Is Christianity to Blame for Wokeness?

Addressing the death of muscular Christianity

In my Substack yesterday (The Churches have betrayed Christianity) I spoke about how many Christian institutions are full of people using Christianity as a cover for woke preaching, and of how the churches have been infiltrated and taken over by those people.

Today I’d like to address a different criticism, which is that Christianity is itself responsible for this. I’d like to address the idea that wokeness and modern degeneracy and decadence derives from Christian instruction. Are the woke pastors and priests right? Is this what Christianity is?

Many of my more philosophically minded friends blame Christianity for our current Satanic society. The argument is that the kinder passages of the New Testament taught people to be weak, that liberalism derives from Christianity and that therefore wokeness and progressivism does too.

The argument is that over time Christian messages (the meek shall inherit the Earth, turn the other cheek, the Good Samaritan, render unto Caesar, loving thy enemy, charity and forgiveness) build weakness and then eventually that becomes the fetish for the Other and the masochistic hating of one’s own people or of normality that is wokeness.

With this argument in place Christianity can’t win. If it is muscular and determined and enforces morals, we are told about the Crusades and ancient Christian atrocities and about the most savage moments of the Old Testament.

If it is reasonable and engages in dialogue we are told about this taint of weakness and given the idea that Christianity makes men into modern soy boys and cuckolds and gimps.

Both arguments essentially ignore the vast majority of the last two thousand years, a period in which western nations became Christian and then became the most powerful nations on Earth and then produced the highest artistic and scientific achievements the world has ever seen. Strength and beauty were not rare in this story. They were commonplace.

What the argument of weakness forgets is that Christians who forgave their enemies had usually first defeated them, or in every instance then defeated them. Christian martyrs did not accept suffering as a weakness, but as an act of courage and an example to other Christians to keep fighting for their beliefs. They were burned and tortured and flayed and crucified because they would not submit.

When it was far easier to submit, when it took only the right words and avoided all that pain and suffering, they refused to.

That’s an odd version of weakness, isn’t it?

Here is what I said to the argument that wokeness and progressivism is the natural end result of Christianity and that it is Christianity that has made us weak and decadent:

If this was true Christianity would never have produced cathedrals.

“You are right about genuine Classical Greek reference (that would indeed have celebrated Beauty, not ugliness, and physical perfection, not obesity and weirdness).

But this mock Nietzchean idea that all weakness and ugliness comes from Christianity has always been false.

Was Christianity teaching people to be weak between its birth and the 19th century? When it held back Islamic invasion? When Europeans built empires? Really? Were the conquistadors weak? The settlers in the American West?

Were Christians before the 20th century openly advocates of weird fetishes? How many Christians even in the 1950s were? How did people dress in the 1950s? What were the attitudes to marriage and gender? How about the Christians on Normandy beaches-were they fat lesbians and weak cowards?

What about the art of the Western world. Was it all decadent filth? What do the bodies look like on the Sistine Chapel ceiling? Sponsored by weak and degenerate Christianity that must be all fat lesbians there too, right?”

Christianity may have come before wokeness and may indeed have been a lot gentler than Roman virtues or more savage and barbarian religions. But it didn’t survive four centuries of persecution by being weak and celebrating weakness.

The western world shifted to degeneracy and weakness and self hatred and mental illness precisely at the point that we started to en masse abandon our cultural heritage and turn away from Christ. The decadence comes following the collapse of belief. The new mad ideas come following the abandonment of tradition and traditional morality, not as a continuation of the last 2,000 years, but as a repudiation of them that is really only a century old.