Home > Work > Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It QUOTES

Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It QUOTES

1 " Yet wokeness, as with all ideologies, does not start with the wonder of image-bearing. It starts with the dull stereotypes of Marxist collectivism. It breaks people down by how they look and where they’re from. It robs the human person of dignity, uniqueness, and a sense of lingering enchantment even in a world ruined by the Fall. It does not teach that we are all bound by the common bond of image-bearing, but rather that we live in fundamental alienation from one another. "

― Owen Strachan , Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

2 " It is true, though, that all beings have a common origin of existence: God’s speech. We are right to teach creation ex nihilo, “from nothing,” but we must also teach of creation in verbo, “by word. "

― Owen Strachan , Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

3 " Men still build walls of partition and division like the terrible Berlin wall, or erect invisible curtains of iron or bamboo, or construct barriers of race, colour, caste, tribe or class. Divisiveness is a constant characteristic of every community without Christ. "

― Owen Strachan , Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

4 " In this system, there is no grace and no love. There is only grievance, resentment, and condemnation. Shackelford revealed as much in her next comments: “I believe all white people are born into not being human.” She saved her toughest words for last: white people, she said, grow up “to be demons. "

― Owen Strachan , Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

5 " In Christ, we learn here, every exclusionary boundary marker falls. This is because the most significant wall dividing humanity has toppled—the covenant wall between Jew and Gentile. If this can fall, so can every other barrier between peoples of every kind. "

― Owen Strachan , Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

6 " The doctrine of human image-bearing means that we must never despise a person for their skin color, background, traits, abilities (or lack thereof), or heritage. Instead, we must treat all people with honor and dignity. Even human sinfulness (see our next section) does nothing—and I mean nothing—to change this truth. "

― Owen Strachan , Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

7 " J. Gresham Machen wrote: [W]hat the liberal theologian has retained after abandoning to the enemy one Christian doctrine after another is not Christianity at all, but a religion which is so entirely different from Christianity as to belong in a distinct category. "

― Owen Strachan , Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

8 " We understand why Cone and the previous voices gain audiences. They often put their finger on a real problem in our past or present, only to both diagnose and address that problem unbiblically. "

― Owen Strachan , Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

9 " Leaving societal matters for a moment, we ultimately know why our culture is fractured. In the simplest biblical terms, “white” skin is not our core problem. Sin is. In the biblical mind, sin does not affect and inhabit one group more than others. One group is not thus more guilty than any other group in foundational terms. We are all equally guilty in Adam, for sin is the universal problem of the human race. But not generic sin—actual sin. Sin committed by individual people—people of every tribe, tongue, nation, and background. People who have a great education or no education. People raised in a Christian home or an atheistic one. People from the left or the right. People from privilege or no privilege (socially speaking). "

― Owen Strachan , Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

10 " Nonetheless, if we relinquish the law, demonize law enforcement, and defund the police, we descend into anarchy. We create an unstable society. We wrong many who would then live without justice and who would be preyed upon by evildoers. "

― Owen Strachan , Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

11 " We do not dismiss passion over the past, then. But we cannot be ruled by it, nor by anger, as Christians. We cannot fall prey to the view that our contemporary society has failed to change in meaningful ways over the centuries. We cannot hold people guilty for the sins of past generations (more on this to come). We cannot read people in a certain light because of their skin color. We cannot automatically equate our culture’s pursuit of justice with biblical justice. "

― Owen Strachan , Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

12 " Man talks much about justice, but he knows not of what he speaks. In this passage and others, justice is not a means of redistributing privilege (per the narratives of the underprivileged). Biblical justice is retributive in nature, recompensing people for their deeds. "

― Owen Strachan , Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

13 " The cross of Christ gives us God’s ultimate resolution of the justice-mercy conundrum. The same cross satisfies divine justice and secures divine mercy. This shows us that justice is retributive, not distributive, even as it reveals that the satisfaction of justice enables the experience of mercy. God does not set aside His justice in the death of His Son; He meets the full terms of His holy nature through the cross. "

― Owen Strachan , Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

14 " Proposals for reparations, we note here, actually yield no justice at all in the end, for the people who suffered in past days see no satisfaction from them, and people living today must thus chip in to pay for crimes they did not commit. Here we see that much of what is called “justice” today is actually injustice and does not do anything to make wrongs right. "

― Owen Strachan , Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

15 " Hill points to “the inequitable systems that perpetuate disparities.”24 It is surely possible that we may find inequities in our systems, and if we do, we should tackle them. But while we take disparities seriously, they do not in themselves prove injustices. Some “white” people are wealthy, and some are very poor; the difference between them can reduce to injustice, but it also can owe to numerous factors, none of them stemming from “white supremacy. "

― Owen Strachan , Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

16 " Our weakness is actually part of the strength of the Christian faith. We are not the point. We are not sinless, and we are not the Savior. Like every sinner, we are the ones who need the Savior—and need Him desperately. "

― Owen Strachan , Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

17 " our culture and society are falling prey to what we call “monocausality.” This means that we trace very complex realities to just one simple factor "

― Owen Strachan , Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

18 " The police are not above scrutiny; no public official is. But Scripture would have us see police as a gift from God to humanity. Fathers and mothers should train their children to honor police officers (and military members and others in similar roles). In many communities, police officers restrain wickedness and do so at tremendous personal risk. In fact, according to PragerU, a police officer is eighteen times more likely to be shot than a “black” man is.55 Our culture is shaping and promoting a narrative that is seriously flawed—and flawed in the anti-institutional form that fits wokeness more broadly. We recall here Marx’s hatred of God-ordained elements of society, and we note that it is "

― Owen Strachan , Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

19 " The police are not above scrutiny; no public official is. But Scripture would have us see police as a gift from God to humanity. Fathers and mothers should train their children to honor police officers (and military members and others in similar roles). In many communities, police officers restrain wickedness and do so at tremendous personal risk. In fact, according to PragerU, a police officer is eighteen times more likely to be shot than a “black” man is.55 Our culture is shaping and promoting a narrative that is seriously flawed—and flawed in the anti-institutional form that fits wokeness more broadly. We recall here Marx’s hatred of God-ordained elements of society, and we note that it is alive and well today. We must reject such a mindset. "

― Owen Strachan , Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

20 " In actuality, many are—but on a personal level only. There is, in general, a double-mindedness about the free market among woke leaders. On the one hand, it is seen as wicked and inherently corrupt. On the other hand, woke scholars and activists do well by it—in some cases, obscenely well. Robin DiAngelo charges fifteen thousand dollars per speaking event and has earned over two million dollars from her book White Fragility, even while castigating capitalism as a racist economic system.64 Ibram Kendi and Ta-Nehisi Coates have even higher price tags: Kendi’s speaking fee is twenty-five thousand dollars, while Coates’s fee is between thirty thousand and forty thousand dollars per event.65 Even as these leaders decry “capitalism,” they make more in a day than many Americans make in a year. "

― Owen Strachan , Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It