Is Wokeism really secular heretical Christianity rather than neo-Marxism?

Same-sex relationships are a good example of how this works. Around 20 percent of Australians say homosexuality should not be accepted by society. These people may or may not be Christians, but it is in line with traditional Christian teaching that stigmatises any sort of sexual relationship outside marriage.

Not that there are no gays in Christian churches, but the traditional view is that they should be celibate.

When the footballer Israel Folau was asked whether he thought homosexuals would go to hell, he quoted from a long list of sins provided by St Paul, which included adultery and drunkenness, as well as male same-sex relationships.

For this, he was expelled from Rugby Australia.

Mr. Folau has never shown any animus towards gays, even appearing on the cover of gay magazine, The Star Observer, presumably leaving it to God to make the judgment, not himself, in a version of "hate the sin, but love the sinner."

But that wasn't enough. Not only did he have to accept homosexuals, he had to affirm them and their practices.

And if he didn't, then he was committing one of the few sins left in our community - refusing to believe someone else's truth.

With no belief in an afterlife, the woke punishment has to occur in the present, so he had to be essentially erased, if not as a human being, as a rugby player.

All of this might seem esoteric, but there is an intellectual movement, which includes people like the historian Niall Ferguson, and his wife Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who think we need a Christian revival, or something like that, to reassert a belief in higher unifying values.

I'm not sure the Christian vessel of Western civilisation can be glued back together.

But we do need to reassert a system where not all truths are relative, where status in life - whether rich or poor - is irrelevant to how we treat each other, and where inequalities of power in multiple dimensions are accepted as being just part of how life must be, not something that can be eradicated by human agency.