The Emergence of a New Religion And the Looming Risk of Another Dark Age

When the Roman emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in 312 AD, he set in motion a trajectory of events that would shape the development of the Western world for almost a thousand years. With the fusion of church and state on a scale that had not been seen before, a relatively minor cult became what remains to this day one of the world’s most populous religions.

The endorsement of Christianity as the empire’s creed transformed the previously decentralized religion into a powerful centralized institution as the Christian Church adopted the infrastructure of the Roman bureaucracy. This transformation began when Constantine convened the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, where the Nicene Creed was enacted as the official statement of Christian doctrine. Prior to the Council, there was no central authority that dictated what the faithful should believe. The Nicene Creed formalized one system of belief that was promoted by the emperor. Thus, any dissent was not only heresy but treason as well.

Constantine used the fusion of a centralized church and state to bolster a sense of unity across the Western world. In the immediate wake of the Nicene Council, the Christian emperor carried the identical power of God as he ruled the empire. Although Rome would fall in 476 AD, the influence of the centralized church would continue and evolve throughout the medieval period and beyond as the Pope emerged as the leader of the Christian Church with significant political power.

Over the next several centuries, the fusion of church and state endured as the medieval monarchies continued to endorse Christianity as the official religion of the Western world. The evolution of this fusion resulted in one of the most draconian periods in human civilization as people were subjected to the brutality of the Crusades and the Inquisition. With the elite having the power to penalize people for what they think, the medieval world became tyrannical and corrupt. Accordingly, those who refused to subscribe to the official religion were deemed heretics, often had their property confiscated, and were sometimes imprisoned, or even executed.

Although Constantine embraced Christianity as a strategy for enhancing the arc of the accomplishments of the Roman Empire, the legacy of the thousand-year fusion of church and state is best remembered for ushering in the Dark Age when many of the achievements of the empire, such as its engineering prowess and intellectual culture, were lost or forgotten. When bureaucracies attempt to control the thinking as well as the behavior of people, dissent is punished, learning is squelched, and innovation is impossible. That’s why civilization devolved during the Dark Age.

However, humans are resilient, and although it may take time, the human spirit can only be squelched for so long. Eventually, the need to think freely, learn, and innovate reasserts itself because it’s the only way that civilizations can advance. That’s what happened when the convergence of the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, and the Industrial Revolution ended the longest and broadest fusion of church and state in the history of human civilization. This convergence would generate the rapid growth of the Protestant Reformation, which challenged the authority of the Papal hierarchy and advanced science as an alternative to faith to explain how the world works. The Renaissance enabled the emergence of democracies as viable forms of self-governance and spawned the economic philosophy of free market capitalism. The bottom-up attributes of independent markets would raise more people out of poverty than any other economic system, setting in motion a sustained period of innovation that began with the Industrial Revolution and lasts to this day with our current Digital Revolution. All of this happened because of the wide acceptance of the core principle of Enlightenment philosophy that the most fundamental right of people in a society is the right to think freely. The socialization of this core principle is what ended the fusion of church and state in the Western world.

A New Religion

The continuation of the progress we have made over the past few centuries, however, could be in jeopardy because of a significant social trend that appears to be hidden in plain sight: the emergence of a new religion. This new religion is the fastest growing creed in the Western world, and like Christianity before it, this new faith is in the early stages of fusing with the state. If this fusion becomes complete, the Western world could once again devolve into a dark age where people are stripped of the right to think freely. This new religion is Wokeism.

Because it has been fourteen hundred years since the arrival of the last world religion, Islam, none of us are familiar with what it looks like when a new creed emerges. Although we may think of Wokeism as a political philosophy, its worldview extends far beyond the role of government in our lives. Wokeism contains all the core elements of a religious creed. It is a system of beliefs about the nature of the world, virtue, sin, and the meaning of life. It provides a sense of community that is reinforced through social practices and rituals. And its teachings and beliefs are enshrined in sacred texts that serve as the foundation for a set of ethical principles.

Wokeism’s system of beliefs has five major articles of faith: Apocalyptic Pantheism, Pseudoscientific Epistemology, Collectivist Morality, Intersectional Predestination, and Gender Transubstantiation. These articles form the foundation of the new religion and shape the way its followers perceive and interact with the world.

Apocalyptic Pantheism

The first article of faith provides the new religion with its theological bearings and its core purpose. Wokeism’s followers believe the earth and nature are divine and should be treated as sacred. Wokeism represents a return to pantheism in its rejection of a singular personal god and its reverence for Mother Earth. Like other religions, Wokeism has a redemption narrative, only it is not a god who needs to save humans, but rather humans who need to save the planet. Accordingly, Mother Earth embodies innate goodness, and humans are a continual threat to the pristine natural order.

An important part of this first article of faith is a strongly held belief in a looming apocalypse, which envisions that fossil fuels will lead to the destruction of the planet sometime within our lifetimes, and possibly as early as the next decade. This variation of Armageddon claims we will experience monster storms the world has never seen before, causing the seas to rise and swallowing whole cities. The climate prophets assert that global warming will induce massive droughts as extreme heat parches the land and transforms the planet into a barren wasteland.

In this version of pantheism, should the idealized vision of the planet come in conflict with the needs of its human inhabitants, it is the humans who must sacrifice, or in some instances, be sacrificed. For example, scientists who don’t subscribe to the mainstream narrative point out that the perpetuation of a singular focus on reducing CO2 emissions is likely to cast a least a billion people into severe poverty because they will be denied the socioeconomic benefits of industrialization. This means, in addition to a return to pantheism, there will be a return to a form of religious human sacrifice, as increased poverty leads to the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of millions of people.

However, this drastic human sacrifice is unnecessary because Wokeism’s apocalyptic vision is more likely fantasy than reality. That’s because the mainstream narrative focuses only on the costs of fossil fuels and industrialization, ignoring the benefits. For example, while highlighting that global warming is likely to increase the number of people who may die from episodes of extreme heat, the apocalyptic narrative fails to call attention to the decrease in the number of people who perish from extreme cold, which is quite significant because, historically, far more people die from extreme cold than extreme heat. An important benefit of industrialization is that fossil fuel based heating has dramatically reduced the number of winter deaths. This explains why, as Alex Epstein describes in his book Fossil Future, the number of climate-related deaths over the last century has actually plummeted by an amazing 98 percent.

This is not to deny that the increasing CO2 is not a problem we need to solve. Global warming is real, and we need to discover innovative solutions that are based on science rather than sorcery. However, we don’t need to use fear by insisting the sky is falling to mobilize our resources to discover new solutions. Exaggerated faith-based extrapolations of  scientific data run through data models based on worst case assumptions are not useful, as we learned with the 1972 report, The Limits to Growth. This apocalyptic treatise, produced by the Club of Rome, used extrapolated data models to predict that gold would be depleted by 1979 and essential resources such as aluminum, copper, mercury, natural gas, oil, silver, tin, and zinc would run out by 2004. Needless to say, the apocalyptic modeling got it wildly wrong. And it is likely that the latest episode of apocalyptic modeling will be just as wrong.

Pseudoscientific Epistemology

The second article of faith, Pseudoscientific Epistemology, is a clever attempt to transform the relationship between faith and science. One of the most important attributes of the Enlightenment was the development and the advancement of science as an alternative to faith in understanding truth and reality. Before the Enlightenment, religious beliefs and myths were the primary sources for explaining how the universe worked. While there were significant technological developments, such as the Roman aqueducts and Greek architecture, the underlying science that made these innovations possible did not challenge faith-based narratives because science was viewed as a practical tool rather than an epistemological framework that might explain how the world worked.

Epistemology is the study of how humans know what they know. The discipline recognizes that knowledge encompasses more than any individual or group of individuals can ever comprehend. Accordingly, advances in knowledge are a dialectic between what we know and what we don’t know. Before the Enlightenment, this dialectic was resolved by fashioning myths to transform unknowns into knowns, and once these myths expanded into common knowledge, the ensuing understanding was considered both certain and unassailable.

The Enlightenment transformed epistemology by shifting the basis for the resolution of the knowledge dialectic from mythology to inquiry. Whereas mythology favors certainty and is averse to questions, inquiry encourages questions and is more comfortable with uncertainty because it accepts that no matter how much we know, human knowledge is always limited. This epistemological shift changed the nature of science from practical applications of math to a methodology for understanding how the universe worked. As the scientific method became the standard for determining how humans know what they know, it transformed the relationship between narratives and facts. In faith-based epistemology, narratives shape facts. In science-based epistemology, facts shape narratives.

With the emergence of Wokeism, we are witnessing another epistemological shift—one that is arguably a regression rather than an advancement of our understanding of reality. What appears to be a rapid development over the past few years has actually been simmering for several decades through the steady capture of the universities in the Western world by the Woke religion. The best evidence of this capture is the devolution of science into a faith-based discipline that produces quantitative analyses and models to advance pre-determined narratives.

An example is the selective research and modeling that anticipates a looming climate apocalypse, as described above in the discussion of Environmental Pantheism. Another example is the corrupt studies produced by established institutions that claimed to demonstrate that Ivermectin was ineffective in treating Covid. The innovative medical professionals who discovered the effectiveness of this Nobel-winning drug found there were two conditions that were essential: 1) Ivermectin must be administered in the first 72 hours of the onset of symptoms and 2) the dosage must be proportional to weight at all weight levels. The establishment study ignored these two conditions by administering the drug to patients beyond the three-day threshold and capping the dosage at 150 pounds, regardless of the weight of the patient. Because the test was designed to show that Ivermectin was ineffective, it was not surprising that this was the result of the study. This is a clear example of pseudoscience where faith shapes what is often referred to as “the science” and narratives shape facts. A clear indication of the rise of pseudoscientific epistemology is the formidable attempts by scientific crusaders on missions to extinguish so-called misinformation by squelching inquiry and dissent.

However, as zealous as these crusaders may be, they are nevertheless misguided scientists, if they are scientists at all. True science invites inquiry, respects differing opinions, and welcomes debate. Pseudoscience, on the other hand, insists upon orthodoxy, censors dissenters, and demonizes those who think differently. The evidence of the Woke capture of science is pervasive. How many supposedly scientific journals will publish well researched compelling articles that challenge the climate change narrative? How many universities will sponsor a debate between two respected scientists with differing views on whether or not biological males who identify as women should participate in women’s sports? How many highly credentialed medical professionals were censored by scientific government agencies because they did not support the government’s assertions during Covid? The failure to promote debate—especially among highly intelligent and highly educated professionals—and the active campaign by scientific institutions to censor these dissenters are clear evidence that the new religion of Wokeism is attempting to replace true science with pseudoscientific myths by favoring narratives over facts.

Collectivist Morality

The next article, Collectivist Morality, addresses a fundamental tension that exists in every society and every religion: the moral balance between the rights and responsibilities of the group and the individual. Wokeism challenges the fundamental understanding of Enlightenment philosophy regarding the relationship between the community and its members.  Unlike Enlightenment values that hold the protection of inalienable individual rights as the cornerstone for building a functioning society, Wokeism believes that communal rights are inalienable and that individuals derive their rights from the community.

Thus, the Woke faithful believe that private ownership of property is a moral hazard that engenders gross inequalities in the distribution of resources and wealth among the people in a society. Because we are all inhabitants of Mother Earth, Wokeism sees the world as one indivisible community where we share the planet’s resources in common. When the world is one, national boundaries, land ownership, patent claims, and even parental rights are considered violations of the natural order. Being one with the pantheistic divine means that we are all connected to Mother Earth, and the fulfillment of our needs, including the needs of our children, is the responsibility of the global community. 

According to the new religion, personal fulfillment is not achieved through self-actualization, the accomplishment of an individual mission, or the accumulation of wealth, but rather by aligning one’s identity with the will of the community, as expressed by elite authorities. Thus, it is the community, and not the individual, that is entitled to ownership rights. Accordingly, an oft quoted Woke aspiration is, “You will own nothing, and you will be happy.”

In his early 1900’s treatise, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the sociologist Max Weber postulated that, without the Protestant Reformation—which was heavily influenced by the principles and the values of the Enlightenment—capitalism might not have emerged as the dominant economic system of the Western world. The Reformation recognized the importance of individual freedom and responsibility as the foundation for building solid communities, whether they be economic or religious. The Reformation emphasized the importance of good works and personal moral behavior for the attainment of salvation. This was a challenge to the prevailing guidance of the Catholic Church at the time, which assured salvation to those who fully participated in the Catholic community and submitted to clerical authority.

The Protestant value of good works was extended to the world of work by encouraging individuals to view entrepreneurial activity as adding to the common good. No longer did individuals need to wait for the afterlife to experience God’s blessings because entrepreneurs could be rewarded with wealth in this life for the fruits of their good work. In defining the healthy relationship between individuals and community, the Protestant ethic supported the notion that it is the free practice of individual morality that builds good communities rather than the coercive exercise of collectivist morality that makes for good individuals.

We find ourselves today in a circumstance where a new collectivist moral movement could undo all the social progress that emanated from the Enlightenment. We are already experiencing the blurring of the lines between religion and the state as government agencies propagate the Woke DEI catechism and its collectivist morality in the workplace. In the United States in particular, if the First Amendment—which  has already been breached by a government censorship campaign against those who question Woke beliefs—becomes fully breached with the practical establishment of a state religion, the Constitution could become empty words as this new religious movement ushers in its authoritarian vision of a one-world Woke community.

Intersectional Predestination

The fourth article of faith, Intersectional Predestination, holds that individuals are essentially powerless to shape their destinies. Intersectional is a term that was coined by Kimberle Crenshaw in an article published in 1989, "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Anti-discrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics." Intersectionality is a framework for understanding how different forms of social inequality can operate together and intensify each other. Crenshaw sees intersectionality as a form of the principle that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Thus, if a person is a member of two or more different minorities based on race, gender, class, sexuality, or immigration status, the experience of discrimination is likely to be more intense than the simple sum of the parts.

However, in absorbing intersectionality as a precept of the new religion, Wokeism moves beyond Crenshaw’s original concept by combining it with the Puritan notion of predestination, a philosophical concept that maintains the ultimate destiny or fate of an individual is predetermined by a higher power or divine force. Accordingly, Intersectional Predestination asserts that social categories are the determinants of social privilege and social oppression, and that individual human actions and actual living circumstances do not affect this ultimate outcome. Because individual intentions and actions are inconsequential, whether one is an oppressor or the oppressed is an inherited characteristic that is passed from one generation to another. Thus, Wokeism, like Christianity, has a concept of original sin. However, unlike Christianity—which believes all persons are born with and can be absolved from original sin through baptism—Wokeism holds that only one particular race inherits original sin and that nothing can be done to expunge this transgression. Thus, those born into this sinful race must engage in a form of lifelong penance to continue to atone but never be forgiven for their natal sin.

Intersectional Predestination is also the foundation for another aspect that is common across various religions: the determination of who are the chosen or elite and who are the outsiders. Thus, there are Christians and heathens, Jews and gentiles, and Muslims and infidels. Although the language of  Wokeism is still developing and clear terms have not yet been established, at this point it seems the chosen include people of color and transgender individuals. Accordingly, there is a sense of sacredness around the needs and the rights of these individuals that must be honored, respected, and never questioned. On the other hand, the outsiders include the white race, especially white males, as well as Asians who are considered by many to be “white-adjacent.”  

Similar to other religions, the plight of the chosen is often a story of how an oppressed people broke free from their oppressors by embracing new religious beliefs and creating a new world order.  Its disciples believe that outsiders can attain salvation, as well as meaning and purpose in life, by acknowledging the victimhood and suffering of the chosen, atoning for the new version of original sin, and recognizing that the chosen have been blessed by a divine-like force. Unfortunately, salvation stories are often embedded with a thread of prejudice woven into the fabric of the underlying narrative that favors the designated chosen. Wokeism’s salvation story is no different.

Finally, in its zeal to indoctrinate people into the beliefs of Intersectional Predestination, Wokeism has developed its own catechism in the form of DEI training programs. These programs have become fixtures in many academic, corporate, and governmental organizations and are a principal activity for spreading the new religion. In some instances, these programs require a written profession of faith and a commitment to become a proactive apostle of this doctrine as a condition of employment. This is particularly troubling in governmental organizations because it is a clear violation of the democratic principle of the separation of religion and state.

Gender Transubstantiation

The final article of faith is Gender Transubstantiation, the belief that the proclamation of the words, “I am a woman,” can transform a man into a woman and the pronouncement “I am a man,” changes a woman into a man. This belief is similar to the doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church about the nature of the Eucharist. Catholic dogma prescribes that the recitation of liturgical words during the Mass actually changes bread and wine into the substance of Christ’s body and blood. The outward appearances of bread and wine that remain are considered accidental and not substantive. In other words, reality has actually been transformed. While other Christian religions may consider the Eucharist to be symbolic, the Roman Catholic Church considers the doctrine of transubstantiation to be a non-negotiable belief.

Similarly, Wokeism considers Gender Transubstantiation to be non-negotiable. According to this Woke doctrine, when people declare they are not their biological sex, these declarations actually change the gender of the people and the biological characteristics that remain are accidents and not substantive. Thus, biological males who identify as transgender insist on being referred to as “she” and similar females as “he.” Failure to acknowledge this transubstantiation is considered a grievous offense whether one believes in this article of faith or not. When this offense is penalized by the government, this is another example of the violation of the separation of religion and state.

The followers of Wokeism believe that people who considered themselves transgender have the right to compete in the sports of their proclaimed gender, use restroom and locker room facilities of their identified sex, and insist that others be compelled to use their preferred pronouns, sometimes under the threat of compulsory re-education training, possible employment termination or even criminal indictment in some places. Furthermore, if the parents of transgender minors do not subscribe to this doctrine and refuse to approve transgender medical procedures, the followers of this new religion often insist the state has the authority to step in and overrule the parents. One difference between Catholics and Wokes is that, while Catholics consider the doctrine of transubstantiation non-negotiable for their faithful, Wokes hold the opinion that Gender Transubstantiation is non-negotiable for societies at large.

The Greatest Threat to Democracy

As the citizens of the United States approach the upcoming presidential election in November, there have been claims by both major political parties that the candidate of the other party is a threat to the preservation of democracy. While the danger to maintaining a constitutional republic is very real, the locus of the threat does not reside in the personalities of two flawed candidates. The true threat is whether or not the apostles of Wokeism are successful in their quest to fully integrate religion and state and, for the first time in the history of the U.S., accomplish the establishment of a state religion. If the Woke zealots are successful, they will obliterate the First Amendment by effectively eliminating freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly. Without these freedoms, the  authoritarian rule of an elite few will likely end the world’s most successful government of the people, by the people, for the people.

It is important to keep in mind that confronting the Woke threat to democracy is not a call to ban the Woke religion. The First Amendment protects the rights of the followers of this new religion to be free to practice their faith and to assemble with their fellow believers. What we do want to stop is the unconstitutional imposition of this new faith upon an entire population, which happens when the full force of the government is used to require citizens to profess their faith and allegiance to the Woke religion.  This danger is very real because the fusion of religion and state has already begun. Fortunately, at this point, it is not solidified. If we are to avoid devolving into another dark age, we must stop this fusion before it’s too late. The choice is ours—at least for now.