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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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