The Tyranny of Woke Gnosticism

Introduction

Turns out that there really is nothing new under the sun. The new spirituality is an old heresy come back with a vengeance and a Nike swoosh. The name of it is Gnosticism. The old gnostic sects were mystery cults surrounding so-called “secret knowledge” societies, inner ring initiations, combined with a dualistic distain for the material world. What mattered was not matter, physical reality, or history or facts. What mattered was the “true” spiritual gnosis, the secret mystical knowledge that cracked the code of existence and freed you from the “confines” of this physical, historical world.

Some early converts to Christianity thought that Jesus might be a new gnostic cult leader, and some versions of the Judaizers might have been semi-gnostics. But what the first apostles made clear is that the gospel of Jesus is a public proclamation for the healing of this world, not a secret, mystical cult. God did not merely “appear” to come in human flesh. He became a real man, a true man. By the incarnation, He permanently embraced human flesh, this material world, in order to save it. And this is not a secret, mystical knowledge. Jesus was crucified in public, in history, under Pontius Pilate, and He rose from the dead with a true, glorified human body that could eat and drink and be touched. And He was seen by hundreds of witnesses.

The thing to point out is the fact that history is the friend of truth and justice and therefore every man. As we do not tire of pointing out, justice is blindfolded in all the old statues and paintings. This is because she only measures the facts – and facts are wonderfully historic and public, in that they can be independently verified. Justice is not to be swayed by age or sex or skin color or income level or hurt feelings or climate change. She merely examines the historical facts by means of witnesses and evidence. And this understanding of justice is thoroughly biblical and Christian. The reason we have due process and presumption of innocence and multiple corroborating witnesses and trial by jury is because Jesus rose from the dead in history and was seen by hundreds of witnesses. The resurrection of Jesus is the bedrock foundation for Western justice – otherwise biblical notions of justice are merely parochial, ethnic preferences and have no business claiming universal applicability. But the current anarchic spasm insisting that we will not have Jesus as our Lord (despite the Constitution’s explicit reference to His birth) is simultaneously an insistence that we be ruled by the capricious whims of gnostic tyranny. What is left after material facts and witnesses and historical evidence have been banished from the public square? What you are left with is secret knowledge, mystical feelings, woke tyranny, emotive lemmings.

Woke Tyranny

This demon of gnosticism that was driven out of the early church and Hellenistic culture has come back to Western civilization with seven more mad hatter friends. So let me give you a number of examples of woke tyranny.

What is a man or a woman? How many sexes are there? If you say that there are any more than two sexes and divorce your definitions from chromosomal, physiological, material realities, you are succumbing to the new gnostic jihad. A man who says he feels like a woman on the inside is claiming some kind of gnostic, secret knowledge because, not to put too fine a point on it, you can’t verify that with any of kind proof, evidence, or material demonstration. This hidden woman could not be located inside this troubled man even with the help of six over zealous TSA agents with blue latex gloves. These trans-claims dismiss the material reality of how God made the world and insist that the “truth” is something immaterial, mystical, a secret knowledge available only to the truly initiated. And since you don’t “get it,” you must be forced to fall into step with the times. You must let the dude in the dress into your daughter’s locker room. Can we see proof of that dude’s female identity? Sorry, sir, please step away from the holy place where our high priests concoct secret rituals with the innards of Critical Theory. You will be made to shave some dude’s junk, you will do trans surgeries, and our name for this is progress – you paying for whatever sick fantasy I dream up next.

We’ve seen the same thing with ethnicity – what is black or white? Again, the definitions being pressed upon us are not merely levels of pigment in the skin or actual biological, familial descent – something physical, material, and demonstrable (whatever descriptive value that may be), but levels of secret knowledge, who your friends are, who accepts you, your “lived experience,” what the establishment now calls “woke” is completely unverifiable. This term indicates the initiated, those who have been welcomed onto the team, into the inner sanctum of the inner city, those who have asked AOC into the projects of their hearts, and that secret knowledge transcends all material realities and troublesome facts, and since Thomas Sowell isn’t woke, he certainly doesn’t count as black. As Gnostic Priestess Rep. Ayanna Pressely put it recently, “We don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be brown voices. We don’t need any more black faces that don’t want to be black voices.” Brown and black are mystical qualities, secret knowledge, gnostic codes. And if you don’t get that, if you don’t submit to our secret understanding, you’re a fat toothed hillbilly.

So let me get this straight (please forgive the heteronormative adjective): some black and brown faces are not speaking for black and brown voices, so why can’t Justin Trudeau don a brown face in order to speak for brown voices? He ain’t woke enough? Or why can’t Rachel Dolezal fully embrace black culture unironically?

The reason is shut up! 

What you will find is that rather than anything approaching a reasonable answer, you will immediately be shouted down because you’re an arch-racist heretic. You just don’t get it. You can’t understand what it’s like to be black. Ok, but a dude can put on a dress and you’ll make him woman of the year? How is it that something as essential as gendered chromosomes is more accessible and replicable than the amount of pigment in my skin? The differences between the races are deeper than biology? Talk about racism.

Gnosticism is always a powerplay. The genius of secret knowledge is that it can’t be pinned down. It morphs and bends and modifies and inverts at will. And turns out that the “will” is the will of whoever happens to have the adulation of the masses at the moment, and it is their erratic, emotive fits that defines the demand of the moment. It is not reasonable, and therefore it doesn’t care about reason, facts, evidence, history, testimony, or witnesses. In fact, all of those things are vestiges of the repressive, patriarchal past. Free your mind from all of those tiresome medieval tropes. The new woke Gnosticism cares only about what it cares about this minute and whatever Trump said on Twitter last night.

But the tyranny train keeps acomin’. What is justice? How do you know if justice has been served? Well, in our #metoo era, it is apparently the shrieks and moans and convulsions of the media-internet mob. Justice, according to the new woke Gnosticism, is the resulting schadenfreude from the latest sacrificial victim disemboweled on the altar of our collective cancel culture rage.

So what is rape? Can it be defined by a description of physical acts and circumstances that can be witnessed or proved by evidence? Of course not, you incorrigible rube. Rape is functionally being defined as whatever a woman decides retroactively she didn’t particularly like at any point in the past. She may have been raped by George Washington — I mean look at the way he ogles her from the dollar bill! She may have been raped by Martin Luther, John Calvin, maybe even by Jesus Christ himself. But if a woman can marry inanimate objects, do not think that these cannot turn into abusive relationships. She may have been raped by the Bible, democracy, the cotton gin, AR-15s, but she has almost certainly been raped by capitalism. I mean seriously, who has capitalism not raped? She may have signed consent forms, but consent forms are systems of patriarchal oppression. She may have smiled, laughed, and nothing may have even happened. But if she transcends this prison of material reality and senses the transcendent mystical meaning of that moment 30 years ago, her inner goddess must be worshipped, and all opposition must be destroyed. All questions for clarification or requests for evidence are indications of latent rapist intentions and misogyny.

The Insanity of Sin

All of this is fundamentally driven by the insanity of sin. Paul wrote centuries ago that those who deny the Creator God clearly manifest in creation suppress the truth in unrighteousness, and professing themselves to be wise become fools, and they begin to confess their climate sins to potted plants and NBC. 

Self-deception goes down deep, and many are so self-deceived that they believe their lies very firmly. But let there be no mistake: they are still deceiving themselves. They are still moral agents, and they are suppressing the truth in unrighteousness. They are in active rebellion against the God who made them. They hate Him. And this is the catnip that drives this whole societal seizure. The foaming at the mouth, the delirious stump speeches, the schizophrenic legislation, the straight faced bloviating on the evening news – it is all the necessary result of turning from the Living God. You can’t ban the origin of all reason and remain reasonable. You can’t suppress the truth and retain any resistance to lies. You cannot damn God’s ordained means of forgiveness and salvation and not run pellmell into the oblivion.

This fundamental human rebellion has always been driven by the offer of secret knowledge – knowledge without God, apart from God. If you eat of the tree, your eyes will be open. You will know. You will be gods. But it turns out that what we become is a twisted inversion of God, restless, erratic demons, set on tyranny and destruction.

But Christ was crucified in public for all of this. He was raised from the dead to cure this manic conniption. He was pierced to take away our sins. And therefore, He is not moved. He sits enthroned and laughs at our folly, and sends His preachers out. And they proclaim this glorious message: Christ was crucified for sinners, Christ was crucified for the insanity of sin, Christ was crucified for raging traitors. And one by one, He saves these frightened, rebel orphans. They fall to their knees in humble surrender and He clothes them in His grace, washes them clean, and brings them home to sit in seats of honor at His table. And as the places fill up, they are all, every last one of them, sitting there clothed and in their right mind and there is nothing but praise in their mouths.

Photo by Paolo Nicolello on Unsplash