(01-25-2020 10:57 AM)q5sys Wrote: https://unherd.com/2020/01/modern-politi...anity-with
Quote:The self-flagellation of all the white supremacists at Hachette is yet another example of how much the Woke borrow from the Church. Identity politics has become a secular religion, and “white privilege” is one of its shibboleths. Indeed Ms Saad makes the point clearly in her book, stating that “I strongly believe that anti-racism practice and social justice work are also spiritual work.”
Quote:But the problem with identity politics as a secular religion is precisely its failure to allow for absolution. The faith that Saad espouses is utterly bleak, even cloaked as it is in words of love. It utterly fails to allow for redemption, and its most direct religious antecedent is found in Calvinist predestination.
Under this doctrine, God has predetermined whether you are damned or elect. From the second that the right sperm hit it lucky with the most fecund egg, your place in the woke hierarchy was decided. In the modern progressive world, informed by intersectional feminists, it does not matter what you say or do, the only defining factor in your state of grace is your skin, gender and sexuality.
This is a profoundly depressing outlook for three main reasons. The first is the essential nihilism in the creed. Your intent? Irrelevant. Your deeds? Likewise. The sum of your experience, desires, longings, beliefs? Your humanity itself? Nah, not relevant.
The second dispiriting message is that the problems its aims to address are insoluble. White people are racist by their nature, and inherently incapable of seeing their own racism or addressing it. Men are misogynists, by default, witting or unwitting bulwarks of the patriarchy. If they don’t believe they are individually at fault they are in denial. And if they try to say, actually, I’m not sure the patriarchy exists, they are mansplaining misogynist bastards. This is the politics of perpetual antagonism, of a kind of bleak acceptance that all relationships between different categories of human are necessarily fractious.
Quote:The third problem with Puritan wokeness is that it sinister echoes in the history of predestination. When the creed reached its zenith in the seventeenth century, the logical hole at its centre became insanely obvious. If it does not matter to God how you behave, because your salvation was pre-determined at birth, why not behave however the hell you want to?
The outpourings of radical thought in the English Civil Wars included sects who came to exactly this conclusion. The Ranters, at least by reputation, advocated a lifestyle of Dionysiac excess. If orgies and boozing, gluttony and blasphemy did not have any material impact on whether you were going to heaven or hell, then why not shag, indulge and curse the Lord as much as you want?
Quote:The Puritan response was a horrified recoil. If God has made you one of the elect, you have a responsibility to Him to behave as if you are elect. A rare few came to believe they were not elect, and tortured themselves with it. If this sounds familiar, you have probably met an apologetic white male ally of the woke.
Your quotes miss the main issue. The worst part of identity politics is not that there is no redemption for the perceived or accused oppressor, but that there is no admission of sin on the part of the aggrieved. In fact the way it is taught in seminaries through Cone's "God of the Oppressed" is that the victim is sinless.
Therein lies the fundamental error in logic and the human condition upon which both grace and redemption are built. If you consider yourself to be sinless you are delusional because none of humanity is perfect and all have character flaws or sins. It is in being forgiven that you can forgive. So accompanying this heretical attempt to establish a class system within Christianity by having the sinless and those beyond redemption, you have the ridiculous elevation of the creature to the sinless status of God, and then as a delusional prideful assumption of sinlessness a denial of the need for redemption for self. Nothing is more haughty and destructive to the core Christian faith than an unrepentant sinner who refuses to offer grace to another. It does however serve well within the Marxist dogma that necessitates and validates the murder of those you oppose.
Sadly this mantra is appealing to political zealots and idiots looking for a new justification to assume power and to consummately abuse it. Such a philosophy justifies and encourages conflict where a doctrine of grace encourages just the opposite.
But understand this, leftist secular humanists following a progressive agenda hijacked our seminaries nearly 40 years ago and the social clubs at the local churches just didn't give damn as long as they were with their buddies on Sunday. The World Council of Churches, itself a communist front organization by philosophy, endorsed Cone's book and the teaching of it in all seminaries as a form of social consciousness and any who condemned its heretical teachings were instantly labeled as white supremacists and bigots.
I witnessed one seminarian from Kansas repent of his whiteness at a chapel service at a mainline seminary and as an act of contrition permit all of the aggrieved minorities to act out their pent up hostilities towards him while he cried. It was the physical representation of the contradiction of Christ saying, "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone."
More pertinently it never addressed minority treatment of women, minority involvement in drug trade, or the history of minority involvement in the actual practice of slavery, or their ongoing atrocities with regard to this subject in Africa today.
IMO it is pure evil in that it justifies wrongdoing without having to confess one's own shortcomings and by its nature and observance turns normal relationships between people in a mixed community into a constant excuse for violence.
So, it is much deeper of a matter and at a more fundamental distinction than the critique offered in these quotes, and the root of it is not so much in the stripping of redemption from the accused, but in the narcissistic expression of self deification by those claiming the victim status, when they too are guilty of the exploitation of others. It is a belief system that denies the humanity of everyone and the divinity of God.
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[NEWS] Identity politics is Christianity without redemption
