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Is Wokeism really secular heretical Christianity rather than neo-Marxism?

By Graham Young - posted Tuesday, 9 April 2024


When divinity is lost, Wokeism arrives

With the rise of materialism, and now also post-modernism, the European world (including many in the Christian churches) lost belief in two of the supports of this Christian worldview, and it has led, in my view, more directly than Marxism, to wokeness.

If you are a materialist, meaning you don't believe in anything beyond the material world, then even if you say you believe in God, that god is so esoteric and abstract, it has no agency in the world.

This strips the divinity from Jesus and the sacred from the world.

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But we still live in a Christian emotional world where we say love is preeminent, and that riches and wealth are actually weaknesses.

We have taken the injunction to love others as we love ourselves, and not to judge "lest you yourselves be judged" to the point where we have made it a universal virtue to accept people, just as they are - what is often referred to as a Kumbaya version of love.

We've managed to retain some sense of a fallen world, and what Christians call "original sin," especially when it comes to the environment. Despite this, we refuse to regard our fellows as anything but inherently good, and, particularly when they are the disadvantaged, require them to take responsibility for their own actions.

With no belief in an afterlife, we also want to create heaven on earth by human fiat, which at one level means no one should have something that others don't have.

The corruption of sacred doctrines

What Christianity brought through the doctrine of man's imperfection, and the need for a sacrifice to redeem us, was a sense of humility. There is the idea that we can do nothing on our own, but only through the "grace" of God.

There is also an acceptance of inequality and suffering.

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Christ told his followers to take up their cross and follow him. The will of God can seem capricious, so that even his own Son must suffer, but the role of the believer is not to resist but to accept, and that can have redeeming consequences.

That is the antithesis of the woke, where pleasure is almost a universal right as is absolute equality, at least when it comes to money and position. And if we are equal then only what we believe ourselves is important, it feeds into postmodernism's view that all truth is relative - your truth, my truth, but never the truth.

This does away with most ideas of sin.

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This article was first published by The Epoch Times with a different title.



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About the Author

Graham Young is chief editor and the publisher of On Line Opinion. He is executive director of the Australian Institute for Progress, an Australian think tank based in Brisbane, and the publisher of On Line Opinion.

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