Tal Bachman, whose wizardry as a pundit I recently noted, is back with another good column, this one about Critical Race Theory, which he calls, “wokism.” Wokism is a very bad thing, according to Bachman (and I agree completely):
“Whether they realize it or not, Wokists themselves combine the lunatic loyalty of the Manson family with the hollow pseudo-joy of Jonestown residents, the racism of National Socialists, the inhumanity of Mao Tse-Tung, the bratty tantrums of Veruca Salt, the nihilism of Bakunin-style anarchists, the totalitarianism of Stalin's Soviet Union, the child torture and sacrifice of the Mayans, the derangement of Heaven's Gate followers, the sadistic violence of the Jacobins, and the ruthless control-freakism of the current Chinese Communist Party.
“Now add to that noxious syncretic blend the Wokist use of powerful communication technologies to shape narratives and meta-narratives, destroy opponents, and recruit new converts, and you've got yourself a thing.”
The Wokists freight their cause and themselves with moral meaning. They see themselves as fighting the good fight of good against evil:
“Through it all, a counterfeit moral imperative with a deceptively appealing name ("social justice") drives the cult. That counterfeit imperative casts all existence as one great battle between Good (Wokism) and Evil (everything that is not Woke). It denies any constraints on efforts to win that battle. It entails an obsessive totalitarianism. It forbids critical self-examination of itself. Adherents of the cult are Knowers of the One True Truth. They are crusaders in righteous battle. Only victory matters. Anyone so much as questioning the One True Truth, inside or out, must be destroyed.”
In recent days we’ve posted stories about the de-Christianization of America; the past twenty years, and especially the past decade, have seen mainline Protestantism rapidly withering away, and the ranks of the “nones”—those professing no religious faith whatsoever—exploding.
But human being are not designed to live without meaning and transcendence. There aren’t enough distractions—not enough drugs, sex, television, sports, films, musical concerts or other diversions—to make a meaningless, pointless life bearable. We are designed to seek meaning.
The religious impulse cannot be eradicated. If it cannot find an outlet in theistic religions it will seek out a substitute for God. People will find some idol to worship, be it “progress,” “science,” “social justice,” or “wokism.” Human beings need to worship, and they need meaning. Without it they sink into depression, nihilism, and sometimes even suicide.
Bachman’s key insight, the thing that makes his column noteworthy, is that the Millennials (and it is mostly Millennials, younger people, who make up the “nones”) are finding meaning in wokism:
“In the case of the Millennials in particular, many have grown up, thanks to their groovy, "post-religion", "non-judgmental" Baby Boomer or Nirvana-nihilist Gen X parents, without any awareness of traditional moral thought and practice (whether Christian, Jewish, Greco-Roman, Chinese, Japanese, Indian, or anything else).
“That is, they grew up spiritually deracinated, spiritually vulnerable, and spiritually needy—so of course they'd be attracted to Wokism. They're human. They still possess all the spiritual intuitions and yearnings and desires and needs their ancestors possessed. They still yearn for belonging and tribal membership and sacrifice, righteousness and ritual and commandment, meaning and guidance and purpose in life. They still crave identity. They still crave some transcendent framework to help give them a sense of why they exist, what they should do, why it matters, and what it means to be a good person. They still want to know, what is the point of it all?”
This is not, by any means, an original observation about Leftist political enthusiasm. Whitaker Chambers (look him up) famously said that the opposite of communism was not capitalism but Christianity. The controversy was not about economics but about faith. (Chambers—a communist who left the party and later fingered State Department star Alger Hiss as a fellow communist—also said he was leaving the winning side for the losing side, which, given recent events, may at last prove true.)
More recently, Christopher Hitchens, an atheist arguing that religion was a very bad thing, when confronted with the 100 million 20th Century deaths caused by atheistic communism, responded that communism was functionally a religion for its adherents.
I think Chambers, Hitchens, and now Bachman have a valid point. Although Leftist ideology is atheistic and clearly not a conventional religion with doctrines about the unseen world, the supernatural and the life to come, it does answer the basic need for meaning and purpose in life, and it does compete with traditional religion.
As to who is to blame for Millennials choosing Leftist wokism over traditional religion, Bachman says all of us are. We all stood around and did nothing as the key institutions of our civilization were “white anted” away (to use that Aussie term I just learned):
“All the institutions and practices which once met the needs I just described, and in largely salutary fashion, have been degenerating for decades. And they degenerated either at our hands, or in the face of our complacence.
“This degeneration provided space for—and frankly, a need for—a new movement. Tragically, a psychotic, psychopathic Wokism filled that void first. We deconstructed, we allowed degeneration, but we not only didn't fill that void with something better—we didn't fill it at all. So, others did. That's the way it works.
“Yes, it is true that Wokism's progenitors actively warred against all those institutions. But that doesn't absolve us. We could have, and should have, done more to conserve what required conserving, create what required creating, improve what needed improving, and along the way, destroy whatever popped up which required destroying. But we didn't.
“Instead, as I say, we either enabled the destruction, or participated in it. Among other things, we broke up our families. We departed from traditional social codes ourselves, or said nothing when others did. If we even noticed at all, we contented ourselves with merely complaining as nutjobs took over our local school boards. We didn't fight back.”
Interestingly, Bachman even criticizes the popular “cheap grace” gospel of the evangelical churches:
“All the while, those of us who are Christians pushed our churches away from preaching James, who insisted on the necessity of right action, and toward Paul, whose language (notwithstanding Romans 6: 1-2) usually seems to suggest that Christianity reduces down to a perpetual "Get Out of Jail Free Card". Paul's creedal religion was so much easier than James's action religion. Why, it felt just as good as a Hallmark card poem. For too many of us, that's all that mattered.”
That paragraph I do not fully agree with. There is no real conflict between Paul and James, just a difference in emphasis. Paul emphasizes justification by faith but upholds the continuing obligation of the law ("Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid: yea, we establish the law." Rom. 3:31) and he is clear that justifying faith will always result in obedience to God’s law (“For it is not those who hear the law who are righteous in God’s sight, but it is those who obey the law who will be declared righteous” Rom. 2:13).
And while James emphasized good works and obedience, he admits the hopelessness of righteousness by law-keeping (“For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it.” James 2:10) and points out the value of obedience in demonstrating the type of faith necessary to be declared righteous (“You see that [Abraham’s] faith . . . was made complete by what he did. And the scripture was fulfilled that says, “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness,” James 2:22-23).
And, as we have recently noted, while the evangelical churches are not exactly flourishing, neither are they collapsing as mainstream Protestantism is. It is not so much James vs. Paul as James and Paul vs. nothing, because mainline Protestantism cannot bring itself to believe anything, not creation in six literal days, not male-female only marriage, not two created sexes, not even, in many cases the Resurrection itself.