Happy Epiphany! Wokeism is not post-modern Marxism, but heretical Christianity

Each year I try and put the season into a Christian perspective because, as plenty of scholars, from Tom Holland to Augusto Zimmermann have demonstrated, even if we think it isn't, ours is still a deeply Christian society.

It has provided us with a unique worldview which leads to modern liberal secularism and the belief in rights and the universal intrinsic worth of human beings. This persists, even if church attendance declines.

But you can't be properly culturally Christian if you don't understand Christianity. As I have argued, Wokeism is not post-modern Marxism, but heretical Christianity. If you want to fight back against it, the most successful and potent arguments are more likely to be found in the writings of Paul the Apostle than anyone from the Enlightenment.

The ARC conference in London in 2023 had a strong Christian undertone. Thinkers like Jordan Peterson seem to have arrived at the same place I have – that there needs to be a rebirth of a Christian understanding of the world so our society can function properly.

Maybe this is what he has in mind with his idea of a 'Better Story'.

Peterson strikes me as a St Paul for our times. Like Paul it would seem he's had his own epiphany and has now produced three documentary series on the Bible – Genesis, Exodus, and The Gospels. His most recent book is We Who Wrestle with God.

Like Paul he comes from outside Christianity, yet from within the cultural tradition.

Paul made Christianity understandable to 'Gentiles', the non-Jewish pagans that peopled the Greco-Roman world, from his position as a sophisticated Jewish pharisee with a great depth of classical Greek knowledge.

Peterson (a portentous name as it is literally 'son of Peter' and St Peter was the accepted leader of the church and in some ways in competition, or even opposition, to Paul) makes Christianity understandable to a therapeutic world from his position somewhere within the Christian tradition, but also as a professor of psychology and a licensed therapist.

Like Paul, Peterson is intense and dense. He's often difficult to follow and adds a gloss to Biblical passages that I don't think is actually there. But he is packing the crowds in and transforming people's lives.

Paul would harangue small crowds for hours, even into the early hours of the morning. Peterson can fill the O2 Arena in London with 20,000 people and keep them spellbound, without PowerPoints or any visual aids, for hours.

At the ARC conference I chatted about this with Mark Latham, who said, 'Mate, it would never work in Australia.'

Maybe, and maybe not. As Shakespeare remarked, in a play set 44 years before the time of Christ, 'There are tides in the affairs of men.'

It certainly feels like a tide has turned in our affairs. Niall Ferguson has written about 'the vibe' shifting globally, by which he means 'a return to – a championing of – reality, a rejection of the bureaucratic, the cowardly, the guilt-driven; a return to greatness, courage, and joyous ambition'.

That's the political wave of which Trump's victory is the most momentous because it is in the biggest sea of all, the USA, but it is mirrored in many smaller seas.

Ferguson is particularly relevant – he is a 'lapsed atheist' who has become a devoted Christian. He's not the only one, atheist or not. There are a lot going with the tide (I don't want to impute mere fashion to the movement, or political positioning, or just the result of inertia, but mass movements tend to drag everyone along, believers and fellow travellers).

There is his wife Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Muslim who became an atheist who is now a Christian and credits her conversion with saving her from alcoholism and depression. And my Christmas email inbox has been full of other examples: I Took Religion Out of Christmas. I Regret It, The Cross and the Machine, and How Intellectuals Found God.

Apparently Peter Thiel, the famous venture capitalist and mentor of JD Vance, is a Christian, and is featured on the Hoover Institute website in Apocalypse Now? Peter Thiel on Ancient Prophecies and Modern Tech. While many of the others are conventionally Christian, this is a bit out there, but you can't ignore the impact Thiel has had, and will have, on the USA, and it is on a classically liberal institute's website at Harvard.

I found it intriguing how he identified the 'anti-Christ' (a term we conventional Anglicans rarely use, except occasionally when talking about the dean of the cathedral) with the administrative state – the state that compels, rather than liberates, but only, of course, with your best interests at heart.

Then this morning I came across this interview between one of the heroes, to me anyway, of the Covid disaster, Dr John Campbell, who is almost too conventionally Christian, and Russell Brand, who is a kind of psychedelic convert.

We even have Richard Dawkins, one of the four horsemen of the New Atheism, walking back his comments about being a 'cultural Christian' at the same time hoping we don't lose all our churches and cathedrals.

I'm kind of surprised it has taken these people so long to come around. For around 20 years from my early twenties to my early forties I said I was an atheist, but I remained a cultural Christian. Faced with a moral dilemma I would more often than not ask myself what Jesus would have done.

While I didn't want my children to grow up as 'anything', I knew that wasn't a choice – you have to grow up something – but I didn't want them to grow-up as atheists; I wanted them to make that decision, if they made it, for themselves. How could it be a decision if they just grew up atheist, and without the understanding of belief how could they know what it was they were choosing? They would be cultural orphans making decisions without any understanding of their own cultural DNA.

And how could I inculcate the understandings, the virtues, and the habits of our Western society, if they did not have an emotional and imaginative connection to them, and how would that happen if they were unchurched?

So they went to church as I had done. Which meant I had to go to church too (which wasn't as difficult as it sounds because I got the gig playing the organ wherever we went, although people wondered why I never took communion).

And then one day I realised that when you translate 'Israel' into English it means 'to struggle with God', and then it became okay to take communion again, and put all that atheism behind me, because faith isn't a matter of blind acceptance after all.

In the early 20th Century, the Enlightenment finds itself on the horns of a dilemma. Without a uniting story the project will founder, but it seems that despite the libraries being full of books that try to find that story, no one has come up with a better one than the one begun in Bethlehem a bit over 2,000 years ago.

Particularly, the passage where the outside world, in the form of the Magi, the Kings from the East, turn up and recognise the deity in the baby in the manger.

Theologically this is an epochal moment because it signifies the change in God's original promise which was to the Jews – you will be my people and I will be your God. This is the moment when the God of the Jews becomes the God for everyone.

Yet that is a magical and emotional story, and the Enlightenment is not about magic or emotion, nor is it about the theological intricacies of the covenants between deities and peoples.

And now we have modern Magi – Peterson, Ferguson, Ali, Thiel, Campbell, Brand, and many more – metaphorically reenacting the event.

Why? Because Ferguson's 'vibe' is about the reassertion of values and social structures which might have fed the Enlightenment and classical liberalism, but which are essentially Christian.

The modern Magi have come to realise that there is only one way to incorporate those things in a durable way. It's through the imaginative acceptance of something higher than ourselves which justifies a belief in an absolute 'truth' rather than the subjective, anarchic and destructive 'my truth'.

That understanding has brought them back to church. Not all in the same way, and some as functional Christians (as I might describe myself) and some on a much more mystical basis.

It's worth pondering over what's left of the holidays just how that translates to all of us, and how it might unfold. Maybe it just means putting Christ back into Christmas next year, and maybe it's much more.

Is there a better story, or do we have it already?

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and Happy Epiphany,