Counter Wokecraft: An Executive Summary
The woke-relevant typology is necessary to identify with whom you might be able to work to challenge the Woke juggernaut, as well as to identify Woke advocates and enablers before they become too powerful. In short, the Critical Social Justice perspective has been promoted and supported by those who adhere to and understand it (the Woke), as well as those broadly sympathetic to the cause but who don’t actually understand it (the Woke-proximate).
The battle against wokeism, aka the Critical Social Justice perspective, is entering its third phase. The first phase involved sounding the alarm and drawing attention to this retrograde, caustic, atavistic, anti-modern, anti-liberal, anti-science and anti-scientific creed. The second phase whose end we are now approaching involved understanding, analyzing and describing to the public at large what characterizes the creed, where it comes from, its results and the extent to which it has captured our institutions. The third phase involves challenging the creed and recapturing our institutions. The beginning of this phase began in earnest in K-12 education with parents all across the US joining together to reclaim control over what their children are being taught. While doing so, lessons are being learned and shared. These experiments are essential to success. What has been missing is a unified presentation of the phenomenon, the strategies and tactics used to entrench it, and those that can be used to defend against it; in a word, a guide. The purpose of Counter Wokecraft is to play this role.
The focus of Counter Wokecraft is universities and academia. They are the focus since they are the origin of the Critical Social Justice perspective and its most avid and effective propagators. They are also the institutions with which I have the most experience and where I have observed the rapid advance of the doctrine in recent years. I believe that at this stage, the manual will be most useful to STEM disciplines defending against the Woke onslaught given the hegemony of the Critical Social Justice perspective in the fine arts, humanities and social sciences. Despite the focus on STEM disciplines in universities, I believe it can be easily adapted to other disciplines, milieux and institutions.
The manual itself comprises three parts: understanding Woke, the strategies and tactics of those advancing the Woke perspective (wokecraft), and how to protect against wokecraft.
Understanding Woke
Understanding Woke provides a description of the doctrine, its political project, as well as a woke-relevant typology of the different participants involved in making decisions at universities.
Understanding Critical Social Justice doctrine is essential to being able to defend against wokecraft for at least three reasons. The first is that the key axioms of the creed inform and help explain the strategies that are adopted to entrench and propagate it. The second is to help readers appreciate that while Wokeism appears to represent a bewildering number of different movements, the “movements” are all fundamentally rooted in a few axioms. Understanding the axioms therefore helps not only to demystify one particular movement, but all of them. Third, it is essential to prepare would-be dissidents to be able to respond to it.
The Woke political project needs to be understood since there is so much confusion around what the goal of the movement is. There are many reasons for this including the fact that so many advocates seem well-meaning, that its goals are intentionally obfuscated, and that many common words are confusingly re-appropriated to serve the Woke cause. In a nutshell, the Woke political project can be summarized as equity: the retributive redistribution of resources according to identity. The flow of the desired redistribution is from oppressor to oppressed identities, where identities are defined by skin color, primary sexual characteristics, sexual orientation, etc.
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The Many Parts of Restoration
We must recognize that there are many moving parts to being “restored” to our brother or sister. The origin point of the problem is conflating all the parts into one single concept, or boiling it down to a single transaction, such as “I’m sorry.”
We’ve all been there: someone has done something to deeply harm or offend us, and they’re standing in front of us having just spoken the words, “I’m sorry.” But something is off. You can’t quite put your finger on it. It doesn’t seem like there has been an adequate understanding of the damage done, nor does it seem like there is a genuine sorrow over the sin. Instead, they have spoken paltry words like a talisman aimed at making all things better, and there you are, forced to respond, feeling the pressure of Christ’s command to forgive, but not knowing how to formulate your next sentence. Do you say “It’s okay,” even though it’s far from okay? Do you say “I forgive you,” even though the person has not repented nor have they asked for forgiveness? And what does this mean moving forward? Is all just forgotten and now the relationship has to “go back to normal”—whatever that means?
This all-too-common illustration of our lives reveals that Christian circles have a long way to go in reclaiming a biblical understanding of relational restoration. Sadly, in the evangelical and reformed world, there is a troubling oversimplification of the reconciliation process. How do we begin to regain ground in walking through repentance and forgiveness in a Christ-honoring way?
In the first place, we must recognize that there are many moving parts to being “restored” to our brother or sister. The origin point of the problem is conflating all the parts into one single concept, or boiling it down to a single transaction, such as “I’m sorry”. That “sorry” is meant to bear the weight of confession, acknowledgement of wrong done, and asking for forgiveness—all in one fell swoop. Such a short sentence—nay, a single word—cannot possibly bear such a load. But in speaking of these components, we’ve already begun to tease-out some of the elements of what Christ would have us work through in the reconciliation process. The main aspects of biblical restoration are at least as follows:
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Miracle Clothes That Changed History
Easter and Christmas do belong together. There is no hope of eternal life and the glorious hope of resurrection bodies that can pass through clothing and leave it undisturbed without the determination of the Creator of the universe not to abhor the virgin’s womb and willingly wear in humility the swaddling clothes of a baby in a feeding trough in a stable in the little town of Bethlehem and in that lowly body, bear our sins in our place.
There are two miracles associated with the life of Jesus, his birth and his resurrection. At Christmas we celebrate the miracle of his birth and at Easter the miracle of his resurrection, but they are related—in particular by clothes.
The Easter event was not the resuscitation of a corpse, as when Jesus raised Lazarus. This was certainly an amazing event but Lazarus subsequently died. Jesus raised him after the decaying process took over, restoring his flesh, yet they had to strip off his grave clothes. The text says: The man who had died came out, his hands and feet bound with linen strips, and his face wrapped with a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go” (Jn. 11:44). However, in the case of Jesus, something very different happened and it was shown in the case of the clothes around the body of Jesus. The Gospel of John, written by one of the eye-witnesses of the event, states: Then Simon Peter came, following him [John], and went into the tomb. He saw the linen cloths lying there, and the face cloth, which had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen cloths but folded up in a place by itself (Jn. 20:6-7). The verb translated “folded” here, in the two other times it is used, Matt 27:59 and Luke 23:53, speaks rather of being wrapped or rolled.
“Folded” gives the impression that the resurrected Jesus got up, folded his clothes the way any well-brought-up adult would do, and then left the tomb in an appropriately tidy state. Actually, what Peter and John saw was the linen scarf that had been wrapped around the head of Jesus, (as in the case of Lazarus) lying apart, still wrapped or maintaining the rolled shape of the head of Jesus who was no longer there.
Since this is a Christmas letter, Christmas will help us. The blown-up, lit-up decorations we see in the evenings on the lawns of many houses end up in the morning lying flat with no air in them. That is what the disciples saw. The body had passed right through the clothes without disturbing them. Jesus did not need to be unbound. He passed right through them and left them empty. The miracle of Easter is not only the empty tomb but the empty grave clothes, and the transformation of Jesus’s earthy body into a glorious spiritual body is like the bodies we will get one day!
The miracle at Christmas was not in the clothes as such but in the fact that there was actually a baby in those swaddling clothes. This baby had no earthly, physical father. Babies do not come from nowhere so we are faced with the miracle of the Virgin Birth. Either Mary was an adulteress and Jesus was the illegitimate result of her sin or what Scripture says is true: The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God (Lk. 1:35). Just as Jesus was raised by the Spirit of holiness (Rom 1:4), he was also born by the Spirit of holiness in a miracle as comparable to that of his resurrection.
I gave myself a Christmas present this year. I re-read very carefully the impressive study on the virgin birth by J Gresham Machen, the father of modern Christian orthodoxy. At the beginning of the twentieth century as he fought liberalism in the mainline Church, and while he was engaged in the politics of maintaining the faith against the powerful bureaucracy of the Presbyterian church, and the powers of liberalism in Princeton Seminary, he was also a faithful and gifted scholar who defended true religion by serious scholarship. His study of 415 carefully argued pages, The Virgin Birth of Christ (Harper and Row, 1930), took on all the critical thinking in English, German and French, on this essential subject of the birth of Christ, showing that the supernatural explanation of the birth of Jesus is the only one that makes ultimate sense of the Gospel witness. I was impressed to note that the greatest liberal scholar of his day, the German Adolf Harnack actually twice cited Machen’s work. Machen shows that there was no early textual evidence that did not include the account of the virgin birth, and that the biblical doctrine of Christ’s sinless and atoning death cannot be maintained without the fact of the virgin birth. He states: “…the two elements of Christian truth belong logically together; the supernatural Person of our Lord belongs logically with his redemptive work: the virgin birth belongs logically with the cross” (p.391). In other words, there is no good news of redemption without the supernatural fact of the virgin birth.
Easter and Christmas do belong together. There is no hope of eternal life and the glorious hope of resurrection bodies that can pass through clothing and leave it undisturbed without the determination of the Creator of the universe not to abhor the virgin’s womb and willingly wear in humility the swaddling clothes of a baby in a feeding trough in a stable in the little town of Bethlehem and in that lowly body, bear our sins in our place.
Dr. Peter Jones is scholar in residence at Westminster Seminary California and associate pastor at New Life Presbyterian Church in Escondido, Calif. He is director of truthXchange, a communications center aimed at equipping the Christian community to recognize and effectively respond to the rise of paganism. This article is used with permission.
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Ministerial Platforms, Self-Praise, and Self-Glory
Someone rightly said, “If all people see is you and your efforts to build a platform, then you are stealing the show.” The clamour for people’s attention in a minister should be of concern. With the rise of social media, the temptation is ever real. Where does one draw the line? On the one hand, it is a wonderful tool for ministry. On the other, the dangers of self-praise are ever-present. Every man knows the motives behind his actions. One famous prayer should be every minister’s. Each line starts with the refrain, “Not I, but Christ.”
John the Baptist is a fascinating character. He plays an essential role in the narrative of the Gospels. Yet he is so peripheral we often don’t pay attention to him. Almost always, you hear him mentioned; it is, by the way, which was the role God intended him to play all along. Every time John speaks, he is pointing to Christ and deflecting focus from himself.
Interestingly, Jesus called him the greatest man that ever lived; only, at the same time, the least in the kingdom (Matthew 11:11). John the Baptist was always humble in his self-assessment. Notice the phrases used to refer to or describe him: he was not the light; I am not the Christ, nor Elijah or the prophet; a voice in the wilderness; and I must decrease. Finally he ended up in prison and beheaded. It is not a glamorous ministry. Neither is it one you crave. Yet John, by Christ’s estimations, was the greatest.
What lessons can we learn from the life and ministry of John the Baptist?
Ministerial Platforms Come from God
John answers, “A person cannot receive even one thing unless it is given him from heaven” (John 3:27).
This perspective of life and ministry will save many of us from envy of other people’s success and from jostling for attention and praise from people. Ministry platforms and opportunities come from God, and they are to be used for him, not self-promotion or exaltation.
This perspective will also ensure that you are content with your ministry, whether it is celebrated or little-known. Christians with this perspective are satisfied with being forgotten. They recognise a difference between proclaiming and promoting the cause of Christ and promotion of self. Oh, for wisdom to know the difference.
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