Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Monday, May 20, 2024
The threat to religious liberty remains and has indeed expanded, but a new one has also emerged: the temptation to combat this by fusing Christianity with worldly forms of power and worldly ways of achieving the same. For want of a better term, it’s a kind of pop Nietzscheanism that uses the idioms of Christianity. It’s understandable why such a thing has emerged. Many Christians think America has been stolen from them. And the path to political power today is littered with crudity, verbal thuggery, and, whatever the policies at stake, the destruction of any given opponent’s character. 

Some years ago I wrote a piece for First Things entitled “The Calvary Option.” It took its cue from the 2014 movie Calvary, which followed the last seven days in the life of a priest who knew that someone was planning to kill him. The killer wanted to do so as revenge for sexual abuse he had suffered as a child at the hands of the clergy. The twist was that he chose his victim because he was a good priest. He had not abused anybody. Once the priest knew he was the target, he faced a choice: flee, or stay and be a good pastor to his parishioners, many of whom despised him. He chose to stay and fulfill his obligations, and in the end he was killed for it. I commented at the time that one might also call this “the traditional pastoral work in an ordinary congregation option.” 
I wrote the piece when Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option was the talk of the town. At that time, the big threat to the faith was the emerging pressure on religious freedom, focused then on the issue of gay marriage. The threat to religious liberty remains and has indeed expanded, but a new one has also emerged: the temptation to combat this by fusing Christianity with worldly forms of power and worldly ways of achieving the same. For want of a better term, it’s a kind of pop Nietzscheanism that uses the idioms of Christianity. It’s understandable why such a thing has emerged. Many Christians think America has been stolen from them. And the path to political power today is littered with crudity, verbal thuggery, and, whatever the policies at stake, the destruction of any given opponent’s character. While the left may pose an obvious threat, there is also a more subtle danger in succumbing to the rules of the political game as currently played by both sides. And the internet doesn’t help. All ideas—however silly, insane, or plain evil—can seem rational and workable in the frictionless kindergartens of social media bubbles. In the real world, things can be just a bit more complicated. 
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Wokism has become a giant bulldozer seeking to crush everything in its path.  It has captured the civil government, educational institutions, the military, corporations, banks, media, and even has made major inroads into the church.  It comes like a cancer (posing as a medicinal cure) eating away everything that sustains life and peace.  In some churches, it is considered a legitimate tool to help us understand sin, but it only creates hatred and destruction.

Wokism is a word that should no longer need a definition. It has become part of our every-day language.  Wokism is the application of a new religion which I call Neo-Marxism (some call it Cultural Marxism).  Equity, Racism, Social Justice, ESG, LGBTQ, Oppressor, Oppressed—these are all part of the definition. If you need someone to define it for you, then you are way behind the curve. See my book Critical Race Theory and the Church – A Concise Analysis.
I call Neo-Marxism a religion because it is a belief in ultimate values that are diametrically opposed to the Christian Faith. It is more than just a political theory or a political movement.  Like Roman Catholicism of the Reformation, or like Mormonism in the early 19th century, it is a threat to the very essence of the Christian Faith. It may not use the Bible as a reference point, but that makes it even more dangerous.  It may not refer to some supreme being outside of our experience, but it is nonetheless a religion.  Any philosophy with ultimate values apart from Christ is a religion.
Wokism has become a giant bulldozer seeking to crush everything in its path.  It has captured the civil government, educational institutions, the military, corporations, banks, media, and even has made major inroads into the church.  It comes like a cancer (posing as a medicinal cure) eating away everything that sustains life and peace.  In some churches, it is considered a legitimate tool to help us understand sin, but it only creates hatred and destruction. Either become a cheerleader for this new religion or be cancelled. Those are becoming your two choices. Maybe you can remain silent for now, but that may soon come to an end.
And if your church has not bought into this new religion, then probably it is choosing to remain quiet.  There is no warning coming from America’s pulpits. As the watchman on the wall in the Book of Ezekiel, the enemy is just outside the gates, but the watchman gives no warning.
Modern America reminds me of Germany during the rise and reign of Adolph Hitler.  Tyranny does not rise overnight. It eats away slowly.  Few German Christian leaders (mainly Lutherans) stood up to Hitler.  They re-interpreted his beliefs as consistent with the Christian Faith.  They accommodated his new religion out of fear.  They accepted whatever came down from the top, no matter how heavy-handed.
However, like Nazism, Neo-Marxism is slowly eating away at our culture and taking advantage of (or creating) very angry people—all in the name of restoring justice and equity.  Death is slowly moving into our culture and our Christian leaders are silent. A fire is raging outside the front door of our house, and we are inside trying to decide what color to paint the living room. We still teach with precision on the major cults of the past, but alarmingly we avoid the beast that is a threat to our people every day of their lives.  Neo-Marxism is the new elephant in the room.
We take pride in all the programs of the church, and we listen to expository sermons every week, but if we do not educate our people (especially our young people) about wokism, and if we do not give them the tools to fight against it, then we are like the watchman on the wall who has not fallen asleep, but is just too busy playing games on his iphone.  It is time for preachers in America to shout from the rooftops that the enemy is outside the gates.
I listen to a lot of sermons, but I have yet to hear a sermon on the threat of wokism to the Christian Faith and to the Church. I hear about it from conservative news outlets and from scholars like Victor Davis Hanson, but never from the pulpit.  That makes me very sad. Very sad indeed!
Larry E. Ball is a retired minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and is now a CPA. He lives in Kingsport, Tenn.
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James’s appeal to Scripture at the Jerusalem Council changes the course of history. God has spoken, and that changes everything. Stepping back, his use of the prophets has amazing things to teach us.

A Crucial Moment in the Early Church
Tensions were running high. The “who’s who” were all there, for the stakes were simply too enormous to miss this meeting. The mother city played host. The keynote addresses were set to begin.
It was AD 49, and on the docket was a pivotal issue that early followers of Jesus had to hash out for the explosive new movement to go forward. It had begun almost entirely with Jewish followers of Jesus. But recently, non-Jews (Gentiles) had been joining the movement in droves, upsetting the status quo and raising tremendous theological questions. What are we to do with Gentiles?
Do they need to convert to Judaism to be on the varsity team of early Christianity? Or, more seriously, do they need to adhere to Mosaic customs and laws in order “to be saved” (Acts 15:1, 5)? Would Christianity be gospel for some and gospel + law for others? The apostles and elders gathered in Jerusalem to sort it out, famously recorded in Acts 15:6–21.
Peter spoke first, recounting how the Gentile Cornelius’s household had experienced an outpouring of the Holy Spirit—like Pentecost 2.0—after Peter himself saw a vision from the Lord declaring all things “clean” (Acts 15:7–11, referring to Acts 10–11). Paul and Barnabas then “related what signs and wonders God had done through them among the Gentiles” (Acts 15:12). But was this enough proof?
The decisive speech fell to James, the brother of Jesus. Yet his speech mainly quoted Scripture (Acts 15:13–18). Visions and miracles do not truly matter unless God himself has spoken authoritatively on the matter. The turning point at the Jerusalem Council was a passage from the Word of God.
Scripture and the Apostles
James’s appeal to the Old Testament (OT) comes as no surprise to those who are familiar with how the New Testament (NT) works. Nearly every writing of the NT engages verbatim with the OT somehow, and you can hardly drive through a chapter in some books (like Romans) without hitting the OT. Why? The apostolic writers were simply following Jesus’s instructions. As one of his last acts on earth he “opened their mind” to understand the Scriptures, so that through them they might witness to the whole world (Luke 24:44–47).
The NT authors apply the OT along three main veins:

Though OT literacy is waning,1 it is exhilarating to dive deeper into the use of the OT in the NT. It may not be easy, but it is always worth it.
So let us trace through what James does with the OT to solve the conundrum at Jerusalem. What is it about the OT that brings clarity—and changes the history of the world in the process? Let us follow three steps.
Step 1: Identify the passage(s)
The first (but often overlooked) step is to notice that an NT author is using the OT in the first place. Footnotes and study Bibles help, but quite often the writer plainly tells us.
Here James doubles down with “words of the prophets” and “as it is written” (Acts 15:15)—it is hard to miss that he is using the OT here. The citation reads like a single quotation and is presented like that in most English Bibles. However, James tips his hand with plural “prophets.” He is actually combining passages:
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