25
" But we should be ever wary of classing people according to stereotypes. When I was a boy, American culture expended a great deal of energy to discredit such thinking and behavior. Today, however, we have witnessed the revenge of the stereotype. We learn from many that the most important part of human identity is skin color or a related identifier. We are told that we can know a great deal about people based upon these limited characteristics. This extends even to assuming that having a certain pigmentation, or being from a certain community, predetermines our way of thinking, our forms of expression, our preferences, our experiences, and our very personhood itself. "
― Owen Strachan , Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It
29
" But wokeness overturns these truths. Its fundamental anthropological categories are not the biblical ones of believer or unbeliever, but oppressor or oppressed (“anthropology” means doctrine of humanity, or what makes us human). As we have seen, wokeness renders “white” people as oppressors and people of color as the oppressed. This is true racially, but as we saw in handling intersectionality, these categories apply much more broadly today to “underprivileged” peoples of all kinds. The Marxists first used this pairing of the rich and the poor, reading the former as evil and the latter as innocent. Today, these same identifiers apply along the lines of skin color, weight, the sexes, disability, the police, and more. "
― Owen Strachan , Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It
30
" Christians know why this is so. We know that God made every person, and without slipping into a kind of therapeutic wonderment project, that God has made each of us as a little display of Himself. That’s the wonder of being made in God’s image, as we saw earlier. 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.26 This alienation as covered elsewhere is truly impossible to overcome—unless one belongs to an underprivileged group, and then one does not live in alienation with members of the group. But here again wokeness compromises biblical truth and fails to capture reality. The miracle of salvation is that people who have nothing in common end up as spiritual family members, while very often people who have massive natural overlap end up living very different lives and holding very different views. "
― Owen Strachan , Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It
35
" Though wokeness promises compassion, it bounces its check. The aforementioned stamp of guilt upon white people as racist means that wokeness produces all sorts of anger, rage, resentment, and hostility.21 Wokeness does not create peace; it creates division, terrible division. This is true in its strictly academic form; this is true in its adapted activist form. The embrace of wokeness is not an embrace of biblical Christianity and, most significantly, the Christian Gospel. The embrace of wokeness means an embrace of grievance, anger, and hostility. "
― Owen Strachan , Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It
39
" From numerous angles, wokeness encourages us to distrust the order God has created in the world He has personally made. As an ideology, it reads our society as fundamentally oppressive along racial lines, but often stops short of substantiating this claim. Furthermore, it conflates individual experience with societal structures, training people to read real wrongs done against them as necessarily part of a broader public square campaign. In addition, wokeness is fundamentally an anti-authority system, but as we have noted, it is itself deeply authoritarian. Though it speaks against “oppression,” it actually creates injustice, for it teaches us to distrust God-made order and God-given authority. Though CRT gets most of the headlines, it is in truth intersectionality that really brings the pain. People who will never read a sentence from an intersectional author nevertheless buy into and express an intersectional framework when they view our society as oppressive and read leadership in terms of power imbalances "
― Owen Strachan , Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It