This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
Although one would never guess it based on the increasingly vicious and open attacks on Christians by this nation’s ruling elites, America was for many generations the most Christian nation on earth – the true secret of its greatness.
In fact, Christianity has unquestionably been the most powerful, consequential, and benevolent force in all of world history. Nothing else even comes close.
Yet today, in the United States of America, a new religion has somehow become the country’s de facto official church.
Mind you, this new faith is not like a religion; it’s not cult-like. It’s a complete and total life religion, influencing every aspect of the true believer’s existence. And right now, it is being forcibly imposed on the entire American populace by virtually every major societal institution, from government, media, and big tech; to academia (preschool through grad school); to entertainment and sports; and perhaps most surprisingly of all, by most of this nation’s biggest and wealthiest businesses.
This new state religion overtaking the United States of America – and increasingly, much of the Western (and formerly Christian) world – is Wokeism.
To most outsiders, the expression “being woke,” or “going woke,” conjures up notions of a person or entity claiming to be acutely sensitive (“awake”) to “systemic social and political injustice” in every form. The “injustice” being condemned by Wokeism is not simply alleged widespread bigotry against black people, but also – as noted in Joe Biden’s Jan. 20, 2021, White House Executive Order – “Latino and Indigenous and Native American persons, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and other persons of color; members of religious minorities; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) persons; persons with disabilities; persons who live in rural areas; and persons otherwise adversely affected by persistent poverty or inequality.” Of course, the “persons who live in rural areas” bit was thrown in as a cynical pretense of caring about blue-collar, working-class, mostly Trump-supporting Americans, when the elites couldn’t care less about them, as their deplorable non-response to the toxic disaster in rural East Palestine, Ohio, demonstrates.) On the other hand, rest assured that the expansive “LGBTQ+” population includes every child-grooming “trans” school teacher, purple-haired, heavily pierced, “nonbinary” TikTok recruiter, and mentally ill cross-dresser seducing your toddler in “drag queen story hour” events.
Bear in mind that all of these people, deemed victims of societal bigotry, are therefore regarded as intrinsically more virtuous and moral than the shameful oppressor class – primarily heterosexual white Christian males.
This new “woke” consciousness is manifesting in dramatic ways – from the nationwide Antifa and Black Lives Matter race riots that decimated countless major U.S. cities during the summer of 2020, to the desecration of long-cherished historic monuments. From insisting on multi-million-dollar reparation payments for every black person in America to appointing men who claim they’re women as top officials in the Biden administration. From Disney producers gleefully boasting on camera how they’re secretly “injecting queerness” into children’s programming, to the U.S. military imposing mandatory “diversity training” and transgender pronoun use on all personnel, causing recruitment to disastrously plummet. From top college and professional athletic organizations permitting and encouraging biological men to compete in women’s athletics – essentially destroying women’s sports – to incarcerating convicted men who suddenly claim they’re women in women’s prisons, resulting unsurprisingly in a rape epidemic in those correctional facilities.
Most ubiquitously of all, there is the rampant racial discrimination in employment, college admissions, and every other area of life, as seen in today’s mass corporate embrace of DEI, or “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” which, stripped of its sanctimony and guilt, amounts to hiring people based on their skin color rather than their qualifications. Not only is such racial discrimination both immoral and flagrantly illegal – remember the 1964 Civil Rights Act? – but it’s also killing people. That’s what happens when, for example, you hire airline pilots and surgeons based on their skin color, rather than their abilities. And it’s happening everywhere.
The power of Wokeism
Unlike in the biblical account, wherein Original Sin consisted of the first man and woman’s disobedience to God in the Garden of Eden, according to Wokeist theology Original Sin consisted of predatory straight white Christians abusing and exploiting “people of color.” Today, this ongoing sinfulness comprises not just actual racism – as manifested in slavery and later segregation, which America long ago repented of and definitively outlawed – but also mysterious and elusive modern-day phenomena like “systemic” or “institutional” racism, as well as “white privilege,” a spiritual condition that renders people who aren’t even the slightest bit racist as still guilty of racism, just for being white.
That is the universal and transcendent power of the religion of Wokeism. And yet, all this is merely the outer face of America’s new state religion.
To understand what’s really at the heart of the new faith rapidly transforming the nation, and to grasp how and why it exerts such a strong hold on so many people – despite being obviously immoral, destructive, and deranged – it’s necessary to consider what constitutes true God-ordained religion. Specifically, the Christian faith, since the religion of Wokeism so closely mimics Christianity in many ways. If Wokeism is a counterfeit, let’s take a brief look at the real thing.
First, recognize that pretty much all religions (with the obvious exception of Satanism) hold that human beings come into this world in an incomplete or “fallen” condition, in some way separated from God, and in need of redemption, completion, or union with Him, and an embrace of a moral and righteous personal life. And indeed, all people, as they grow up, have to contend with an inherited sinful nature, within both themselves and others, and the consequent strong tendency to transgress God’s moral laws. In fact, unredeemed human beings – if one looks past whatever veneer of competence, happiness, attractiveness, or achievement they labor to project outward in life – are usually conflicted, guilt-ridden, and insecure deep down.
Why would that be?
According to the biblical narrative, it goes back to that very first (“original”) sin, committed by the first man and woman.
As the Apostle Paul explains with remarkable clarity and simplicity in Romans 5, sin and death came upon the entire human race because of the sin of one man, Adam. However, another man, Jesus Christ, the long-promised Messiah, came to earth on a rescue mission as a “second Adam,” so to speak, to reverse the original curse that followed the Fall of mankind. The Son of God accomplished this by taking upon Himself the burden of the sins of all humanity and, by willingly suffering the horrors of crucifixion and death on a Roman cross, paid to a righteous and just God the legal penalty – in full – for the sins of the entire human race.
Seeing as “sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people because all sinned,” reasons Paul, “… how much more did God’s grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many!” (Romans 5:12, 15)
Paul’s explanation is so elegantly logical that he restates the principle one more time, just to drive the message all the way home: “Consequently, just as one trespass resulted in condemnation for all people, so also one righteous act resulted in justification and life for all people.” (Romans 5:18)
This, of course, is the beating heart of the Christian Gospel, that a just yet merciful God has provided a way for wayward mankind to become fully righteous in His eyes – to be redeemed, renewed, and restored – to be brought, justified and free, into close and eternal fellowship with God and His family.
Let’s pause for a moment just to acknowledge that the Christian Gospel constitutes the most magnificent, cosmic love story of all time. To undo the consequences of The Fall, it took great love. As Christ, Himself said, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13) That’s exactly what Jesus did. As a result, He made a way, through this sacrificial act of great love on His part – and through faith, obedience, and sincere commitment on our part – for us to be transformed and renewed, literally reborn spiritually with a new nature and a new and wonderful eternal destiny.
‘Woke’ is the new ‘saved’
However, believe it or not, in the bizarre and deranged world of Wokeism, America’s new official national religion promises much the same thing as Christianity.
Wokeism promises to make sinful human beings (especially heterosexual white men) justified and free, not only from their own sins but from the curse of the sins of their forefathers, a sinfulness that clings to white Americans like the stain of Adam and Eve’s Original Sin, no matter how many generations pass since the end of slavery and Jim Crow. It’s systemic, you see; we’re born with it.
This leads us to Wokeism’s formula for “salvation” and “forgiveness of sins,” whereby the guilt, the burden, the stain of all of our sins and those of our ancestors are lifted and washed clean, replaced by freedom, innocence, and righteousness.
So be of good cheer, there is good news afoot. Christian author John Zmirak, senior editor of The Stream, paints a vivid and relieving picture of just how salvation and progressive sanctification typically occur in the religion of Wokeism. In “‘Woke’ is the New ‘Saved,” Zmirak explains:
“By listening to professors, or following peer pressure, a student discovers that the world is deeply wrong. Permeated by evil. Its evil is inequality. And that evil has an author: straight white males.
“Realizing the depth and extent of this all-pervading evil comes as a kind of conversion. One wakes up. Then one is ‘woke.’ That’s SJW-speak for ‘saved.’” Hence the first moment of faith. ‘I once was lost but now am found. Was blind but now I see.’”
In hopes of “joining the righteous,” reveals Zmirak, students learn to cherish victimhood as the highest virtue in all of life:
“If a student belongs to any other group but straight white males, then she is in luck: She’s certified as a victim,” he writes. “She deserves special treatment from everyone from college deans to government bureaucrats. Even better, she should feel virtuous for wallowing in anger and resentment. No matter if she’s Malia Obama. She can righteously seethe with rage at jobless white coal miners or homeless white veterans. Her sense of victimhood gives her the ‘blessed assurance’ that she is part of the Elect.
“This creed offers salvation even to the worst of sinners, straight white males. The price is steep: a life of self-denial and penance. But for those who walk this path, rewards await. You can attain justification. Not by your efforts – but by the righteousness that suffering, innocent victims (non-straights, non-whites, non-males) can impute to you. As an ‘ally’ of the less privileged, you earn the same right to despise the mass of oppressors. And feminists will date you, for whatever that’s worth.”
The more deeply new converts venture into the religion of Wokeism, Zmirak cautions, the more rigorous the disciplines become:
Now white women must admit their role in oppressing women of color. This requires some of the grovelings that white males must endure. But it offers the same benefit: a sense of forgiveness and spiritual progress. Likewise, black males must atone for women of color. All straights must bow down to gays. Even gays must make amends for their insensitivity to “trans” people. …
Observing that the Woke “religious movement apes the structure of a Christian conversion, and of subsequent life in the Spirit,” Zmirak translates: “It replaces worship with protest. Spirituality with unhinged histrionics. Examination of conscience with the scapegoating of others conveniently dead or out of power.”
Let’s sum up: Just as the Apostle Paul crystallizes the Christian Gospel when he describes, in Romans 8, how “through Christ Jesus, the law of the spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death,” today the apostles of America’s new state religion might say, “The law of wokeness set me free from the law of bigotry and cancellation.”
How extraordinary that the Creator of the Universe demonstrated the greatest love imaginable, sending His own Son to suffer and die to save a broken and sinful human race – or as Paul expressed it, “God made Him who had no sin to be sin for us so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). And yet, multitudes today are turning away from that shining path to true freedom, only to jump into the astonishingly destructive, unjust and – in some ways, worst of all – unbelievably stupid religion of Wokeism.
Surprise. It’s all an act.
Oh, one more thing: Our dive into the official state religion of Wokeism wouldn’t be complete without pointing out that, though there are multitudes of true believers, and though tens of millions of lives are currently being disrupted, sabotaged and in many cases destroyed by Wokeism, in truth America’s top-tier political leaders – and I’m talking now about those wielding the real power over Americans – don’t believe in any of this. It’s all just a big act for them.
They pretend to care about inner-city black families, equal rights for Pacific Islanders, and “trans” men who brag about having periods and getting pregnant, but they do not care. Not a bit. They just play-act, while exploiting the ever-expanding wokeness craze for their personal benefit, so they can build and consolidate their own power, wealth, privilege, and glory.
This is how tyranny takes hold in a once-free country. The Frankfurt School-era communist theorist Antonio Gramsci famously advocated for the incremental Marxist takeover of America via what he called a “long march through the institutions,” as opposed to the traditional method of having a violent revolution as in Russia and elsewhere. Wokeism is just the latest phase in the far-left, progressive, globalist, collectivist, Marxist, communist (please chose your favorite word, it doesn’t matter, since in the end, they all converge into totalitarian global government) revolution’s slow-motion “fundamental transformation” of America.
Keep in mind, the revolutionary left always disguises its depredations by blaming the innocent for what they themselves are actually doing – it’s classic projection. It is the leftwing Democratic Party whose history and current agenda are notoriously racist. Meanwhile, most members of the center-right, great American middle class long ago embraced the liberating message of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech and haven’t a racist bone in their bodies. America is, more than any other nation in the world and in all of history, a diverse, free, uniquely successful “live-and-let-live” multi-ethnic national success story. No wonder would-be totalitarians hate it and seek to destroy it.
So, even though the crazy Marxist college professors and their sadly indoctrinated students might believe in the religion of Wokeism, the powerful politicians, the elite class, the deep-staters, the super-rich CEOs and the globalist schemers do not. They just pretend, and play along, because it confers a veneer of morality and righteousness onto very immoral, unrighteous, and utterly self-serving sociopaths. It disguises their real agendas. And it serves to keep “the rabble” off balance, confused, divided, fearful, intimidated, reacting to one another, afraid of being “canceled” and losing their friends, livelihood, everything – the perfect cover for the left’s “long march.”
Most of all, it is a potent tool for amassing ever more POWER and GLORY to themselves – which, of course, is their real religion.
