This is the essence of the social construction of reality: objective facts can matter less than intersubjective consensus. Since other people’s perceptions are an objective fact, you had best conform to their expectations—no matter how radical or irrational they might be.

America’s major institutions have gone woke the same way that someone goes bankrupt: slowly, then all at once. How is it that so many of us have had the experience of being in a diversity-training session divided into racially segregated “affinity groups” or reading yet another sackcloth-and-ashes statement from management and thinking: They can’t possibly believe this, right? Any answer should begin with the dominant theory from the sociology of organizations: neo-institutionalism and isomorphism. The theory explains that organizations go beyond their core competencies to imitate market leaders and to meet the demands of their trading partners, the regulatory state, and key employees.
Based on his study of a Stone Age culture in New Guinea, Bronisław Malinowski argued that when people face uncertainty, they turn to magic to propitiate the capricious spirits responsible for their incomprehensible misfortune. Being ever-so-sophisticated people who attended business school, corporate executives don’t hire shamans to replenish fisheries or to avoid a storm. Instead, they bring in consultants to help the firm embrace best practices. But as Charles Fain Lehman explains, John Meyer and Brian Rowan’s 1977 paper in the American Journal of Sociology, “Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony,” argues that this distinction is a farce—that much behavior as practiced by modern corporations, NGOs, and government agencies is not about technical efficacy that rationally orients means to ends but ritual, vaguely intended to elicit good fortune by achieving legitimacy with the firm’s “environment.”
Following Meyer and Rowan was Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell’s “The Iron Cage Revisited,” published in 1983 in the American Sociological Review. DiMaggio and Powell fleshed out the theory with three specific pathways for why organizations adopt similar practices—or, in their language, become isomorphic.
Consider, first, coercive isomorphism—when an organization adopts practices because the state or its trading partners demand that it do so. As Frank Dobbin and John Sutton noted in the American Journal of Sociology in 1998, affirmative action began as a response to executive orders that applied not to all firms but specifically to federal contractors. However, since most large firms sell, or aspire to sell, something to the federal government, this mandate applies to much of the economy. Similarly, most federal higher-education policy takes the form of putting strings on federal money. A college can ignore those Department of Education “Dear Colleague” letters if it is willing to forgo access to federally subsidized student loans and NIH grants, but that’s an expensive declaration of autonomy. And as Richard Hanania has argued, civil rights legislation is enforced through torts with the presumption that imbalances are malicious, giving organizations a vague but powerful mandate to err strenuously on the side of avoiding anything that might validate that presumption.
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There is only one way to out of this moral crisis, and it’s by returning to the concept of a unitary right as an objective divine standard in which all society must conform. The question we are confronted with today is not “what should we do?” Rather it is, “Do we have the moral courage to do it?”

During the 2020 campaign candidate Joe Biden famously stumbled over the Declaration of Independence saying “We hold these truths to be self-evident. All men and women are created…by the…you know…you know the thing…”
Apparently, Mr. Biden didn’t know the thing. More disturbingly, a large swath of the American public don’t “know the thing” either.
The thing that Mr. Biden was referring to was, of course, the endowment of rights bestowed on men by their Creator including, but not limited to, Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
This section of the Declaration is one of the most famous and frequently quoted portions of the historic document. Yet, there is something in this text that has escaped the attention of almost everyone except perhaps a few knowledgeable political philosophers and historians.
So, as it turns out, hardly anyone actually “knows the thing.”
As the fourth century church father, Basil the Great, pointed out in De Spiritu Sancto, every phrase, every word, and every syllable is important when trying to understand a text. To take his argument one step further we can say that every letter is important.
Oliver O’Donovan reminds us of Edward Gibbon’s somewhat exaggerated claim that Christianity was once divided over a single letter. That history is repeating itself only this time with a different letter from the English alphabet. Not since the Christological debates of the fourth century has one letter had so much power to change the course of human events. In the fourth century it was the Greek iota that split the church. In our time it is the letter “s” at the end of the word rights.
While the split is largely between academicians at this point, my concern is for the practical and ethical outworking of O’Donovan’s perspective as he interacts and takes issue with the work of Nicholas Wolterstorff. This essay is meant to be an accurate summary and application of O’Donovan’s position which I take to be persuasive.
The Declaration speaks of rights as a plural and inherent concept grounded in the individual person. The ancients, however, nearly always spoke of right in the singular. Translators have often missed this and translated Hebrew and Greek texts in the plural instead of the singular when the equivalent word for right is carried over into English as it is in Proverbs 8:8-9 and Jeremiah 5:28. The shift begins in the twelfth century and gradually morphs until it reaches its apex in the revolutionary literature of the eighteenth century such as the American Declaration of Independence.
Since the idea of rights conceived in the Declaration are inherent in each person then the practical result is a multiplicity of human rights that can be expanded indefinitely. There are now potentially as many rights as there are people. This conception makes rights synonymous with justice.
The problem arises when these rights must be enforced and defended by using the apparatus of the state. This is precisely where the woke western world finds itself at present, and all political, economic, and linguistic means are being used to coerce people, cultures, and entire states to comply. The message is simple: comply or be canceled. This is no small matter when armies are currently being mobilized to cancel countries that refuse to conform.
This is a seismic shift from the ancient concept of a unitary right as an objective divine standard embedded in the cosmos. In this way of thinking, as John Carlson explains, justice is the measure of society’s realization of this divine order established by God. Moreover, this unitary right cannot be severed from righteousness itself. In the Bible, human rights are always conferred by God in the context of the covenant community. Hence, the right that we have is to cultivate virtue and conform to the divine standard. Whatever does not conform to the divine standard cannot be a right. It can only be wrong.
In the end, these are two different conceptual histories of justice. As O’Donovan warned, “The moment will come when different readings of the world cash out in different practical determinations.” There is much at stake as we can already see in the western world.
Ironically, many conservatives in America nostalgically think that all we need to do is return to the principles of our founding documents to save our country. Until, and unless, we are willing and able to part with the single letter that is causing all the mischief we are still going to be faced with such things as LBGTQ+ rights, drag queen hour at elementary schools, the grooming of young school children, and the mutilation of a 5-year old’s genitalia.
There is only one way to out of this moral crisis, and it’s by returning to the concept of a unitary right as an objective divine standard in which all society must conform. The question we are confronted with today is not “what should we do?” Rather it is, “Do we have the moral courage to do it?”
Earlier this year Governor DeSantis and the Florida legislature were applauded by some, and attacked by many, when they banned classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity for children ages 5-9. I commend the governor and the legislature for protecting kindergarteners through third-graders, but what about fourth, fifth, and sixth graders, and so on. This is essentially putting a band-aid on a cancer. Or to put it another way, it’s treating the symptom not the cause.
The cause is the single letter “s.” And as Jesus said about eyes and hands that cause you to sin, “It is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell.”
As for that mischievous letter “s,” it’s past time to pluck it out, and cut it off.
Jim Fitzgerald is a Minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and a missionary in the Middle East and North Africa.
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All sin is false worship. We worship what we love – and we become like it. We can become consumed and transformed by gluttony or envy or lust. We can make work or money or sex our god. And we worship these things. Our sinful desires really destroy the way we were meant to be: “Idols redefine reality and morality. But in so doing, they also redefine us. Partly, this is what we wanted: idols create a rewritten reality designed for us.” Today’s idols of sex, freedom and self are destroying all three of these things.

John Calvin once said that the human heart is an idol-making factory. If we do not worship the God who created us, we will worship anyone or anything else. And we inevitably become like these objects of worship. We love our sins and we love our idols, and we move further and further away from who we were meant to be.
Back in 2008 the American New Testament scholar Greg Beale released a volume on idolatry called We Become What We Worship (IVP). In it he said this: “All of us are imitators, and there is no neutrality. We should disabuse ourselves of the notion that we can be spiritually neutral. We are either being conformed to an idol of the world or to God.” And this is serious business, given how often we find in Scripture idols and idolatry related to the demonic.
The truth is, if we get God wrong, we get everything else wrong. Our understanding of who we are and why we are here gets fully distorted and twisted if the one true God is not our focus and our sole object of worship. Being image-bearers of God, our proper sense of identity and self-worth is fully bound up in him. When we worship false gods of any sort, our identity gets radically warped and disfigured.
Today in the West everyone seems obsessed with identity. But unless they are in right relation with the one who made them in his image, their identity will always become ever more messed up. We see this so clearly in the distorted (and yes, demonic) assault on human sexuality.
The radical homosexual and trans revolutions are a classic case in point. These folks are obsessed with identity, but it is all focused in the wrong place. Sexual identity becomes an obsession and an idol and takes us away from God and freedom and into satanic bondage.  
These matters are all covered very nicely indeed in a new book by Matthew Roberts: Pride: Identity and the Worship of Self (Christian Focus, 2023). Here in Australia, we just had the 46th annual Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras over the weekend in Sydney. They call these things “pride marches”. They are all about finding identity and meaning in one’s sexuality.
But as Roberts explains so well, the worship of anything other than God will NOT give us our real identity and will only further entrap us in a downward spiral. Idolatry always does that. This book is well worth quoting from, so let me offer a number of choice remarks found in it.
Early on he writes: “The argument of this present book is that Christianity provides an answer which secularism cannot; indeed, the fundamental tenets of secularism are the problem. Since who we are is defined by our duty to worship God, our crisis of identity is at root a crisis of worship.” p. 16
He continues:
We do not know ourselves by focussing on ourselves; we know ourselves by focusing on God, for we are created to display Him. In this sense, all of Christian theology has been about ‘identity’, but it is deeply Christian that Christians have not thought of it that way. Christianity has the answers to identity-obsession, but we will not find them by indulging in it ourselves. It is of our very essence to direct our minds and hearts towards God. The more our being is filled with the knowledge of God, the more God is imaged in us, and the more we truly are and know what we are supposed to be. pp. 19-20
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