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AR 26:31 - WOKENESS - "need to go through prison ... to understand?"
In this issue:
SECULARISM - a "formerly powerful" Roman Catholic Church, now "en mutation"
WOKENESS - "Social Justice is America's unofficial state religion"
+ "our present, and future, soft totalitarianism"
+ "Woke corporations?"
Apologia Report 26:31 (1,536)
August 4, 2021
SECULARISM
Quebec is unique in regard to its secularism. "In 1960, adherence to church positions made cremation close to unthinkable; today, Quebec's cremation rate is around 60 percent. ...
"In 2019, a controversial new law prohibited public employees from wearing or displaying the symbols of any religion. ...
"In about a generation, one of the world's most religious societies became one of the least." This *progression* is noted by Philip Jenkins in Christian Century (May 5, 2021), where he opens: "Americans don't have to look as far away as Europe for an example of how quickly secularization can come. ...
"This is not to suggest any direct analogies with the present US situation, but rather to stress how quickly an impregnable fortress can crumble.
"Quebec in the 1950s was one of the world's most religiously active societies, with a powerful Roman Catholic Church that was regarded as reactionary even by the standards of the time. ... The Catholic Church utterly dominated large areas of everyday life through its role in health care, education, and social welfare. Weekly mass attendance rates reportedly reached a staggering 90 percent. ...
"Quebecois French is one of the rare Western languages in which religious swear words carry far more weight than sexual epithets....
"Starting in 1960, Quebec experienced a general cultural and political transformation. ...
"Between 1986 and 2011, the proportion of Quebec's population attending church monthly fell from 48 to 17 percent. The weekly attendance rate today is around 4 percent, low even by European standards. ...
"[F]ormer churches [awaiting] reassignment are described by the creepy phrase en mutation." <www.bit.ly/3is9wtS>
… and yet: according to its publishers, a new book - The Mystical Geography of Quebec: Catholic Schisms and New Religious Movements - argues that "Quebec provides a favorable 'ecology' for alternative spirituality," and explores the influences contributing to it: "the rapid decline of the Catholic Church after Vatican II; the 'Quiet Revolution,' a utopian faith in Science; the 1975 Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms; and an open immigration that welcomes diverse faiths." [1]
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WOKENESS
David Azerrad's subtitle, "Social Justice is America's unofficial state religion," introduces his review of Power and Purity: The Unholy Marriage That Spawned America's Social Justice Warriors, by Mark Mitchell (professor of political science, Patrick Henry College) [2].
Mitchell sees in social justice "a toxic combination of the Nietzschean will to power and Puritan moralism.... 'In this desiccated Christianity without Christ, no amount of blood is adequate.... 'The stain of guilt is never removed.' America's original sin of slavery is inexpiable. ...
"Ultimately, the woke mindset combines pathetic insecurity - the gnawing feeling that these cooked-up identities are nonsensical and that certain ways of life are shameful - with an authoritarian urge to silence dissent. ...
"[T]he woke mindset is not actually about choice: it is about compliance and control. The woke rallying cry 'I can be whoever or whatever I want to be' is tacitly subject to serious qualification. ...
"Social justice is fundamentally about punishing the guilty. Its driving animus is hatred of the evil oppressor groups. ...
"[T]hey arrogate to themselves the authority to mete out punishment upon those who thwart the ideals of equality and tolerance or who violate the rights of approved victims.
"Mitchell's fundamental claim is that we are dealing with fanatics who ultimately have no basis for their fanaticism. He believes that 'the moral demands of the social justice warriors are undermined by their metaphysical skepticism.' ...
"The moral philosopher Richard Rorty preached solidarity for the marginalized while conceding that his reasons for doing so were arbitrary. Ta-Nehisi Coates, the last great apostle of social justice, is also a nihilist. ...
"Nietzsche - the great psychologist of guilt - did not anticipate this phenomenon." Surprise: instead he "focused on Western self-hatred." Azerrad concludes that "perhaps white guilt is another instance of progressives hating the Church, but loving its poison. ...
"'The man of 'modern ideas,' Nietzsche observed ... is immeasurably dissatisfied with himself: that is certain. ... And so pity has become 'the only religion preached now.' ...
"The cult of pity is alive and well today in the West, however selectively it may be applied (poor whites are left to die of despair). ... Sure, they feel bad when they think about what America did and continues to do to black people. Sure, they mouth the slogans and put up the lawn signs. But their conscience is not tormented by a crushing sense of guilt. They sleep well at night in their gated communities.
"Our progressive elites also do not hate themselves (however much they should). ...
"There are no known examples of any white liberal giving up a tenured professorship or syndicated column so that the vacancy may be filled by a member of an oppressed, under-represented minority group. Though tormented by complicity in the oppression of victims, white liberals reliably devise penances that will be performed by other people.
"The louder they denounce their country and their countrymen, the louder they affirm their innocence." Claremont Review of Books, Spring 2021, <www.bit.ly/2V0iAOH>
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In "The Truth Option: How to identify and resist our present, and future, soft totalitarianism," Robert Royal (President, Faith & Reason Institute <frinstitute.org>) reviews Rod Dreher's latest, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents [3]. Dreher knows what we're up against: "Social media, the internet in general, and the restless social activism they foster - to say nothing of surveillance technologies - reach deep into society in ways older totalitarians only dreamt of. And this new threat has arisen primarily in dominant cultural institutions such as the university and the media, reinforced by a progressivist convergence with the capitalist corporate world."
Dreher "believes that many who lived under Communism in the last century have a sharp sense of what's beginning to emerge in the West. Some who have moved to America tell him they're 'angry' at what's happening here and believe we're 'hopelessly naïve.'"
Apparently, one of Dreher's hoped-for responses is "A religious revival sophisticated enough to deal with our technological, intellectual, and cultural challenges...." Unfortunately, "many religious groups have joined the very forces that will, sooner rather than later, render them impotent."
The looming question is "how many will need to go through prison, like [Aleksandr] Solzhenitsyn, to understand the nature of the new totalitarianism and come out on the other side unafraid of what tyranny and lies can do to us? ...
"Dreher’s examples from Eastern Europe are truly frightening - and inspiring. ... Soft totalitarianism, however ... produces devastation all the same. We can only hope it also produces sufficient numbers of what Czech philosopher and dissident Jan Patočka called 'the solidarity of the shattered.' ...
"Dreher follows Hannah Arendt in distinguishing between dictatorship (or tyranny), which is common in history and limited in scope, and totalitarianism, which is less common and limitless in its aims. ...
"The old markers of identity - family, religion, nation - have given way to the unholy trinity of identity politics - race, class, and gender." In response, Royal wonders: "Will we understand in time to aid 'rootless people who may in time see through the false harbors offered by identity politics and react by returning to something like sanity?'" Claremont Review of Books, Spring 2021, pp39-40), <www.bit.ly/3hVIFHL>
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"Woke corporations? Unlike today’s Republican party, Delta and Coca-Cola are responsive to public opinion" by the editors of Christian Century (Apr 5 '21) -- complains that "In 2015–16, political groups associated with corporations contributed twice as much to Republicans as they did to Democrats at the federal level. ...
"Attributing wokeness or outrage to a corporation may fuel the culture wars, but it doesn’t accurately describe how the corporate sector functions. ... Corporations are swayed by culture-war language to the extent that the public - that is, their real and potential stakeholders - asks them to be. In this limited sense, corporate behavior is essentially democratic. ...
"According to a recent Gallup poll, 49 percent of Americans align themselves with the Democratic Party and 40 percent with the Republicans. This gap, the largest since 2012, is not lost on corporations. Nor is the January poll in which 67 percent of respondents (including a majority of Republicans) supported HR 1, the federal electoral reform legislation that, among other things, would override state laws that disenfranchise people."
The editors conclude that "when democracy is threatened by a deliberate stifling of the majority of voices, those voices will find other ways to be heard." <www.bit.ly/3rsMuaI>
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SOURCES: Monographs
1 - The Mystical Geography of Quebec: Catholic Schisms and New Religious Movements, Susan J. Palmer, Martin Geoffroy, and Paul L. Gareau, eds. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, paperback, 290 pages)<bit.ly/3inT4fI>
2 - Power and Purity: The Unholy Marriage That Spawned America's Social Justice Warriors, by Mark Mitchell (Regnery, 2020, hardcover, 256 pages) <www.bit.ly/3eJQy0V>
3 - Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents, by Rod Dreher (Penguin, 2020, hardcover, 256 pages) <www.bit.ly/3bUn5Ax>
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