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"Everybody is theocrat" is something that many people only recently realized. Everybody knows that politics is downstream of culture, but culture is downstream of of theology. If it will not be a Christian theology that is going to be informing the culture, then it will be something else. There is no "separation of state and religion", all policies are based on morality and ideology of decision makers. Everybody was culture warrior even before, even if they did not think it was so. They were like fish that were not aware of the water they swim in. Your regular grandma did not read Augustine, she probably could not formulate elaborate theological arguments, but she knew what is a man a woman or what is marriage based on age old culture influenced by specific ethos. Not in her wildest dreams did she imagine that this could ever become a question, nobody was prepared to defend such a basic thing. Not anymore, people are no longer seeped in the same water and we see this interaction real time - at home, at work and also in church.
However there is a huge shift even with your friend. No matter what his supposedly heretic theology is, he can just go out there and say that whatever policy he prefers is purely because Christians like him want it. This claim itself fries brain of many secular people - no, there is no need to couche this argument in some secular language that by itself is seeped in utilitarianism or harm reductionism or some other type of moral philosophy. No, my Christian sect wants this and we want it because it is our moral preference. It is the only justification (in scripture, tradition or whatever) that is fully sufficient for us to pursue this specific policy.
By the way the genie is already out of the bottle even on religious front - even discounting the fact that progressives moved the needle for society to accept their religious doctrine, such as let's say that a man is a woman as state policy. This is however more visible as they embraced Muslims into their coalition. For example schools should have halal food. Not because it is good for environment or that it is cheap or anything like that. Our Muslim voters want it, and that is why we will deliver it. It is purely formed by their preference informed by their religion and no other tortured secular justification needs to be done anymore. But this was always so, we only pretended that these utilitarian justifications were morally and theologically neutral, as if history ended and secularists were just independent arbiters in safari full of religious animals. This veneer was already broken, especially by progressives who were able to smuggle increasingly insane moral prescriptions under secularist or "liberal" framework. This only shows that secularists have no better justification for "good" or "bad" policy than any other group, because what is good and bad is subject to moral philosophy and theology. Secular liberalism, intersectional progressivism, Christian socialism, political Islam - it is all just ideologies based on specific moral and theological framework that fight for influence and power.
Only if you have an overly broad definition of theology and religion. I know many people on the right like to categorize Wokeism as a theological/religious movement but then they immediately balk when you ask what base theology did Wokeism form from. So either every collective philosophical movement really just tickles the religious part of the human mind and is consequently a "theology", or you have a much stricter definition of "theology" and then no, not everyone is a theocrat.
Wokeism = Secular Christianity. Scoop out the Holy trinity and you get the logical conclusion of championing the meek, the downtrodden, the oppressed.
I'm still pretty doubtful that if one examines the continental->critical philosophy pipeline that developed into wokeism, one would find a pool of Christian theologians doing Christian stuff, even if heretical.
There are still plenty of non-trinitarians, and they aren't the ones who created wokeism, either. You have to go full atheism first. At every step of the development of wokeism, it's people who went full atheism first. As The Rightful Caliph observed later in the process:
I suppose one could try to argue that it's impossible for an atheist sect to have a hamartiology, but I think it would require argument for why Scott is wrong.
Do you really think that if one scratches the likes of Marx, Gramsci, Adorno, Marcuse, Derrida, Foucault, etc., one primarily finds a bunch of Christians doing Christian stuff? Nah, they thoroughly rejected any sort of god-based anything, went full atheism, and then built an atheism-based epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and politics. They weren't Christians doing Christian stuff and deciding to just scoop out the trinity and keep what remains. It's incredibly different on almost every level, down to the base. It seems that there's maybe one kinda similarity if you squint really really hard, but even that has a totally different basis and totally different implications.
The better phrase I should have used was "scoop out Christian Metaphysics"
I think in order for you to make the argument that none of the people in that list were ever influenced at their core by any Christian morality, Christian Theology or Christian hamartiology, you'd have to put forth the idea that tabula rasa exists into adulthood. That your mind, your beliefs, your values are entirely your own. You tread un-walked ground and nothing of the culture that you developed, grew, learned in steeped into your core. I guess it's basically a soft cultural determinism view. Your beliefs are downstream of your societies culture, your societies culture is downstream of the theology. Thus your entire core moral system operates from a distinctly Christian lens. Rejection, acceptance, mutation, convergence, how ever you change, doesn't really matter, your base subset is the core theology of your society. In the west that is overridingly Christian.
I'd be curious to see if atheism that developed from a non-western society has similar moral systems as that of a western-developed atheism. However I'm not sure one exists. Christianity is such a universalist religion, while at the same time it suffers apostates, meaning you can stop believing and go hard in that, and still be allowed to live. I'd postulate that non-universalist religions don't inspire such aggressive rejection, and the other universalists like Islam don't suffer apostates.
I don't think that was the matter in question. The way you had originally put it was, "what base theology did Wokeism form from"? This is quite the shift of goalposts.
If this is the test for the original question, then don't we have to conclude that your own particular sect of atheism also formed from the base theology of Christianity? Or did you uniquely possess tabula rasa into adulthood in a world otherwise full of mere mortals? It's making the question meaningless. Certainly not about theological development.
Maybe I'm not using the right words. I see it as the same thing. It's essentially an idea of cultural determinism. If Christian Morality is the root soil, then really any plant that grows out of it is going to be suffused with it. Either rebelling against it intrinsically or co-opting some of it's values. A truly foreign morality system would not even consider the Christian values a topic of discussion. It's like the saying goes, the opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.
Absolutely, I'd say my moral system is culturally Christian. I, as a westerner, was raised to be guilt not shame oriented, I believe in noblesse oblige, the basic dignity of all man, following my conscience against civil authorities, that intentions matter morally, etc.
Though to be clear, I am an agnostic theist, not an atheist.
The original poster was arguing that culture is downstream of theology, that morality is downstream of theology. If so, then theological development is by definition, in the discussion.
I think this would likely imply that wokeism is Christian... and anti-wokeism is Christian. Communism is Christian and libertarianism is Christian, and I guess socialism and other points in between are all Christian. Fascism is Christian and anti-fascism is Christian. Monarchism is Christian and republicanism (classical) is Christian. And on and on. Is this right?
Wokeism - Yes
Anti-Wokeism - Yes: Though I would suggest that Anti-Wokeism isn't really a belief system. Adversity to Wokeism derives from competing political belief systems, within the Christian Memeplex
Communism - Yes
Libertarianism - Yes
Fascism - No, Fascism is distinctly trying to return to pre-Christian Germanic pagan morality
Anti-Fascism - Yes: most major rejections of Fascism are on strongly Christian moral grounds
Monarchism - Depends: Believe it or not Monarchs and other forms of Autocracy are not solely the purview of the Western world. Taking that view, is arrogantly Euro-centric.
Republicanism - Yes
Problem is you just listed mostly all Western political systems or political thoughts. For you to then make the argument that if all of these are Christian derived it is meaningless, is special pleading because you only listed things that would be considered in the class of Christian-derived. If I just listed various breeds of dogs and then claimed the classification of "Canine" is pointless and ubiquitous I would have made your same argument.
But it absolutely and very explicitly emerged from Christian society, by people who were in all likelihood influenced in their core by Christian ideology. If "distinctly trying" to get somewhere outside the Christian frame is good enough to separate an ideology from Christianity, then Communism, Libertarianism, Wokeism and probably Republicanism (depending on definition) should likewise be recognized as distinct intellectual movements.
My view is that Progressivism as an ideology is the source of Communism, Fascism, Libertarianism, anti-fascism and wokeism. All of these start with the assumption that God does not exist and Christianity is, at best, an irrelevant distraction from the obvious work of reorganizing human society to better meet human ends.
Either everything that emerges later is just an offshoot of what came before, in which case all western ideologies are Christian and Christianity itself is just variant Paganism, making the argument fully general, or else new ideologies are possible, in which case Progressivism and its offshoots are markedly distinct from the Christianity they emerged from and specifically rejected.
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I will not balk, it is a Hegelian "religion", same as OG Marxism etc, which in turn was informed by other religions and traditions such as Christianity, Hermeticism, enlightenment philosophy etc. They developed their own philosophical system answering question for instance of ontology (what is a man), sociology (how should society organize itself) etc. And they do not even deny it, they have a process for it inside their own religious tradition - Hegelian dialectic. Just one example, the concept of abolish has Hegelian roots, it is the concept of aufheben - it is to resolve the contradiction by dissolving it in higher truth.
There are many such words, even the word oppression is based on Hegelian Master-Slave (or more precise Lordship-Bondage) framework developed in his Phenomenology of Spirit way back in 1807. It is interesting because to explain this concept, Hegel framed it as clash of Will where the weaker will submits to the stronger one, thus forging the relationship. He introduced a new form of social and historical will as result of clash for power, which is quite distinct to let's say Augustinian concept of free will as a gift from God. There are stark differences in theology of philosophical systems that borrow from different traditions.
The same for words like alienation or consciousness in a sense of let's say class consciousness or false consciousness. These are religiously supercharged terms, talking about false consciousness requires you to accept the whole baggage in this religious system and its theology, it is completely different meaning from regular usage of let's say falling unconscious after hitting your head.
Just for instance look at the topic of "human rights". What are they, how they come to be, who has authority to arbitrate between them in terms of hierarchy, how do we amend or suspend or cancel them. These are all highly metaphysical questions for which there is no simple answer.
The very fact that they refuse to categorize it as a religion is part of the culture war, they want to posit their religious dogma and doctrine informing how law and morality is enforced as some "universal" system outside of any critique. They presuppose that their religion is correct and invite you to only discuss the issue on their own terms.
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I'm easily willing to bite that bullet, wokeism is Calvinism. And both of them have no place as being the US state religion.
I would like it if wokeism was labelled as a state religion. Someone would be doing everyone a massive favor if they went through the process of getting it recognized as a religion.
Easy agree, but as far as I know you aren't a religious poster on TheMotte who wants to separate the two so there is no tractable fault, or comparison between the too. Nor have you made claims that everything good about The West is because of Christian Theology (Not that I remember if the OP has, but Christian Maximalists on TheMotte have made this claim repeatedly).
I'd like Christians to stop pretending Wokeism is not their child and not following similar behavioral patterns as it's memetic ancestors.
I do not think anybody is pretending, for instance I as a Catholic can say that traditional Satanists who believe in existence of demonic entity of Satan are "children of Christianity" in a very narrow sense that they probably could not exist without Christianity and its system. I can even accept Wokeism as a religion that subverts Christianity - heck, they literally celebrate the most heinous mortal sin of pride connected to sexual depravity. Many Christians see it as a work of The Enemy and indirect proof of their own faith.
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This isn't true, though. Wokeism has a lot of similar principles, but it also attaches to it its own set of faith-based claims about reality. That's what makes so many people call it a religion (including myself, as far back as 2015 back when it was just called "social justice" - though, quite honestly, this should have been obvious even as far back as the late 00s, by my estimation), rather than merely an ideology. Its core tenets rely irreducibly on faith to support claims about how certain individuals are oppressed by other individuals in society.
I probably should rephrase that Wokeism isn't the same thing as Christianity. Wokeism is a genealogical descendant of Western Christianity. It's core theological morality is very Christian in nature. In a way that cannot be said of other religions even other Abrahamic religions. The concept of Original Sin, The Confession, Repentance, The emphasis of the sanctity of the meek, it's universalism, etc. Christian slave morality is a direct ancestor of identity-based oppression morality. There is a distinct status inversion to Christianity vs the older European Pagan religions, and the Eastern religions. Core Christian symbolism is literally God suffering on the cross and being holy for that sacrifice. The apparently humiliated and defeated victim can possess supreme moral status, while worldly authorities can be radically mistaken about who is righteous. Now the structural oppressor–oppressed components are substantially Marxian in nature, but breed that belief system with other religions and you would not co-evolve to Wokeism. The Eastern religions are easy to ablate out. Islam, sharing many moral beliefs with Christianity still does not contain the moral primitive of original sin nor does it's central sacred narrative place God himself as the humiliated, tortured, and executed victim.
A good chunk of those can be found in pagan religions, though.
Let's take Communism: capital is the original sin, confession/repentance is done through continual revolution, the meek are the workers, Comintern are the missionaries, etc.
Woke, same thing: ability is the original sin, confession/repentance is done through continual humiliation, the meek are the disabled, USAID are the missionaries, etc.
So while I do think it presses the same moral buttons as Christianity (or perhaps more relevantly, Islam) does/did in the average follower (which is what I think people actually mean when they say it's a religion), I don't think it's actually a proper descendant.
Uhhh, I'd need to see serious evidence for that kind of assertion.
These are possible to find individually in pagan religions but not really all together in this package. Nolan just got asked this question by a Chinese Classics Professor, because Homeric Greeks don't really have the Christian concept of Atonement that pervaded, and was even a core theme, of his new movie. The Greeks saw the gods as beings, you offended them and you made amends much like you would if you offended your king. It's not repentance. Germanic/Norse Paganism, is almost the opposite in that vengeance for slights/wrongs was the moral basis. I feel like I could dig more and more, hence why I think you need evidence for this assertion, because nothing I can uncover even suggests this is close to the truth.
This is uniquely Christian, not even Judaism or Islam really hold to the conception of original sin. Adam sinned yes, but the whole of humanity does not bear the burden of his sin in either of those two religions. To define Original Sin, it is something like Primordial Transgression + Inherited Human condition = Inherent Moral Fault
Going down the list:
The concept of Original Sin is about as OG Christian as it can get. I'd go so far as to say that any ideology that borrows the concept, that developed in the west IS borrowing Christian Theology. So yes Communism and Wokeism, tightly match to Christianity. But if the genealogy of Wokeism is Christianity + Marxism, and 1848 Germany was still deeply religious, when Marx wrote Das Capital, then it stands to reason that Marxism and its descendants are also descendants of Western Christianity minus the Christian Metaphysics. After all Marx was culturally Christian. It's essentially Western Christian Theology all the way down.
There are numerous pre-Christian religions/theologies, that developed outside if Christianity (e.g. in Americas) that share the Original/Ancestral sin framework. For that, the main two attributes of the original sin is as follows:
Here, Buddhism is a direct comparison. The universe is orderly and good, while human is born broken often ridden with karmic debt. The Pythagoreans had similar concepts as do Hindus with doctrine of Ṛṇa or Popol Vuh of Mayans. Of course there are quite an important details that completely subvert the Christian story, but so does Progressive religion.
Progressives believe in subverted story of original sin - individuals are born as perfect innocent tabula rasa individuals, it is the world that is evil and poisons them through systems of oppression into various sins such as racism etc. You have to become woke to these sinful poisonous systems out there, and do the work to perfect yourself and the world in order to build eschatological progressive heaven on Earth in form of ultimate Social Justice, thus liberating future perfect newborn beings from these negative influences. Progressive hamartiology has more overlap with let's say Gnostic view of Original Sin as opposed to mainstream Christianity - and it is not a coincidence.
You are missing a middle bullet point: Humanity inherits the guilt of their ancestor Adam. A human is born broken BECAUSE of Adam. Also your last bullet is subtly wrong too, it's not that "Humans must navigate this fact" Humans must actively seek redemption and grace. Some googling tells me this is actual a Western Christian vs Orthodox Christian disagreement in the view of OG sin.
This is a very christianized interpretation. Buddhism doesn't view the world as good or bad. It teaches that the conventional world (samsara) is characterized by impermanence (anicca) and dissatisfaction or suffering (dukkha), driven by ignorance and craving, rather than being a moral judgment of the world as good or evil. Karma likewise is not inherited guilt of humanity as a whole but the cosmic debt of your past lives. In essence, Buddhism has no primordial human transgression and carries no inherited ancestral guilt.
I can look up those other too later, but considering the loss of that middle bullet around inherited guilt, I'm guessing the distinction comes down to that. You have an incorrect definition of Western Christianities Original Sin.
Incorrect partially, the race you are born to gives you your sinful status at birth. Being born white means you inherit the racial sins of your ancestors and must seek redemption through atonement in the woke belief system.
The rest of the description I agree with. If you can convince me that the OG sin is more your line than mine, I could be swayed to view Progressive belief systems as less connected to Christian Theology.
That is definitely not the only or even predominant Christian view outside of Calvinists and related sects. For instance Catholics do not view original sin through prism of guilt, original sin is contracted, not committed. Orthodox Christians actually use different vocabulary, they call it Ancestral Sin.
Yes, seeking redemption is the way how you do it. I did not want to go into details of soteriology as there are even more profound differences in as with what is the nature of grace, what is the nature of justification, sanctification and glorification etc.
As for the rest you are also too hung up on details here, which is strange as as you have no problem saying that Communism and Wokeism “borrowed” this concept. You defined Original Sin narrowly toward Calvinist tradition yet at the same time Marxist share it? Of course you will find out that it is unique. I framed Original Sin as more general concept specifically related to nature of the world and human. Of course various religions or even specific heresies will differ on specifics of cosmology and related human ontology and harmatiology - including Communism and Wokism.
Incorrect partially. You were born with white privilege - but this privilege is bestowed upon you by oppressive system of white supremacy, it is not inside your ontological nature. It is the system that is corrupt. You have to of course do proper progressive work, accept and profess your privilege, listen to people of color as they posses superior standpoint epistemological position etc. But this work is related to dismantling the oppressive system, so that future whites are no longer corrupted and we live in true and voluntary equity. I'd argue that there is no true personal atonement in progressivism, you are shaped by material conditions of the systems of opression, to “atone” is to change and ideally abolish these systems, so you and future generations will be shaped differently. There is just endless work in Theory-Praxis cycle for everybody, as we all possess some kind of privilege even black women can be cis etc.
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Yes. It does rely heavily on unproven claims and implications such as all differences in crime sanctions arising from police forces who simply hate dark skin, etc.
It also wants you to label huge groups as 'oppressors' with a very broad brush and claims that the individuals inside those groups cannot be legitimate victims, so feel free to tread on them. Jesus wouldn't approve of group identity based discrimination and revanchism.
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Most Motteposters grandmothers will be of the Silent Generation, which is the generation that effectively invented modern divorce. Your regular grandma grew up in a society where marriage was for life, but participated in the process (1/4-1/3 of the time by frivorcing her husband herself, but in almost every case by treating her contemporaries who did so as respectable women making a praiseworthy life choice) of making it for as long as both members of the couple still feel like it. Almost nobody complained - and in particular the social conservatives who should have done mostly didn't. (Reagan signed no-fault divorce into law as governor of California).
If your grandma actually did something to preserve the age-old view of marriage, then she was an outlier, not a regular grandma.
Evangelical Conservatives apparently did have some qualms about Reagan; I recall my youth pastor talking about this in the 90's, that supporting a man who divorced his first wife, and signed no-fault into law, was a hard pill to swallow, only done after "significant prayer" (i.e. realizing that there were no better options). I myself was way too young to have any first-hand experience; I was barely a toddler when he moved into the White House, and spent his administration watching thinly-veiled advertisements for toys passed off as cartoons (that his own admin changed the rules on to allow!), but he really wasn't a Culture Warrior, and not much of a social conservative, when you get down to it. Evangelicals were really a cheap date for the Republicans at the time, and it wasn't until GWB that they even so much as got the Party to pass meaningless legislation (that they had no intention of vigoursly defending).
This doesn't surprise me - it is very obvious that "Evangelical Conservatives" covers and covered a coalition that includes serious committed Christians trying to legislate Christian morality (including Christian sexual morality) and also unchurched Red Tribers for whom "Evangelical Christian" is a tribal label and not a religious one trying to clown on their outgroup. (If I had to point fingers at specific pastors, I would say Billy Graham vs Pat Robertson.) It doesn't surprise me that the actual Christians have to hold their noses to vote for Republicans, or that they do.
There are plenty of leftwing shifts on social issues where "regular grandmas" as @georgioz put it, did fight for traditional values, most obviously abortion. But preserving the traditional understanding of marriage, at least in the US, wasn't one of them. (The British Christian right, despite being much weaker than its American equivalent, did fight the issue, and as a result we didn't get de facto no fault divorce until 1986 and de jure no fault divorce until 2022, despite a blue-ribbon commission calling for no-fault divorce as early as 1967)
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Sure, I do not even deny it, the point being that it is not some conscious choice, but slow changing of culture. For instance silent generation grew up in schools where crosses, framed ten commandments or morning prayers were the norm even if not many of them consciously thought of it. Now those are often outright banned by the very same silent generation, but there are progress flags and Earth Day and other such things in schools instead. It is change in culture and ethos.
I like the way James Lindsay explains it in the form of various philosophical systems where theology is the grounding pilar, it is fundamental meta-narrative that determines the ultimate nature of reality, truth, and human purpose. Theology synthetizes other particular philosophies such as cosmology, epistemology, anthropology, sociology, axiology, hamartiology etc. So for instance Christians have God at the center of their theology, this informs epistemology through divine revelation and empirical observation of God's creation, man is created in image of God, Christian virtue ethics is objective morality based on God's commandments. I think he compared it to Marxism which views Man (species being) at the center, epistemology is based on your standpoint in class and other hierarchies providing you with unique insights, nature of man is as social being that is entirely shaped by material conditions etc. These are incompatible philosophical systems.
Using Scott Alexander's language, Culture War is Conflict Theory all the way down especially with such radical differences on basic things like ontology, epistemology or ideas of how society should function. Somebody will be in charge, if not you then somebody else that may have vastly different philosophical system which will seep into culture and ultimately politics. Mistatke theroy is just camouflage, you take the dominant theological/philosophical system as given, an then argue as if progressives and classical liberals or Christian nationalists or Islamists are just mistaken in how their policy proposal will bring about "greater good". But in reality you are just theocrat for your own system and view other competing systems through that prism. Mistake theory is luxury to be indulged for debates inside this philosophical system where people are theologically aligned.
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