The modern world is not just a clashing of armies, economies, political parties, and special-interest groups. It is also a battlefield of worldviews, or values. As we examine the Christian worldview in this issue of the Epistle, it is helpful to be aware of those opposing perspectives that are in direct conflict with what biblical Christians believe and how we live.
Some interconnected dangerous false ideas and attitudes have spread across the western world like an invisible virus. These concepts, described by their proponents with the newly coined word “wokeness,” are fundamentally in error and yet are being promoted by some in the cultural elite and their followers as accurate and irrefutable. I will attempt to explain why I believe these are wrong and incompatible with our biblical faith and why they are sure to ultimately fail.
The Book of Proverbs in the Bible repeatedly warns of the danger of imperfect people blundering their way into folly. A fool, in Proverbs, is the opposite of a wise person. But foolishness is not a result of low intelligence. It is reflected in our choices and our actions. Smart people can embrace foolish thinking, resulting in irrational ways of living. At the core, folly is disobedience to God and an elevating of sinful human orientation over what has been revealed as true in Scripture.
Nearly four decades ago, leading historian Barbara Tuchman published a bestseller entitled The March of Folly. She chose several incidents from history (beginning with the Trojan War and ending with the Vietnam War) that demonstrated how intelligent leaders can make self-defeating choices. (If she wrote the book today, my hunch is that the final chapter would be the hasty U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.) I am borrowing and adapting Barbara’s title for my thoughts. We will be considering the flawed thinking of many people in positions of influence today, and their followers, as the contemporary “Woke March of Folly.”
The fundamental mistake that has led people into the folly of wokeness is embracing an ideology as their dominating philosophy or worldview and then allowing that to be their unifying frame of reference. An ideology is a simplistic and incomplete view of a complex reality. It is an attempt to offer a diagnosis and a remedy for multi-faceted problems that are easy to grasp and summarize. There are several modern ideologies, and we will label those who passionately embrace them as ideologues. The most extreme ideologues seize upon their idea with great enthusiasm and seek to apply it uniformly in every case (despite any evidence to the contrary or indications that their solutions may not work as well as promised). Extreme ideologues typically have abandoned or rejected reason, dialogue, debate, and discussion with people who don’t agree with them completely. They are not interested in compromise, nor can they acknowledge nuance. They are often impatient, insisting on immediate fulfillment of their demands. They paint the world in all black-and-white terms. They are intolerant of anyone who doesn’t see things exactly their way (dismissing them as people who “don’t get it”). Desiring approval (and even a personal relationship) with ideologues requires that you completely surrender to and embrace their ideology.
Some of the related ideologies that have been woven into the fabric of 21st-century western wokeness include: Socialism (a slight amendment of the widely-discredited 20th-century ideology of Communism); Feminism (which has advanced far beyond fighting for female equality to its modern extreme of female elevation and male subjugation or rejection); Transgenderism (which has gone beyond permitting gender-modification surgery to encouraging children to question their native gender); Environmentalism (which has moved beyond concern for water and air quality to a religious-like conviction of climate change or global warming, and the assumption that it is 100% generated by human activity); and Critical Race Theory (with its abandonment of the racial equality taught by Martin Luther King Jr. and its replacement by an all-encompassing reinterpretation of history along racial lines and a hyper-racism that denies individuality and sees everyone strictly in terms of their ethnic identity).
The primary reason why ALL of these are follies—and therefore dangerous and corrupting to modern society and incapable of producing workable solutions—is because they are all contrary to reality. Ideologies oversimplify incredibly complex issues. They directly fulfill one of Murphy’s Laws: “For every complex problem, there is a simple, easy-to-understand wrong answer.” Ideologies appeal to their adherents precisely because they offer to simplify the very complex world of nature, human nature, and human society. They are the modern equivalents of the primitive medicine of hundreds of years ago, which seized on false and simplistic theories of how the human body worked and then offered simplistic and harmful remedies. (Think of the primitive medicine of 250 years ago, where learned doctors were taught that all human illness was a result of bad blood and that the uniform treatment was bleeding—sometimes attaching blood-sucking leeches to a patient—which only made the patient sicker.) The doctors of wokeness are likewise trying to connect leeches to the modern world, and the treatment makes things worse rather than curing the disease.
Let’s look closely at one example of an overly simplistic ideology that is naively contrary to reality. Socialism is a simplistic caricature of the tremendous complexity of human economic interaction. It claims that there are just two categories of people: the workers (who are automatically labeled the “oppressed”) and the capitalists (who are automatically labeled the “oppressors”). This Marxist delusion was disproven by the phenomenal explosion across nearly every country in the past century of a massive middle class—billions of people who do not fit conveniently into either of the two socialist boxes. Socialism is a folly because it denies the economic reality that people are always motivated to work hard, apply themselves, and succeed only to the extent that they can enjoy the fruit of their labors. The utopian fantasy of Marx that everyone will be content to receive precisely the same (except, of course, for the ruling class who will live like royalty) is demonstrably false. It is why every truly Socialist or Communist economy has failed.
Consider the problem of poverty, which we will define broadly as an individual or family not having adequate financial resources to provide a comfortable life for themselves. Here are some of the reasons why a person or family might be poor: physical disability or handicap, drought, famine, natural disaster, alcoholism or drug addiction, lack of education or job training, lack of personal ambition, lack of childcare for young children, poor work ethic, economic recession, a criminal record, mental illness, broken family, a crime-ridden neighborhood.
Each of these issues brings its own unique and challenging problems. If an economist or politician blinded by a naïve socialist ideology were to proclaim that all poverty is solely the result of oppression by the rich, such a diagnosis would ignore the complexity of the various actual causes. And suppose the prescribed remedy were to simply take a lot of money from rich people and give it to poor people. In that case, that might help alleviate some of the experience of poverty at least temporarily but would not solve all of the interrelated and underlying issues. A quick infusion of money to people who have personal problems or lack discipline will cause the money to evaporate quickly, and the person is still left with their debilitating problems.
To sum up, the fundamental blunder of contemporary woke ideologies is that they try to shrink incredibly complex reality into simple terms. And they offer those who have small or lazy minds an easy shortcut to understanding everything. But they fail to deliver their promised results because reality will not cooperate and does not bend to their preferences.
I am writing from a Christian perspective. Unlike all of the simplistic modern ideologies I have described (and any others that are out there or will emerge in the future), I believe the Bible gives us an accurate understanding of reality. Its diagnosis of the human condition is not simplistic but nuanced and complex. It portrays men and women as they are, with both noble and ignoble characteristics, with sinfulness and yet with conscience, capable of moral choices that bring consequences, both good and bad. The Bible portrays right and wrong in all its richly complex nature: the Ten Commandments and the teachings of Jesus and the New Testament do not see people as one-dimensional or black-and-white. And so, I commend all who modern ideologies have influenced to exchange their preliminary diagnoses and remedies for our human problems for the timeless and always-relevant truth found in the Bible.
