An Open Letter to my Conservative Christian Readers

[ecosophia]

Dear conservative Christian readers, 

I'm sure by now that all of you have heard of Critical Race Theory, the ideology -- widespread in the US academic scene these days -- that's been so heavily used of late to justify "woke" violence. I'm not sure if you're aware just how immense an opportunity it offers your denominations. I wasn't aware of this, either, until I read two very thoughtful essays on "woke" ideology by James Lindsay, "No, The Woke Won't Debate You And Here's Why" and "Do Better Than Critical Race Theory."

By academic training I'm a historian of ideas, and what struck me most forcefully on reading these essays is that what Critical Race Theory is offering, without realizing it, is a distorted and incomplete version of your faith. Historical theorist Oswald Spengler pointed out more than a century ago that the secular ideologies of every culture were its religious beliefs with the serial numbers filed off; if he'd known about Critical Race Theory, he'd have cited it as a prime example. 

The basic ideas of Critical Race Theory are that racism is the cause of everything that's wrong with the world, that all light-skinned people are by definition racists, and that all light-skinned people therefore need to fall on their knees, repent their racism, and spend the rest of their lives searching mind and conscience for racist beliefs and ideas so they can atone for the sins they have inherited from their ancestors. Ditch the race-baiting rhetoric that frames the ideology, and replace the word "racism" with that older and more potent word "sin," and see whether you notice anything familiar about the result. 

Of course, being devout Christians, you've already noticed what's missing in the Critical Race Theory version of that story. The Critical Race Theorists have the conviction of sin, they've got the catharsis of repentance...but they can offer no hope of salvation. All they can offer is an endless wallowing in repentance, without the forgiveness of sins, without anyone to take the burden of their sinfulness on himself. That's where you come in, because your faith can offer them that. I don't have to be a member of your faith to know that it meets very real spiritual and emotional needs in many people -- or to recognize that the people who are turning to Critical Race Theory are crying out for what you have to offer, and just don't know that yet. 

With that in mind, could you please find some good old-fashioned fire and brimstone preachers, the kind who can reduce an audience to stark terror at their own sinfulness and the just wrath of God that awaits them, and send them out of their familiar habitats to preach to the woke? If Spengler's right -- and I think he is -- over the next century or so, the various secular ideologies that provide ersatz substitutes for religion will give way to what he calls the Second Religiosity, a return to traditional religious forms.  You might as well start that process now -- and all of us, whatever our religion, will be better off once the wokesters realize that they're mistakenly seeking in the political sphere something that can only be attained in the realms of the spirit. 

Yours sincerely, 
John Michael Greer

Comments

I hear good Christians say 'of course we are all racist' and 'of course we are all sinners'.

[(Anonymous)]

Christians have made the connection. We are okay with it.

Re: I hear good Christians say 'of course we are all racist' and 'of course we are all sinners'.

[ecosophia]

That's why I specifically addressed my conservative Christian readers -- that is to say, those who are far enough from the woke zeitgeist that they don't buy into the parody of Christian theology that Critical Race Theory offers.

[(Anonymous)]

John - I say this with love - I’ve noticed you getting sucked in more and more to the culture war, and your posts have gotten a lot more standard and boilerplate, things that could have as easily been written by Conservative Gary #15427 as John Michael Greer. I’ve seen it happen to so many people - formerly interesting writer becomes Liberal Larry #53281, or whatever.

IMO the issue isn’t that people’s ideology gets more “extreme” or less nuanced or whatever, or even that their ideology changes at all - you were conservative before, most writers I’ve seen descending into boring woke cliches were lefties before - but that the attention shifts to the same topics everyone else is discussing, with special attention on How Dumb And Crazy The Other Side Is.

I say this all from pure selfishness as a reader. I can read ten thousand essays (perhaps even correct ones) on how blue-haired urbanites are insidious religious fanatics, but only one writer on translating Ficino. But it is, after all, your time, and not my place to tell you how to spend it.

[ecosophia]

I've been fielding comments like yours since I first started writing about peak oil. It really does come across as concern trolling, you know.

Spiritual imitation

[(Anonymous)]

JMG,

Spengler’s observation has long made sense to me, but I’m not sure that today’s wokesters would admit to any sense of sin outside of being inherently racist by virtue of their skin color. Wouldn’t the first task of the fiery brimstoney preachers be convincing the wokesters that their guilt is entirely misplaced? That would be difficult to say the least, I imagine.

I might add that the leftist/woke penchant for erecting pale imitations of the Christian religion might in part account for the ongoing riots - they’re looking for the rallying point of martyrs and imitation saints along the lines of a Che or a Horst Wessel. The woke mayors and governors might not be doing the far left any favors by holding the police back in this respect, while the civil unrest continues to rattle the psyche of rural America, also no favor to the far left cause.

Speaking of grotesque spiritual imitations - Soviet Communism, in fact current Russia still has its entombed, preserved Lenin, a repulsive imitation of the Resurrected Christ.

Thanks.

Re: Spiritual imitation

[ecosophia]

My guess is that it would be much less of a challenge than it looks, since conservative Christianity offers something that woke ideology can't match -- the promise of salvation. Your competent fire and brimstone preacher knows that he doesn't have to convince anyone of anything, in any rational sense of the word "convince;" it's the intensity of passion and the internal structure of conversion -- conviction of sin, catharsis of repentance, ecstatic embrace of the promise of salvation -- that does the trick. If I'm right, a great many of the woke are caught up in what I suppose we'd have to call "convertus interruptus" -- they've only got the first two stages of the process, with no hope of the third -- and given a chance to complete the process, my guess is that a lot of them would jump for it.

[(Anonymous)]

I’m not sure there are any of those left in the U.S. If there are, and the public becomes aware of them, the Wokesters will harass them into silence with the unanswerable charge of “Racism!” Sorry, JMG. I agree that a society where Desmond-is-amazing , Lactatia, and all the toddler beauty queens have not been removed from their unfit parents could use a little fire-and-brimstone, but I just don’t see it happening.

[ecosophia]

There are quite a few of them -- I hear from them from time to time! -- and any shout of "Racism!" can be shouted down quite as easily with a Jonathan Edwards-esque roar of "Sinners! Sinners in the hands of an angry God!" If Spengler's right, as I believe he is, it's going to happen sooner or later anyway -- and the fact that so many people have embraced what amounts to a parody of evangelical Christian theology says to me tht they're ripe for it.

Hmm

[(Anonymous)]

No one likes the hellfire preachers except the crazies, but maybe things have gotten crazy enough for it to work. A scary thought.

What I am curious about is whether a branch of Christianity can figure out how to establish a connection with Christ and help everyday people find it. Just today a young gay friend of mine was asking for advice about whether he *had* to leave Catholicism because he was gay. His church was terrible, but he was still hesitant to leave his faith in general. It looked like he really wanted to believe, so long as he could be reassured that God and others didn't hate him.

I didn't know what to tell him, other than to try praying directly, but he was unsure about that and seemed to want a church or priest or someone to counsel him personally.

Re: Hmm

[ecosophia]

Your young gay friend is after a different kind of religious experience than the wokesters I'm discussing. I hope he finds it, too. Somewhere between modernists who don't actually believe in the god they claim to worship, and fundamentalists who have lost track of that bit about the mote in their brothers's eye and the beam in theirs, there ought to be room for a Christianity that will make room for him. Still, it's not my religion, and Christians will have to settle that among themselves.

hmm

[syfen]

Archdruid,

You know this kinda explains something I've observed from the Vedic stand-point. This whole confess and repent thing really doesn't work when you follow an ideology that does not recognize sin or repentance as particularly important in its cosmological structure.

Everytime one of the wokesters (they exist in India but have been thoroughly co-opted by the Islamic and Christian Orthodoxies) come at us with the whole "you must feel guilty for x" thing, it always elicits blank stares.

Regards,

Sufen

Re: hmm

[ecosophia]

Oh, granted. It doesn't make any more sense from my spiritual standpoint either. Clearly, though, there are a lot of people out there who are conservative Christians under a thin veneer of radical political rhetoric, and -- as I noted in the post -- the sooner they realize that they can't get what they need from politics, and turn to religion instead, the better for all of us.

[(Anonymous)]

I had hoped to share it during the open post but the timing is perfect for this- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/03/race-to-dinner-party-racism-women

Privileged liberal women paying 2,500$ for a dinner to learn from privileged women of color on how they ought to own up to their racism. The accounts of the dinner are a sight to behold, with one person even committing to a journal on her thoughts that could be considered racist.

- Nomad

[ecosophia]

Oh dear gods, that's funny. If I'd tried to make up an over-the-top story about virtue signaling as a form of conspicuous consumption for the overprivileged classes, I don't think I could have come up with something half so self-parodying.

Salvation

[(Anonymous)]

JMG,

>> .... conservative Christianity offers something that woke ideology can't match -- the promise of salvation.<<

Yes, makes sense to me. The only impediment I see here is that along with their array of pre-imitations, the woke really do have their sickly post-imitation of “salvation”, that is, to grovel and kneel for the rest of their lives (as long as they don’t have to give up a jot of their privilege). So it seems to me the preachers would have to focus in on the utter falsity of that particular kind of salvation. Not that that wouldn’t work, but it would take the considerable time for the imitation-salvation believing wokesters to actually experience the spiritual impoverishment of their belief. Or would the intensity of their current belief in false salvation provide them with a springboard that could elevate them into a genuinely spiritual sense of salvation?

Thanks.

Re: Salvation

[ecosophia]

My guess is that it might be very effective very quickly, at least in some cases. The blind rage that we're seeing from so many wokesters these days makes sense as a product of cognitive dissonance -- they've been taught that accepting woke ideology is true and right and good, but it leaves them feeling bitterly impoverished and empty. That's where the fire and brimstone preacher comes in. He or she can speak to their condition, point out that they're trying and failing to make themselves righteous by their own efforts, mention a whitened (or, tip of the hat to Rachel Dolezal, blackened) sepulchre or two, and then offer them the opportunity for a deeper repentance and a more convincing hope of salvation. Did you by any chance ever read Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman's book Snapping? They talk about how suddenly people can pop from one ideology to another, provided that both share a common deep structure; that's what makes me think the conservative Christian denominations might want to get cracking.

[inavalon]

This sounds like "the opposite of one bad idea is usually another bad idea."

Seems to me that the powder keg of unfulfilled longing for authentic spiritual connection and the twisted fuse of Critical Race Theory don't need to be ignited by any fire-and-brimstone-style preaching. Blowback could be apocalyptic!

Instead I pray that the scales will fall from their woken/broken eyes and hearts in an extended moment of collective spiritual awakening brought on by beautiful music, fine art, human kindness and good food shared among the congregation.

Let them seek attunement with a loving, all-forgiving deity, rather than atonement with punishment meted out by an angry god.

[ecosophia]

I wish that were likely, but I've found that a lot of people with a very deeply rooted sense of guilt can't handle attunement; they want atonement, and there are better ways to get it than the one they're pursuing now.

[ecosophian]

This plan, if it succeeds, is going to create a whole lot of fundamentalist Christians.
Here's hoping they won't start any witch hunts, or druid hunts for that matter, looking for sinners to punish. Because no doubt they are going to project their feelings of guilt on others.

[ecosophia]

They're engaging in witch hunts right now, and looking for sinners to punish. I'm not sure I see the difference.

[(Anonymous)]

What if the masochism of not being saved is part of the picture? Then the fire and brimstone preacher will have a problem. But perhaps a particularly masochistic form of Catholicism might do the trick?

Then, there is always fundamentalist Islam. All that rage! Or some kind of pseudo-religious political cult, like the Symbionese Liberation Army.

Hmmm...

Maybe we should all pray for these people to become regular Baptists!

Tidlösa

[ecosophia]

The hardcore conservative end of Catholicism could certainly offer quite a bit to these people, as indeed could the Baptists!

A Buddhist response

[(Anonymous)]

Here's my attempt at a Buddhist response to the situation... maybe it can inspire a few Christians - I'm sure they can adjust as needed: https://interdependentscience.blogspot.com/2020/07/the-character-of-character.html

Re: A Buddhist response

[ecosophia]

Thanks for this. I'm not sure it will reach the wokesters, though; I'm pretty sure that what underlies their ideology is a deepseated conviction that they are Bad People, and you'll have a hard time talking them out of that.

[(Anonymous)]

After reading the first essay, I'm almost tempted to play "advocatus diaboli". Our society really does have irrational myths at its core, such as the liberal conceit that we really have "dispassionate search for truth" bla bla. Nah, what we have is, er, capitalist imperialism...

But this works both ways. What social forces do the Critical Social Justice theorists represent? They seem to be highly educated scholars from the privileged upper middle class. Surprisingly often, they are White!

Sure wonder what kind of power their discourse is projecting...

Tidlösa

[ecosophia]

Oh, a class analysis makes perfect sense of them, too. They represent the white bourgeoisie, and their entire strategy is an attempt to keep the white proletariat and the nonwhite proletariat at one another's throats, so that the two halves of the proletariat never get around to realizing that the only people who benefit from that strife are the white bourgeoisie.

[(Anonymous)]

Maybe this is a couple of steps further ahead of where they are at the moment. The endless guilt and repentance might be a process they need to go through for some time longer, like purgatory? before they feel ready for 'salvation'.

Christian anarchism would seem to have more obvious philosophies to offer once they start thinking it might be time to ask what good endless guilt and self-criticism sessions do. Though Christian anarchists are one of the least pushy Christian movements around. Still, I wouldn't be surprised, if the prediction is correct about young woke people becoming religious, that the early steps might include some kind of fusion of Christian anarchism and black churches. Then from there, increasing conservatism.

[ecosophia]

Yes, there may need to be a transitional stage. Do you remember the Jesus People of the early 1970s? That was the transitional stage between the hippie youth culture and late 1970s fundamentalist Christianity.

[(Anonymous)]

You could well appeal to orthodox Marxists to teach wokesters that white workers are not responsible for the historical crimes that were committed by white landowners.

[ecosophia]

I doubt they'd listen. The grubby secret of the wokesters is that they belong to the privileged classes -- the bourgeoisie, in Marxist terms -- and as Malcom Kyeyune has pointed out so deftly, as a bourgeois movement, wokesterism is inevitably commited to the defense of bourgeois privilege, no matter how frantically they wrap that in a rhetoric of concern for the proletariat. That's why they're so full of hate toward the white working class -- they say it's because of whiteness, but it's actually class bigotry on their part...

[hearthspirit]

The catchphrase of the residential school ideology in the US and Canada was to "Kill the Indian in the child." Quoth Duncan Campbell Scott, the Canadian Indian Affairs Minister who oversaw the 'refinement' of the system, "I want to get rid of the Indian problem. I do not think as a matter of fact, that the country ought to continuously protect a class of people who are able to stand alone . . . Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question..."

I've had a great deal of fun saying to Critical Race Theory advocates up here who also gum on about indigenous reconciliation "Oh indeed, we do not wish to kill white people, that would be barbaric. We only seek to kill the Whiteness inside them, and ensure that White Privilege is eradicated from the system, and there is no such contaminating thing left without our society". Most don't get it... but, there are always a few...

[ecosophia]

Oof! A good solid groin kick of an argument. Thank you -- I'll keep that one in mind.

[(Anonymous)]

I wonder what the "Social Justice Warriors" think about this injustice:
https://howiehawkins.us/what-the-democrats-arent-telling-you-about-wisconsin/

[ecosophia]

They don't think about it at all. As James Lindsay points out in the first of his essays linked to in my post, they're taught to think of independent thinking as evil -- the only kind of thought that's acceptable is the kind that parrots critical-theory clichés. Did you ever read Madeleine L'Engle's children's novel A Wrinkle in Time? Theirs is the ideology of Camazotz -- everyone doing exactly the same thing at exactly the same time, with any variation savagely punished.

Critical Race Theory and Immanentizing the Eschaton

[(Anonymous)]

I don't have a lot to add, but something did occur me:

If Vine Deloria Jr. was right that the Civil Rights Movement was an attempt to implement the Christian ideal of universal brotherhood on Earth, then both it and the more recent Critical Social Justice movement (to use Lindsay's term for it) are in their essence postmillennialist movements attempting to immanentize the Eschaton.

The difference, then, is that while the former appealed to secular as well as religious principles, it was still rooted in authentic Christian theology, while the latter is based on a crude (and cruel) mimicry of those ideals.

That suggests another analogy: Critical Social Justice is in a sense like a Satanic movement trying to maintain its energy by performing ever-more-shocking blasphemies (I don't think I need to supply examples); the end result then should be that it culminates in blasphemies too shocking for the rank and file. Many will return to the Church in shame and horror, while others will simply realize the party's jumped the shark and go home, preferably early enough that someone else is left to clean up.

[(Anonymous)]

The second "Sokal affair" of wokesterism:
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/10/13/pers-o13.html

[(Anonymous)]

I've been quietly saying this to my friends and family for some time now. The concept of racism in critical race theory is precisely analogous to the doctrine of total depravity in Calvinist theology. Compare:
https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/yes-all-white-people-are-racist-eefa97cc5605
https://carm.org/dictionary-total-depravity

I was able to dodge out of the way of the social justice ideology due to my childhood dodging traps of fundamentalist Christianity, so the parallels were very clear to me early on.

Breanna

[(Anonymous)]

Exhibit C:

https://www.balloon-juice.com/2020/09/13/the-bad-place/

I don’t know, JMG. These woke people remind me of the theory that the gates of hell are locked from the inside. The damned could walk out any time they want to—but they are so attached to their hatred, frustration, and misery that they willingly stay. A little preaching won’t help that. A slap upside the head on the road to Damascus would probably be needed.

I have noticed that a lot of readers on exhibit C are attached to the expensive end of the college industry. Do expensive colleges cause mental instability, or do they attract those are already unstable?

[ecosophia]

Expensive colleges attract people with class privilege, and people with class privilege are very quick to defend that privilege using rhetoric that discusses every kind of privilege but the one they have.

[(Anonymous)]

Here is an example of why we need the fire and brimstone preachers back in action.

Earlier today, two Los Angeles County Sheriff's Deputies were ambushed and shot, suffering severe head wounds as result. When the deputies were rushed to the emergency room, BLM protesters swarmed the hospital, yelling death threats and taunting the police, blocking entryways and exits and causing as much disruption and chaos as possible. They even stormed the operating room and attemtped to prevent hospital personnel from saving the lives of the deputies, which is flat-out attempted murder.

https://www.the-sun.com/news/1465386/black-lives-matter-group-blocks-hospital-officers-die/

It's blindingly obvious at this point that BLM and the rest of the Wokesters have completely lost their minds and whatever moral authority they might have had. Kimberly Steele is right: many of these people are demonically posssesed, or at the very least have come under the influence of demonic entities.

Counterproductive

[weilong]

Seeing the BLM protests harass people makes me think "if everybody didn't hate black people before, they're going to now." Their antics are not going to bring anybody over to their side, and will probably drive lots of people away.

Same thing with the whole Democratic Party party these days. If somebody doesn't agree with them, they respond by calling that person stupid, racist, or a "science-denier." Doesn't seem like they're trying to make friends.

I don't know if it's demons, but the way they are racing to destroy themselves through their own excesses sounds like the kind of plan a demon would cook up.

[(Anonymous)]

Where does the notion of a second religiosity largely made up of traditional Christian religion fit with your observation that Piscean age religions like Christianity are past their prime and less powerful than they once were?

[ecosophia]

The second religiosity of the Greco-Roman civilization was the great revival of the old temple cults that followed the twilight of the Greco-Roman age of reason. You'll notice that it crumpled before Christianity. The second religiosity is always autumnal, always past its prime, but can develop considerable momentum for a few centuries because in its time, it's the one alternative to the mental chaos left behind by reason divorced from reality.

[(Anonymous)]

What do you see as the parallels between the current woke movement and the social gospel movement of the first half of the twentieth century (which also had some positive characteristics and some truly horrific ones). Seems like it was also about mapping Christian spiritual ideas onto the material world (albeit much more explicitly so, and done by self professed Christians). I know some woke folks in the Unitarian Universalist church, for example, who see themselves as the proud heirs to that movement.

[ecosophia]

The wokesters are in fact the decadent heirs of that movement, just as Marxism was the natural heir of the radical Protestant Reformation. As a culture ages, it converts its radical religious movements into radical secular movements, which then gutter out.

[(Anonymous)]

In Christian theology, in between repentance and salvation are forgiveness and redemption. Sin and its consequences lead to repentance, repentance leads to forgiveness, forgiveness leads to redemption and it is redemption that leads to salvation.

Where Wokesterism goes off the rails is because there is no forgiveness and no redemption. That is why there is no salvation in Wokester theology. In a manner of speaking, it is the missing link. In the pseudo-Calvinist theology of Critical Race Theory and "social justice" activism, there is only eternal guilt, judgment and damnation based on something the alleged sinner can do nothing about, namely the color of their skin.

In that respect, Wokesterism bears a disturbing resemblance to the old theory that blacks deserved to be enslaved because they were Sons of Ham and therefore eternally guilty based on a misdeed by Ham in the Book of Genesis, which was a perversion of Christian teachings that was used to justify the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the enslavement of African Americans. It also bears an equally disturbing resemblance to the Marxist-Leninist theory of objective guilt, another doctrine that was used to justify unspeakable acts of evil, including the persecution, enslavement and murder of untold millions. Of course, Marxism, like Wokesterism and liberalism, is itself a Christian heresy.

On a social and interpersonal level, forgiveness allows the sinner and wrongdoer to be reintegrated back into society without being endlessly tormented for past mistakes and without endless recriminations that breed a never-ending cycle of conflict, hate and revenge. It is for this reason that a great many non-Christian religions and cultures also encourage forgiveness.

[ecosophia]

Fair enough. Not being Christian, I lumped forgiveness, redemption, and salvation into a single lump -- what happens after you truly repent.