Bari Weiss & the Traditional Woke Fly in Her Soup

Introduction
When you live in the land of zombies, every sound of sanity brings hope. So when Bari Weiss came out swinging last week, you could hear the collective sigh of relief. We’re not alone! We’re not crazy! Bari wrote an article in Commentary Magazine entitled, “We Got Here Because of Cowardice. We Get Out With Courage: Say No to the Woke Revolution.” Ms. Weiss could have tweeted just that and the crowds would have roared. But the whole article was packed with unusual amounts of common sense:

A lot of people want to convince you that you need a Ph.D. or a law degree or dozens of hours of free time to read dense texts about critical theory to understand the woke movement and its worldview. You do not. You simply need to believe your own eyes and ears. 

Let me offer the briefest overview of the core beliefs of the Woke Revolution, which are abundantly clear to anyone willing to look past the hashtags and the jargon…

…In this ideology, speech is violence. But violence, when carried out by the right people in pursuit of a just cause, is not violence at all. In this ideology, bullying is wrong, unless you are bullying the right people, in which case it’s very, very good. In this ideology, education is not about teaching people how to think, it’s about reeducating them in what to think. In this ideology, the need to feel safe trumps the need to speak truthfully…

How did we get here? There are a lot of factors that are relevant to the answer…  

But there is one word we should linger on, because every moment of radical victory turned on it. The word is cowardice.

The revolution has been met with almost no resistance by those who have the title CEO or leader or president or principal in front of their names. The refusal of the adults in the room to speak the truth, their refusal to say no to efforts to undermine the mission of their institutions, their fear of being called a bad name and that fear trumping their responsibility—that is how we got here.

Around the same time, Ms. Weiss went on CNN and went toe to toe with Brian Stelter on how the world has gone mad:

And there is of course so much to commend. I am grateful for such barrel proof truth on CNN. I’m grateful for the call for courage. I’m thankful for the calling out of the CEOs, presidents, all the “adults in the room.”

An Honest Assessment?
The problem of course is that we cannot stop there. We cannot merely denounce cowardice and call out to courage to save us. We must actually put cowardice to death and put on courage. And we must not merely put courage on, but we must allow that courage to take us all the way into the heat of the battle, which will require a good deal of repentance. And to be clear, Weiss acknowledges this:

“This bravery isn’t the last or only step in opposing this revolution—it’s just the first. After that must come honest assessments of why America was vulnerable to start with, and an aggressive commitment to rebuilding the economy and society in ways that once again offer life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to the greatest number of Americans.

But let’s start with a little courage.

Courage means, first off, the unqualified rejection of lies. Do not speak untruths, either about yourself or anyone else, no matter the comfort offered by the mob. And do not genially accept the lies told to you. If possible, be vocal in rejecting claims you know to be false. Courage can be contagious, and your example may serve as a means of transmission.”

Weiss goes on to give a list of her own suggestions of where to throw down with current lies being circulated. She also cites a number of examples of folks being courageous, telling the truth, and refusing to crumble under the weight of outrage.

A Fly in the Soup
But there’s a fly in the soup. And it’s not a little one. It’s a fat hairy one doing a frantic backstroke. Bari Weiss is a lesbian. She has embraced the delusion that she is married to another woman. Now don’t misunderstand me. This doesn’t mean that she cannot see and say true things. I commend her article to you. It is full of lots of refreshing truth. And I truly hope that this courage Ms. Weiss speaks of, this honest assessment of how we got here will include her full repentance. I pray that God sends courageous, faithful Christians into her life who will love her in truth, and that her words will become truer over the next number of months and years.

But in the meantime, part of the exuberance for Ms. Weiss’s diatribe is the fact that she is one of the high priestesses of the Woke Religion. She is a Woke reformer, a critic, and a voice crying in the wilderness, if you will. She professes the Jewish religion, but she practices Traditional Wokism. Traditional Wokism, mind you, is not as radical as the modern, progressive version. Here’s her helpful explanation of Wokeness:

It begins by stipulating that the forces of justice and progress are in a war against backwardness and tyranny. And in a war, the normal rules of the game must be suspended. Indeed, this ideology would argue that those rules are not just obstacles to justice, but tools of oppression. They are the master’s tools.  And the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house.

So the tools themselves are not just replaced but repudiated. And in so doing, persuasion—the purpose of argument—is replaced with public shaming. Moral complexity is replaced with moral certainty. Facts are replaced with feelings.

How is it that Ms. Weiss arrived at the conclusion she, a woman made in the image of God, could “marry” another woman, made in the image of God? It was (in various ways) by stipulating that the normal rules of the game needed to be suspended, that normal rules of morality and justice were tools of slavery and oppression. While she would no doubt hide herself in “moral complexity,” the fact is that the entire homosexual movement is the replacement of facts with feelings.

God created us male and female, and He gave us clear sexual assignments in the world and created the institution of marriage. And rebellious people shook their fists at God and said that they could be whatever they wanted, however they wanted, and marriage could be whatever they wanted. Why? Not because of facts, but because of feelings. The facts contradict every form of sexual rebellion. The facts condemn heterosexual sin, homosexual sin, transsexual sin, bestiality, pedophilia, necrophilia, and whatever the next stripe of sexual wahooey happens to be. The facts contradict it all. They contradict it with STDs, shorter life expectancy, confusion, depression, anxiety, suicide, guilt, shame, and utter fruitlessness.

So you cannot get out of this mess with a slightly more conservative form of wokism. You cannot say that you only want a little bit of “revolution.” That’s like going back to Playboy magazines in the garage. That’s like going back to Jim Crow laws. That’s like saying, we only want to destroy two corners of the cathedral of Western Civilization — not the whole thing. But that isn’t possible. And while this will of course get spun as “radical right” extremism, it actually goes back to the beginning of Genesis. Weiss even noted in her interview with Brian Stelter that when someone cannot say out loud that there are differences between men and women without being cancelled, the world has gone mad.

Yes, but it is not merely saying it out loud, it is believing it. It is obeying those sexual assignments embedded in the world. You can no more build civilization on homosexuality than you can build a suspension bridge denying the reality of math. Aggressively rebuild the economy, Ms. Weiss? That would require having children.

If Darwin is Right, Serve Him
The last thing I’ll say is that the greatest blame for all of this lies at the feet of Christians who know better. We are the ones who became embarrassed of Genesis 1-2. We are the ones sputtering and making excuses for the age of the universe, six days of creation, and Noah’s flood. But this is why every syllable of the creation narrative matters: Does male and female matter? Does heterosexuality really matter? Does being made in the image of God matter?

You simply do not get to pick and choose. You do not get to say that this verse is *merely* poetry and symbolic because it doesn’t make sense to my modern sensibilities, but this verse is historic and dogmatic. Yes, there is poetry in Scripture, as well as apocalyptic literature and parables. But we do not get to choose our own adventure. That is the Woke Revolution, and it’s as old as the talking serpent in the Garden: Did God really say?

You cannot appeal to common sense or reason or science. Those are the idols that got us here. We are now at Woke Model 13, but Darwin and Marx and Nietzsche and Rousseau were just the earlier models of Wokeness. You cannot split the difference. If there is a God, we must worship Him. If there isn’t, then shut the Hell up.

So the foundation of our repentance, the thing that really must be undone before we will make any headway, any real progress against the Woke Revolution is a thoroughgoing recommitment to the doctrine of Creation. It is there where the madness begins:

“For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools… Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, so their bodies would be dishonored among them… For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural…” (Rom. 1:20-22, 24, 26)

So let me add to what Ms. Weiss said on CNN: When you think this mind-blowingly beautiful universe accidentally evolved over billions of years and people are descended from monkeys, the world has gone mad. When you think two women can get married, the world has gone mad. When you send your women into battle, the world has gone mad.

If Darwin was right, then I’m afraid there’s no reason why Darwin can’t trump these white patriarchal notions of truth that Bari Weiss wants to cling to. If Darwin was right then the Woke Revolutionaries are being consistent, and Bari Weiss is a racist bigot (by their definition). If we got here by survival of the fittest, there’s no good reason to protest against the woke jihad since, they’re just trying to survive, conquer, rape, and pillage exactly as their ancestors have done for billions of years. Where do you get these benighted notions of equality and dignity and justice, Ms. Weiss, when we all descended from mindless pondscum? There’s no dignity or justice if we are just a cosmic accident. 

Conclusion
God has given us over to our madness. But Christ is not far off. The truth has not left. We cannot turn back to Christ while clinging to our idols, but if we turn to Christ, we can be free from our idols. Our idols will not have power over us anymore. Our idols will stop abusing us. Our idols only have the power we give to them in our drooling insanity. And that is the source of all our cowardice. We are afraid of our idols. But there is really only one kind of courage, and it is the courage of Christ, the courage of His cross where all our madness, all our rebellion, all our sin went to die. But there is no middle ground. You cannot have Christ take half your madness and keep the other half. That will still leave you in your sins and afraid of what your idols will do. But if we surrender completely to Christ, and lay everything down, He will give us courage, and all these nightmares will fade away.