Some people blame Marx for Woke.
I’m not denying that wokeness owes something to Marxism, and in particular neo-Marxism, but then Christian beliefs also underpin parts of the ideology.
Let me explain.
Both Marxism and Wokeness are products of the West. They take existing concepts, view them in new lights, and twist or modify them to novel ends.
The West is a creation of Christianity, combined with Roman administration and Greek philosophy and science.
It would be strange if Western-derived ideologies did not have a Christian skeleton, and this would explain why, despite the fact that the majority of Marxists and Wokeists are either atheists or agnostics, these philosophies have a firm hold on many in the churches—take liberation theology, for example, and the current Roman Catholic pope.
Misusing the Idea of the ‘Victim’
“Intersectionality” is a term that encompasses the Venn diagrams of victimhood. Being poor on its own gives you gravitas—but mix it with colour, gender diversity, a debilitating drug habit, and you start to have real status.The poor black lesbian sleeping rough in the New York subway, for example, is to be accorded more moral and persuasive weight than a rich, white, male billionaire.
On Good Friday, Christians marked the torture and death by crucifixion of Jesus, and on Sunday his resurrection from the dead. While he is described as a “victor” he is also at the same time described as a “victim,” as in the hymn “Thee we praise High Priest and victim.”
In his speeches and sermons, Christ often praised the poor and needy.
He said that if any of his followers tended to one of “the least of these my brethren,” they in fact, tended to him, potentially putting the disadvantaged on a very high pedestal of equality with God.
When his mother Mary is told by the Archangel Gabriel that she is pregnant, she says, “He hath put down the mighty from their seat: and hath exalted the humble and meek.”
Jesus says at another place, “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”
So Wokeness places the underprivileged and the “victims” in an elevated position. And while this might in some cases feel just and right, it is a secularised misreading of words and concepts that underpin modern activism.
These words have lost their original sacred meaning, and to understand that meaning we need to understand better the world in which Jesus lived.
There were few, if any, atheists in the pagan world. Everyone believed in gods.
It was common to be careful with the gods and goddesses and make frequent sacrifices to them in a way we moderns would see as close to mere superstition—they could involve money or food, sometimes the sacrifice was consumed as a meal, or it might be burned and destroyed altogether.
The word “sacrifice” derives from the Latin words for sacred and work. Sacrifice was to do sacred work. The victim, “victima” in Latin, was the animal or person to be sacrificed.
Sacrifice didn’t mean just to give something up, and victim didn’t mean someone to whom something bad happened.
Those meanings came only recently, as the words were traditionally used to emphasise the seriousness of an event, or to ironically exaggerate it.
While soldiers might sacrifice themselves on the altar of patriotism—a use of the word which imparts gravity—you can be a victim of your own success, or sacrifice a point in a tennis match, phrases which ironically play around with the concepts.
Wokeness takes the Christian awe of the sacrificial victim, and transfers it to secular victims, valorising them, and lifting them up.
The Jews had a more modern religious system than the pagans who dominated the ancient world. They had only one God, he was so abstract you weren’t allowed to say his name, he was the Creator of the world, and he represented the highest order, good and justice.
You still made sacrifices, but unlike the pagans, this wasn’t done at shrines all over the place, but in the temple in Jerusalem, and as a result, it was not a commonplace event. It was a special one.
For Christians, Jesus represents the next step forward in this theology. For them, Jesus is not only the Son of God, but he is God, and just as importantly, fully human.
The world was full of sin, man was imperfect, and a sacrifice was needed to be made to God. That sacrifice should be the most perfect possible, and once it was made, it would be made forever, and through that sacrifice the world would be saved.
What better and more perfect sacrifice than God’s own son, who is also God himself, taking the role of victim on himself voluntarily?
Jordan Peterson describes the Bible as the first “hyperlinked text.” It’s a neat description for a set of books that intricately reference each other in many places, and no character in the Christian Bible is more hyperlinked than Jesus.
How many times do the Gospels say, “This was done, so that the scripture might be fulfilled …”?
Judaism is a covenantal religion. There is the old covenant where God agrees that he will be their God and they will be his people.
And then there is the new covenant of the Christians where God enters into this exclusive relationship with anyone who will follow, or believe in, Christ.
The Apostles and their followers were impelled to share this with the world.
By the 4th century, Christianity was so significant that Emperor Constantine found the need to regularise it at the councils, including the Council of Nicea. His successor, Theodosius, made Nicene Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.
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.
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.
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 require them to take responsibility for their own actions, particularly when they are the disadvantaged.
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.
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.
This does away with most ideas of sin.
While Christianity stigmatises pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth, if any of that cuts across “my truth” then to criticise me or fail to celebrate my behaviours becomes the sin.
Same-sex relationships are a good example of how this works. Around 20 percent of Australians say homosexuality should not be accepted by society. These people may or may not be Christians, but it is in line with traditional Christian teaching that stigmatises any sort of sexual relationship outside marriage.
Not that there are no gays in Christian churches, but the traditional view is that they should be celibate.
When the footballer Israel Folau was asked whether he thought homosexuals would go to hell, he quoted from a long list of sins provided by St Paul, which included adultery and drunkenness, as well as male same-sex relationships.
For this, he was expelled from Rugby Australia.
Mr. Folau has never shown any animus towards gays, even appearing on the cover of gay magazine, The Star Observer, presumably leaving it to God to make the judgment, not himself, in a version of “hate the sin, but love the sinner.”
But that wasn’t enough. Not only did he have to accept homosexuals, he had to affirm them and their practices.
And if he didn’t, then he was committing one of the few sins left in our community—refusing to believe someone else’s truth.
With no belief in an afterlife, the woke punishment has to occur in the present, so he had to be essentially erased, if not as a human being, as a rugby player.
All of this might seem esoteric, but there is an intellectual movement, which includes people like the historian Niall Ferguson, and his wife Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who think we need a Christian revival, or something like that, to reassert a belief in higher unifying values.
I’m not sure the Christian vessel of Western civilisation can be glued back together.
But we do need to reassert a system where not all truths are relative, where status in life—whether rich or poor—is irrelevant to how we treat each other, and where inequalities of power in multiple dimensions are accepted as being just part of how life must be, not something that can be eradicated by human agency.
