Christianity and Wokeness Quotes

“It is the strangest thing today. Personal experience matters and is validated when you come to progressive conclusions, but not when you arrive at conservative convictions.”
― Owen Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

“Should we always watch for oppression? Indeed, we should. Evil does not sleep. In fact, we should watch out for authoritarian evil from every corner, knowing that it is all too easy for those who are supposedly “anti-authoritarianism” to end up oppressing others. Surely a good number of those inclined to wokeness do not start out with such intentions. But movements are strange and unpredictable things, and they are especially ripe for exploitation when not grounded in sound principles and Christian ideas.”
― Owen Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

“From numerous angles, wokeness encourages us to distrust the order God has created in the world He has personally made. As an ideology, it reads our society as fundamentally oppressive along racial lines, but often stops short of substantiating this claim. Furthermore, it conflates individual experience with societal structures, training people to read real wrongs done against them as necessarily part of a broader public square campaign. In addition, wokeness is fundamentally an anti-authority system, but as we have noted, it is itself deeply authoritarian. Though it speaks against “oppression,” it actually creates injustice, for it teaches us to distrust God-made order and God-given authority. Though CRT gets most of the headlines, it is in truth intersectionality that really brings the pain. People who will never read a sentence from an intersectional author nevertheless buy into and express an intersectional framework when they view our society as oppressive and read leadership in terms of power imbalances”
― Owen Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

“Christians know why this is so. We know that God made every person, and without slipping into a kind of therapeutic wonderment project, that God has made each of us as a little display of Himself. That’s the wonder of being made in God’s image, as we saw earlier. Yet wokeness, as with all ideologies, does not start with the wonder of image-bearing. It starts with the dull stereotypes of Marxist collectivism. It breaks people down by how they look and where they’re from. It robs the human person of dignity, uniqueness, and a sense of lingering enchantment even in a world ruined by the Fall. It does not teach that we are all bound by the common bond of image-bearing, but rather that we live in fundamental alienation from one another.26 This alienation as covered elsewhere is truly impossible to overcome—unless one belongs to an underprivileged group, and then one does not live in alienation with members of the group. But here again wokeness compromises biblical truth and fails to capture reality. The miracle of salvation is that people who have nothing in common end up as spiritual family members, while very often people who have massive natural overlap end up living very different lives and holding very different views.”
― Owen Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

“God has given us a distinct heritage, background, appearance, personality, and life. There is an unhealthy individualism today that some fall prey to, believing that they are so unique as to be little gods, essentially. But if this Disneyfied conception of the self is troubling, so too is what we could call conformist collectivism—a grouping of people according to certain traits that diminishes their God-given selfhood. Image-bearers are not robots. Human beings are not stereotypes. We are not faceless members of the collective. We are individuals made by God to know God.”
― Owen Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

“But we should be ever wary of classing people according to stereotypes. When I was a boy, American culture expended a great deal of energy to discredit such thinking and behavior. Today, however, we have witnessed the revenge of the stereotype. We learn from many that the most important part of human identity is skin color or a related identifier. We are told that we can know a great deal about people based upon these limited characteristics. This extends even to assuming that having a certain pigmentation, or being from a certain community, predetermines our way of thinking, our forms of expression, our preferences, our experiences, and our very personhood itself.”
― Owen Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

“The doctrine of human image-bearing means that we must never despise a person for their skin color, background, traits, abilities (or lack thereof), or heritage. Instead, we must treat all people with honor and dignity. Even human sinfulness (see our next section) does nothing—and I mean nothing—to change this truth.”
― Owen Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

“It is true, though, that all beings have a common origin of existence: God’s speech. We are right to teach creation ex nihilo, “from nothing,” but we must also teach of creation in verbo, “by word.”
― Owen Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

“wokeness violates what the Apostle Paul expressly teaches. In Romans 8:1, we read, “There is therefore now no condemnation”
― Owen Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

“While recognizing certain limited points of contact with biblical Christianity, we do not embrace part of Marxism, or part of Epicureanism, or part of existentialism, or part of homosexuality, or part of transgenderism, or part of postmodernity as believers. We learn about these worldviews, we compassionately engage those following them, and we refute them. Using the apostle’s language, we go to war against them, in order that we may live and that the influence of unbelief may be overcome.”
― Owen Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

“Yet much as the state supplies all we need, so too does wokeness/UJP have a mystical and therapeutic streak in it. All things must be ordered according to man-centered social justice, necessitating government control. But at the same time, people (at least some people) must be free to find and publicly celebrate their true selves. When this union of statism and selfism breaks free of the traditional constraints of Judeo-Christian religion, fundamentalist creationism, free markets, democratic government, personal responsibility, and strong local church presence in communities, then the earth will be made right, rescued from global warming, intolerant dogmatism, political liberty, and communalism. We will not live forever in a world made right by God, what Christians call “escalated re-creation.” Instead, we will live in a world governed by science, technology, and justice. Wokeness does not do away with eschatology; it immanentizes it in a distinctly humanist form, but not live-and-let-live humanism—hard-edged judicial and statist humanism.”
― Owen Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

“Here are the basic commitments that run behind and through wokeness (or UJP more descriptively): Anthropology: Neo-paganism (no Creator, no creation order, we are our own rulers) Sexual ethics: Compulsive libertinism (we express our desires, and all should approve) Political theology: Marxist Statism (we trust the state to rule us and make things right) Metaphysics: Postmodern Darwinism (evolution explains life with no absolute truth) Theology Proper: Mystic Selfism (we should follow our hearts, not any authority) Soteriology: Therapeuticism/Ritualism (we become our best self by doing the work) Eschatology: Utopian Earth-Centrism (we’ll make the earth right through social justice)”
― Owen Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

“Wokeness sits loose in a philosophical sense but is connected to the following modern ideologies: Wokeness has little grounding in a theistic system; it is this-worldly from the start. Wokeness uses the categories of Marxism, with people being either oppressor or oppressed. Wokeness champions the neo-pagan sexual ethic, one distinct from biblical sexuality. Wokeness is a utopian justice movement at its base; it syncs with both Enlightenment revolutionary movements and liberationist theological camps and connects in different ways to each.”
― Owen Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

“In actuality, many are—but on a personal level only. There is, in general, a double-mindedness about the free market among woke leaders. On the one hand, it is seen as wicked and inherently corrupt. On the other hand, woke scholars and activists do well by it—in some cases, obscenely well. Robin DiAngelo charges fifteen thousand dollars per speaking event and has earned over two million dollars from her book White Fragility, even while castigating capitalism as a racist economic system.64 Ibram Kendi and Ta-Nehisi Coates have even higher price tags: Kendi’s speaking fee is twenty-five thousand dollars, while Coates’s fee is between thirty thousand and forty thousand dollars per event.65 Even as these leaders decry “capitalism,” they make more in a day than many Americans make in a year.”
― Owen Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

“The police are not above scrutiny; no public official is. But Scripture would have us see police as a gift from God to humanity. Fathers and mothers should train their children to honor police officers (and military members and others in similar roles). In many communities, police officers restrain wickedness and do so at tremendous personal risk. In fact, according to PragerU, a police officer is eighteen times more likely to be shot than a “black” man is.55 Our culture is shaping and promoting a narrative that is seriously flawed—and flawed in the anti-institutional form that fits wokeness more broadly. We recall here Marx’s hatred of God-ordained elements of society, and we note that it is alive and well today. We must reject such a mindset.”
― Owen Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

“The police are not above scrutiny; no public official is. But Scripture would have us see police as a gift from God to humanity. Fathers and mothers should train their children to honor police officers (and military members and others in similar roles). In many communities, police officers restrain wickedness and do so at tremendous personal risk. In fact, according to PragerU, a police officer is eighteen times more likely to be shot than a “black” man is.55 Our culture is shaping and promoting a narrative that is seriously flawed—and flawed in the anti-institutional form that fits wokeness more broadly. We recall here Marx’s hatred of God-ordained elements of society, and we note that it is”
― Owen Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

“This commentary shows us the untamed resentment at the heart of wokeness. What is commendable in scriptural terms is interpreted as evil in ideological terms. Adoption is not driven by human generosity; it is driven by oppressive instincts. In response, we need to be clear: Such ideology is anti-human and anti-Gospel. What Ibram Kendi is selling, no believer should buy. This is an all-too-clear illustration of what wokeness leads to: it corrupts your worldview, causing you to see the world wrongly, with “white” people being effectively evil, their actions being necessarily poisonous, and the lines between “races” being uncrossable, effectively. Many evangelicals have done what Barrett did. These people are not perfect; they have their flaws; some of them may even need to grow in their handling of diversity. But to adopt a child, including one that looks different from you, is the very essence of true religion, according to James 1:27. James asserts: Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.”
― Owen Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

“have raised, is bound to be a different valuation than the person of color you see on the street.21”
― Owen Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

“This is especially poignant when one thinks about social fragmentation. So-called “interracial” adoption is a lovely thing in basic human terms. Yet not long ago, Ibram Kendi tweeted this amid media coverage of Supreme Court Justice nominee Amy Coney Barrett’s adoption of “black” children (two from Haiti): Some White colonizers “adopted” Black children. They “civilized” these “savage” children in the “superior” ways of White people, while using them as props in their lifelong pictures of denial, while cutting the biological parents of these children out of the picture of humanity.19 Kendi then argued that adopting such children in no way makes someone “not a racist”: And whether this is Barrett or not is not the point. It is a belief too many White people have: if they have or adopt a child of color, then they can’t be racist.20 A writer for Christianity Today, Sitara Roden, spoke of her own adoptive background in a positive way, but also agreed with Kendi’s perspective on bias: This is a conversation I’ve had with my own white family. Just because I am not white and a part of their family does not mean their implicit biases are any less real. How you view the nonwhite person in your family, that you might have raised, is bound to be a different valuation than”
― Owen Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

“In wokeness, we really are judicially guilty of ancestral sin, and we really must “repent” of those sins, it seems.”
― Owen Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

“Anyabwile’s call to “repentance” came from a structuralist conception of evil—a woke one in which all participate in “systemic” sin.”
― Owen Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

“Why consider military history in a book on wokeness? Because, like the ill-fated French defenses of yesteryear, our theology is not adapted to the major challenge of our day. We are prepared for what you could call “soft postmodernism”—the belief that there is no objective truth, no “ought” in life, and that science tells us the meaning of the cosmos. We are not prepared for the “hard postmodernism” that is now dominant in our culture. Unlike the earlier form of ten to thirty years ago, hard postmodernism presents a very carefully framed argument, many oughts, a clear good group and bad group, and maintains that science—like all disciplines—is shot through with Western rationalism borne of white supremacy.4 If you do not know this, however good your intentions may be, you are equipped for a different struggle than the one that is knocking on your door. Wokeness is not soft postmodernism; wokeness is hard postmodernism.5”
― Owen Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

“Remember once more that in woke thinking this is not conscious and intentional “white supremacy” of the kind we rightly decry in the Ku Klux Klan. It is participational or ontological “white supremacy” derived simply from our skin color (or our failure to challenge such systemic evil, whatever color we may be).38 Because of our skin color or failure to dismantle “whiteness,” we have a condition to address (for we cannot repent and decisively put it behind us in woke ideology) that we did not know we had. Beyond this, we have a whole set of “antiracist” actions to perform, even as they will never take away the stain on our soul.”
― Owen Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

“All this helps us see that “Christian wokeness” is preaching “another Jesus,” a Jesus who does not end up much of a savior at all (2 Corinthians 11:4).”
― Owen Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

“We are now equipped to understand what so few do today: that wokeness violates what the Apostle Paul expressly teaches. In Romans 8:1, we read, “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” This status is due to God’s judicial verdict pronounced on the basis of our faith in the atoning work of the Son. As Christians, God has regenerated us and given us saving faith; as a result, God has removed His own just sentence of condemnation from us. In His courtroom, all who trust Christ are not only not guilty, but innocent. This is not a feeling; it is a fact. It does not owe to us; it owes to God. It does not come and go; it is stable, purchased, and our possession—now and for all time. It is God’s courtroom pronouncement, and no one can edit it, reverse it, or refute it. This is true of every Christian without exception in biblical terms (see Romans 5:12–21). If this sounds miraculous, this is because it is indeed a miracle.”
― Owen Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

“As we noted in the introduction to this chapter, our pagan age actually has a hard edge to it, and it marches under the banner of forced affirmation.”
― Owen Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

“What we are warning people away from is not just bad behavior, but a disenchanted worldview. More simply, we are turning them away from neopaganism. Paganism is the anti-wisdom of the serpent which deconstructs ordered reality—the God-made world—and replaces it with a new order, an anti-order ruled by the devil. In this anti-order, there is no Creator; no divine design; no male or female; no script for sexuality; no God-designed family with a father, mother, and children; no need to protect and care for children at all; no Savior, Lord, or theistic end to the cosmos; and no judge of evil.30”
― Owen Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

“Wokeness does indeed seek acceptance. But it does not want people to accept biblical complementarity.”
― Owen Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

“Instead of taking agency, wokeness encourages people to embrace their victimhood.”
― Owen Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

“There is at least a whisper of doubt over my entire generation of educated blacks—a whisper, frankly, of inferiority. Are we where we are because of merit, or because of jerrybuilt, white guilt concepts like affirmative action and “diversity”? How different, really, is diversity’s stigmatization of us as “needy victims” from segregation’s stigmatization of us as inferiors? In either case, we are put in service to the white American imagination.… In both cases we were a means to a white end.”
― Owen Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It