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- Written by: Rex M. Rogers
If you think woke culture or “Wokeism,” with its attendant cancel culture, isn’t going to bother Christians, the Church, Christianity, or Christ himself, you should think again.
“Woke” people often consider themselves or at least those they purport to represent, victims. Consequently, they seem to be offended by nearly everything. That’s bad enough, but the real problem begins with their penchant for wanting to silence or cancel everything and everyone with which or with whom they disagree, turning them into bullies.
In an incredibly short time, woke religiosity has garnered a wave of White guilt being confessed in religious forms: kneeling, washing feet, chanted mantras, weeping, lengthy impassioned confessions, white fragility, cash reparations, groveling, White people in general acting more offended than the victim, apologizing for mostly phantom offenses, new vocabulary like “I must do better,” “white privilege,” “systemic racism,” “white supremacy,” “allyship,” ritual chastisement, invented “cultural appropriation.”
Bullies are never satisfied, never placated. No amount of agreement, apology, acquiescence, or appeasement is enough. Bullies always demand more.
First it was Confederate statues, then any statue would do.
Now it’s burning Bibles and the American flag, attacking churches, Christianity, even Christ. Black Lives Matter activists vandalized churches. Bibles will not be the last of this.
Now we have a book claiming Christianity is at bottom about racism and was shaped by White supremacy.
This is barely scratching the surface, and it’s just beginning. There will be much more to come. But people throwing rocks at Christianity is nothing new.
Jesus said, “If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you. Remember what I told you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also. If they obeyed my teaching, they will obey yours also” (John 15:18-20).
Remember The Beatles’ John Lennon in 1966? He said, “We’re more popular than Jesus.” The remark spawned considerable reaction in the United States, but little ultimately came of it. Enormously talented, arrogant, and confused young men are part and parcel to rock and roll then and since. It’s a “chasing after the wind.”
What’s new in 2020, though, is not just a few “out-there” irreligious individuals attacking Christianity or the Church, it’s the degree to which this is becoming a new normal in American culture, often accepted if not promulgated by Big Media and/or Big Social Media and other cultural elites. Anti-Christian bias is growing.
And some within the Church are buying-in to woke culture. “‘Woke’ Christian leaders and pastors today are jumping on the ‘hype train’ of what culture is currently applauding. But they don't really look at what the hype train is connected to. For example, many of the things culture applauds are connected to relativism, abortion, transgenderism, the breakup of the nuclear family.” Woke-within the Church is more dangerous than Woke-without.
Woke culture stems from a non-Christian worldview. It’s a matter of pre-theoretical assumptions and values. So woke people have internalized their views. This isn’t just a political movement; it’s a cultural revolution.
Biblically Christian values regarding sexual morality and gender definition make Christians and the Church by definition enemies of Wokeism. Christian perspectives on race, work, property, and economics, liberty, family, law and order, education and culture, in part or in whole are at odds with woke philosophy. This means woke people will attempt to “cancel” aspects of the Church, Christian nonprofit organizations, and Christian colleges and universities. It’s going to happen. It is happening.
During March to August and continuing, First Amendment freedoms of speech and religion were already being trampled by overreaching state officials in the name of public health. Now these unalienable rights are beginning to be sacrificed to the new religion of woke orthodoxy that brooks no disagreement, operates without grace, offers no forgiveness, and provides no redemption, just condemnation and destruction of reputations, careers, lives.
How shall we then live? Christians and the Church need to be ready to give an answer of their hope (1 Peter 3:15), which means:
- Be informed about the issues,
- Be able to apply your Christian worldview to these issues,
- Be humble in speaking the truth in love, with gentleness and respect,
- Be forgiving as Christ forgave us,
- Be aware that suffering, harassment, possibly persecution could come your way for what you believe,
- Be confident and strong in the Lord, for He is Sovereign.
© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2020
*This blog may be reproduced in whole or in part with a full attribution statement. Contact me or read more commentary on current issues and events at www.rexmrogers.com/, or connect with me at www.linkedin.com/in/rexmrogers.
Our Brave New World
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- Written by: Rex M. Rogers
1-If you question the science of climate change, you’re a “climate change denier,” a new category of unbeliever considered ignorant, even dangerous.
2-If you wonder about biased coronavirus data and the now extensive number of medical scientists who reject mask mandates, economic lockdowns, school shuttering, i.e. America Full Stop, you don’t care about people dying, you’re selfish, you’re the enemy.
3-If you point out that rioters, looters, arsonists, anarchists (who are mostly white) are using race to advance their goals to destroy (including minority-owned) property, capitalism, and the American system that provides more freedom than any country in the history of the world, you don’t care about George Floyd and you support “stormtroopers” and Gestapo tactics.
4-If you support the Second Amendment or question the wisdom of gun control, you’re a militia freako.
5-If you say athletes should be able to stand for the National Anthem, i.e. his/her freedom of speech (a while ago we debated one guy kneeling; now we’re debating one standing), you’re insensitive and white privileged like Drew Brees and just don’t get it.
6-If you want to review factual police shooting data, look at real numbers rather than a narrative, or examine Black on Black killings in Chicago, you don’t care about police brutality.
7-If you point to the whole of human history as to why you think “Defund the Police” is the most irrational idea ever to gain traction, you are anti-Black.
8-If you express a Judeo-Christian moral perspective, thus rejecting the idea boys-who-identify-as-female being allowed to participate in girls’ high school sports competition (see Connecticut), you are a hater and a bigot.
9-If you question the legitimacy of public funds being used to paint “Black Lives Matter” on public streets, or really any political message, you are a victim of white fragility and a racist by definition because “everyone is racist.”
10-If you just aren’t the politically emotive type, don’t like social-political discussions, and want to live your life focused on your interests, your “Silence is violence,” which is to say you don’t care about racial injustice.
There is now no unbiased science, no free inquiry, no way for the best ideas to rise to the top based on their merits. Everything is now “trumped,” no pun intended, by politics.
© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2020
*This blog may be reproduced in whole or in part with a full attribution statement. Contact me or read more commentary on current issues and events at www.rexmrogers.com/, or connect with me at www.linkedin.com/in/rexmrogers.
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- Written by: Rex M. Rogers
© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2020
*This blog may be reproduced in whole or in part with a full attribution statement. Contact me or read more commentary on current issues and events at www.rexmrogers.com/, or connect with me at www.linkedin.com/in/rexmrogers.
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- Written by: Rex M. Rogers
Words you thought you understood may not now mean what you think they mean. They've been politicized, and some of these terms, while perhaps useful if defined based upon a Christian worldview, may be used in ways that are contrary to biblical values and a Christian worldview.
Examples of words with new meanings include:
tolerance and intolerance, inclusion, rights, discrimination, gender roles, sex, patriarchy, Western family, racism and anti-racism, systemic racism, colorblind, privilege, white supremacy, justice, sexual equality, cultural relativism, cultural sensitivity, troll, Black Lives Matter—if you mean the organization as opposed to the phrase or movement. These are merely illustrative. There are many more.
Some changing definitions emerge organically, meaning they come out of common usage. All languages experience this form of semantic change. Etymology is the study of the history of words.
On the other hand, for ideological or partisan reasons, words can also be redefined intentionally, even at times with meanings in direct contradiction to the original, historic “dictionary definition.”
Word meanings can be changed and used as political weapons that may be antithetical to a Christian worldview. “Tolerance” is one of those words. If this word means “a fair, objective, and permissive attitude toward those whose opinions, beliefs, practices, racial or ethnic origins, etc., differ from one's own,” then a Christian can use this word to good effect. But if this word means “'all values, all beliefs, all lifestyles, all truth claims are equal,” then a Christian cannot use this term and remain consistent with his or her Christian worldview.
I’ve always considered tolerance as a goal for one’s behavior toward others to be a low bar, particularly when the Word says to love our neighbors as ourselves, a much higher bar than simply putting up with others, even in the name of fairness or respect.
Black Lives Matter is the phrase of the moment, but it’s more than that, it’s an organization that stands for a list of goals incompatible with biblical Christianity. Yet Christians are using the term and the symbols, seemingly oblivious of the contradictions. My guess is that many if not most have not read the organization’s website and in their commendable zeal to stand for racial justice they buy into the latest politics.
The Sexual Revolution continues to redefine and politicize words, beginning with gay and moving on to hammer words like transphobia.
The point of all this is to say that words have meaning, and meanings have consequences.
In Scripture, Psalm 34:13 enjoins us to “keep your tongue from evil and your lips from telling lies.”
© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2020
*This blog may be reproduced in whole or in part with a full attribution statement. Contact me or read more commentary on current issues and events at www.rexmrogers.com/, or connect with me at www.linkedin.com/in/rexmrogers.
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- Written by: Rex M. Rogers
Since outrage is the new American pastime, I thought I’d get into the act and list a few personal “outrages.”
1-Abortion on demand, and the “women’s health” offered by Planned Parenthood.
2-Suppression of free speech and the First Amendment…in the name of tolerance?
3-Senseless rioting destroying neighborhoods as political “leaders” go AWOL.
4-Vandalization of America’s founding, ideals, names and places in an ahistorical cancel culture purge.
5-Surrender of public universities as bastions of free inquiry to political correctness totalitarianism and “safe zones,” whatever that is.
6-Adoption in public schools of the bogus “The 1619 Project” as a substitution for real, accurate, and actual American history.
7-Feckless kowtowing of politicians to the new religion of the Left (not classical Liberalism) that brooks no disagreement, demands absolute fidelity to its woke doctrines, offers no forgiveness or grace only shaming for those who question, postures eternal victimhood, and presents itself as the savior of America.
8-American professional sports turning into a politicized circus.
9-Cultural appropriation, an undefined concept, used as a bludgeon to not just create guilt or yield change but to destroy careers and ruin lives for transgressions of the new holy list of wokeness.
10-Big Social Media – FB/Instagram, Twitter, Google/YouTube – blithe censorship of content, including religious presentations, they find somehow dangerous to the accepted (i.e., their) narrative.
Meanwhile, genuine discussion about how to extend liberty and justice for all goes wanting.
© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2020
*This blog may be reproduced in whole or in part with a full attribution statement. Contact me or read more commentary on current issues and events at www.rexmrogers.com/, or connect with me at www.linkedin.com/in/rexmrogers.
Questions for America's Moment
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- Written by: Rex M. Rogers
I’ve written that America has lost its moral center, and that America is celebrating irrationality. Here are a few results.
Questions for our moment:
1) Why have politicians on both sides of the aisle, who just a couple of months ago willingly dictated behavior restrictions (some unconstitutional) to preserve public health, suddenly become so feckless in the face of lawless rioters?
2) How, despite Justice Neil Gorsuch’s verbal gymnastics in the US Supreme Court’s recent majority opinion for Bostock v Clayton County, reading sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) back into the 1964 Civil Rights laws, can anyone believe that SOGI and religious liberty are not on a collision course?
3) How can people, rightly believing “Black lives matter,” jump on the bandwagon of the radical organization Black Lives Matter, which lists its views, antithetical to Christianity, on its website?
4) Why have America’s opinion elites: journalists, academics, celebrities, corporate executives, become so afraid of being “politically incorrect” that they rush to virtue signal their bona fides by kowtowing to the latest mob insanity du jour? –Cancel or silence people for their views? Sure. –Topple statues of great achievers? Sure. –Force board resignations or cancel church leases for leaders’ “Likes” of unacceptable politicians' Tweets? Sure.
5) Do the national personalities who regard abortion-on-demand—infanticide by another name—as a sacred, inviolable norm really believe a baby is only a baby if it’s wanted, that a mother’s “rights” supersede the child’s right to life?
© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2020
*This blog may be reproduced in whole or in part with a full attribution statement. Contact me or read more commentary on current issues and events at www.rexmrogers.com/, or connect with me at www.linkedin.com/in/rexmrogers.