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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   32896 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 15, 2025

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Woke progressivism wears many once venerable institutions like a skinsuit. It consumes all their social capital and then moves on to the next victim.

It's because Wokism is a Christian heresy.

That's an interesting claim, considering that it came significantly out of atheism. E.g.:

Most movement atheists weren’t in it for the religion. They were in it for the hamartiology [the study of sin, in particular, how sin enters the universe]. Once they got the message that the culture-at-large had settled on a different, better hamartiology, there was no psychological impediment to switching over. We woke up one morning and the atheist bloggers had all quietly became social justice bloggers. Nothing else had changed because nothing else had to; the underlying itch being scratched was the same. They just had to CTRL+F and replace a couple of keywords.

I'm pretty doubtful that if one examines the continental->critical philosophy pipeline that may have undergirded some of the trend, one would find a pool of Christian heretics, either. I guess if you say that all the atheism is just Christian heresy (would be quite a claim) and that Wokism is just atheist heresy, blink and imagine some form of transitive property, you might be able to think that Wokism is just Christian heresy.

I guess if you say that all the atheism is just Christian heresy (would be quite a claim)

Not that outlandish. In many cases, the God they didn't believe in was specifically the Christian God.

I mean that's just a vestige of the culture. By this logic Catholicism is a Greek Pagan heresy since the Catholic Church incorporated a lot of Greek philosophy in it's formation.

I guess if you say that all the atheism is just Christian heresy (would be quite a claim)

This has been a pretty popular take I've seen floating around over the last few years actually. Tom Holland pushes it and repeats it on pretty much every religiously adjacent podcast he goes on. His view (at least expressed in his book 'Dominion') is that a) necessarily European modes of thought are themselves Christian, so that liberalism, enlightenment thought, rationality, and so on, are themselves essentially Christian, and b) specifically the concept of the secular is unique to Christianity, which ties in with atheistic modes of thought via some extra steps. For context, Holland is a pretty milquetoast liberal, albeit a (cultural?) Christian.

I've also seen versions of the view popular in NRx circles. Nick Land has been on a liberalism = anglo-being kick for a while now, and I think would agree that Dawkins style New Atheism is itself essentially Anglo (and therefore Protestant). I can't remember who else off the top of my head has made similar claims but the narrower "atheism is just protestantism taken to it's logical conclusion" view is also one of I've seen pushed by online Catholics.

I can't really buy this we had Atheist Greeks and Philosophical schools before Christianity. The Enlightment is pretty non Christian. And China was ruled by a secular philosophical school as base value rather than religion. It seems way to much a just so story. The concept of the secular is definitely not unique to Christianity.

Dominion is a good read and makes the argument much better than I could. I don't think I agree with you about China though. By secularism I mean both the concept of separation of church and state, but also the general conceptual rendering that comes with "render unto Caesar", that there is a realm of life which isn't governed by the religious. Worth noting of course this has often been ignored by Christian states themselves, but was picked up with more seriousness later down the line. But Chinese emperors and dynasties had the Mandate of Heaven, oracle bones, and neo-Confucianism.

I've also seen versions of the view popular in NRx circles.

I won't pretend to have read it all, but Moldbug wrote a whole book about this in 2007, https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/09/how-dawkins-got-pwned-part-1/

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