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AR 30:37 - WOKEISM: "inclusion that demands dishonesty"
In this issue:
PSYCHEDELICS - "the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God"
RELIGIOUS RELATIVISM - "a 'new paradigm' in moral theology"
WOKEISM - "the harmful impact of young people having to lie about who they are"
Apologia Report 30:37 (1,726)
October 17, 2025
PSYCHEDELICS
"The Coming Psychedelic Moment" by Phil Cotnoir (Mere Orthodoxy, (Aug 29 '25) -- a brief history of hallucinogenic drug use followed by notice of the rise of mental health problems. Cotnoir concludes that "for all kinds of reasons, the inner life of Americans - and especially those under 35 - is a mess. ... And many, it turns out, are increasingly turning to hallucinogenic drugs. ...
"Surveys indicate a rise in general psychedelic use.... While the numbers may not be huge, the trend is clearly moving only one way and, more importantly, is accelerating. ... My contention in this article is that these two trends - the rise in mental health issues and the rise in psychedelic use - are even now starting to collide. In fact, one study claims that 65% of Americans with mental health conditions 'want access to psychedelics.' The question is: what happens when they get that access? ...
"To borrow from the insights of Charles Taylor, if modernity produced isolated, buffered selves that were in some way insulated from the supernatural, then the re-paganizing and re-enchanting era we are entering now is producing newly porous ones. ... While Christians at least have categories for answering those questions, the spiritual-but-not-religious crowd has only a spiritual openness and an allergy to organized religion. This leaves them primed for a host of New Age beliefs that dovetail nicely with the use of psychedelics."
Cotnoir notes that "the default Christian opposition to mind-altering substances ... is rooted in the New Testament's exhortations to sober-mindedness and the injunction against pharmakia, which certainly includes any desire for spiritual illumination or contact through use of drugs. We do well to remember that the Bible forbids it not because it doesn't work but because it does. ... For every lab coat-wearing researcher writing dryly about the mental health benefits of the chemically-enabled neuroplasticity associated with psychedelics, assuring everyone that there is nothing 'spiritual' about any of this, there are a dozen shamans and New Agers incensed at this denial of their unbroken ancient tradition of communing with their gods. ...
"The first danger is all too human, without a whiff of the supernatural about it. ...
"Psychedelics are already a billion-dollar industry, and growing exponentially. Expect to see major branding efforts touting these therapies, with a slick new treatment center opening near you. ...
"The second danger is the prototypical bad trip...." Where "it is shrugged off as the wisdom of the drug, the entities, and the process.
"Still others are afflicted by a little-known side-effect called Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder (HPPD), which is listed in the DSM-5 and can involve permanent visual hallucinations and distortions, audio hallucinations, and more. There is no known cure.
"The last danger is spiritual deception.
"'Some element of danger is unavoidable,' wrote Ross Douthat in an excellent piece on the subject. <www.archive.today/8df76> ...
"My contention is that such warnings are falling on deaf ears for the most part. The Millennials and Gen Zs who represent those with the most mental turmoil are also the ones most cut off from the traditional wisdom that Douthat eloquently summarizes in his article.
"As our culture recedes from the high-water mark of atheism and naturalistic materialism that occurred around 2010, the pent-up waters of the supernatural will continue rushing in. ...
"On his deathbed, psychedelics enthusiast Aldous Huxley asked for an injection of LSD and said, 'It is never enough. Never enough. Never enough of beauty. Never enough of love. Never enough of life.' ... As we in the West enter a new phase of widespread psychedelic and spiritual experimentation, we might borrow Lewis' words and say that it is sure to be just one more chapter in 'the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.'" <www.tinyurl.com/2t2677ap> (registration required)
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RELIGIOUS RELATIVISM
"On the Urgent Need to Recognize and Reject Religious Relativism" by Larry Chapp (Catholic World Report, Sep 10 '25) -- sees religious relativism as today's "pervasive fog."
Chapp's first point concerns "Christian particularity vs. modern particularism [because] it gets to the heart of the problem. To wit, the notion that adherence to a particular religious tradition as true represents a 'hemming in' of our religious consciousness. ...
"A baker who will not bake a cake for a 'gay wedding', or The Little Sisters of the Poor who will not put contraceptives and abortifacients in their health plans, or, as in the UK recently, those who even make jokes on social media about protected classes such as cross-dressers, will all find themselves before a magistrate."
Chapp isolates "The soft totalitarianism of the new religion" and labels it as "a not-so-hidden soft totalitarianism that is swiftly moving into 'harder' versions with devastating real-life consequences for anyone who dares to openly resist it. What counts as 'public' resistance has been expanded to include even those who, for example, will just stand outside of an abortion clinic in the UK with heads silently bowed in prayer. ...
"The emphasis on a vague and undefined notion of a universally generic sense of 'religious experience' rarely rises above the level of the purely immanent."
It extols the "freedom of indifference to any particular moral good; it is also then viewed as a mere 'freedom from' any external constraints, morally speaking. This then allows the new religion of endless tolerance to claim the high ground as the great defender of 'freedom' against the awful theocratic oppressors.
"In this view, 'compassion' has come to mean the lifting of moral constraints in the name of baptizing all of our choices as inherently 'good,' with the only caveat being that those choices cannot harm others in any way. But the immanentism of the new religion would also say that compassion would never include invoking moral principles grounded in transcendence and the natural law 'against' the actions of anyone in the privileged classes of the historically oppressed. Why? Because this would represent an offensive provocation to their 'freedom'. ...
"The new religious relativism, with its soft totalitarianism and emphasis upon purely immanent material goals, is the very spirit of anti-Christ. It is a new 'religion of humanity' that is actually deeply inhuman. Described by authors as varied as Vladimir Solovyov, C. S. Lewis, Robert Hugh Benson, and, in our time, the philosopher Daniel Mahoney, it represents nothing short of a direct repudiation of the Christian view of the human person as made in the image of God and whose purpose it is to seek that God. ...
"We hear talk in the Vatican and in various conferences about the need for a 'new paradigm' in moral theology that focuses on 'complex concrete circumstances' that burden 'average people' with moral commandments that seem too heavy for their attenuated freedom to bear. And so the Church must intervene to relieve people of this burden of their freedom and to tell them that 'all are welcome' without the need for conversion and at least an attempt at repentance.
"The T-shirt worn by an individual inside St. Peter's Basilica the other day at the LGBTQ Jubilee event said it all better than my words here could: '[DAMN] the rules.'" <www.tinyurl.com/38r988cy>
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WOKEISM
"Donald Trump didn't start this quiet war on woke: Like his Republican Party takeover or social media use, the president's attack on universities simply tapped into a growing mood" by Justin Webb (The Times, Aug 28 '25) -- "Last Christmas, almost unnoticed by a world transfixed by the second coming of Donald Trump, the renowned Harvard academic Steven Pinker resigned from an organisation he had supported for 20 years.
"Pinker was honorary president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation - the US equivalent of the National Secular Society. It had, he said, lost its way: 'the Foundation is no longer a defender of freedom from religion but the imposer of a new religion, complete with dogma, blasphemy, and heretics'. It had 'turned its back on reason'. He was referring to a row about trans rights, or more specifically the rights of people to believe that biological sex is real and immutable. ...
"The forcing out of Pinker will have seemed to most supporters of the Freedom From Religion Foundation like a necessary piece of historical progress. But it is becoming increasingly obvious that they may have misread the times: just as unipolarity seemed inevitable in 1998, so the dominance of a monoculture seemed assured in the post-Trump, Biden-Harris era. ...
"A study released this month by the psychologists Forest Romm and Kevin Waldman suggests that a majority of American students are faking their wokeness. More than 1,400 students at two of the top universities in the US - Northwestern and Michigan - were asked whether they ever pretended to hold more progressive views than they truly endorsed to succeed professionally or socially: 88 per cent said they did. More than 80 per cent said they had submitted coursework that misrepresented their views in order to align with professors.
"In the light of the debate begun in these pages recently about academic failings in British universities, the findings seem highly relevant. But the news from the US is that the students themselves are revealing a greater willingness to complain in private about the situation in which they find themselves. The authors tell us: 'When given permission to speak freely, many described the experience of participating in our survey not as liberating, but as clarifying. They weren't escaping responsibility - they were reclaiming it. For students trained to perform, the act of telling the truth felt radical.'
"There is a growing body of academic work that concerns itself with the harmful impact of young people having to lie about who they are. As the authors put it, 'authenticity, once considered a psychological good, has become a social liability. Universities often justify these dynamics in the name of inclusion. But inclusion that demands dishonesty is not ensuring psychological safety - it is sanctioning self-abandonment.'" <www.tinyurl.com/4ksfzbej>
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