Christians every year struggle to remind themselves and others of the “reason for the season,” worrying that consumerism and cheap sentimentality will crowd out baby Jesus, love, and hope at Christmastime.
There’s a greater secular threat these days that extends well beyond the Christmas or Hannukah seasons: politics.
As people fall away from religious affiliation, they don’t fall into nihilism. They take religious devotions to other causes. And in America today, the hottest religion is politics. This is true both on the Right and the Left.
If you look at what remains of the “Religious Right” these days, you can see signs of a troubling secularization. Folks who used to find their meaning in faith, a savior, and the Bible increasingly find meaning in politics, a president, and conservative media. Conservatives regularly mocked or criticized the way the Democratic base treated President Barack Obama as a messiah figure, but we now see the same thing happening with the Republican base and President Trump.
“The chosen one” and “the second coming” are terms Trump’s supporters, and Trump himself, have used to describe the president. Christian conservatives run the risk of replacing Christ with Trump, which would be a grave mistake.
The most disturbing secular religion these days, though, is on the Left. Dubbed “The Great Awokening,” modern leftist identity politics has become a full-fledged faith. The censorious intolerance on American campuses is hard to understand if you think of academia as a place to learn. It makes sense, though, if you think of college campuses as temples of woke.
They cannot tolerate blasphemy inside their temples. Allowing a conservative speaker on campus is like tolerating a Satanist sermon from a Pentecostal pulpit.
The new religion has speech codes and jargon befitting the most fundamentalist faiths. You are to declare your pronouns and never presume another’s pronouns. Jokes are not permitted on questions of identity. Any expression of opinion, taste, analysis, or fact uttered by a privileged individual must be prefaced by an apology for said privilege.
If you violate these ever-shifting speech codes, you have sinned, and there is no reconciliation or forgiveness of sins against the Church of the Woke.
Seeing wokeness as a religion clears a lot of things up. For the past decade or so, religious conservatives have fought the culture wars on the terms of religious liberty. They are asking to be allowed to live their own lives according to their faith.
The identity-politics Left laughs this off. It is waging a holy war, and conservatives are pleading for religious tolerance. The intolerance is the point. They aren’t here to preach. They are here to dominate.
If Jewish, Christian, and Muslim victims of religious prosecution in the United States were to see their enemy for what he is, their lawyers wouldn’t invoke the First Amendment’s free exercise clause. They would point to the establishment clause.
The woke Left has its religion and wants to establish it as the state religion.
And all of this trickles into the home. The idea of peaceful family Christmas and Thanksgiving is anathema if it includes tolerance of those who either love Trump, hate Trump, or tolerate him. This undermines family and community, and so it is a natural aftershock of the loss of faith.
Christmastime and the New Year are the perfect time to reverse those trends. As your family’s holidays continue, try to remember that politics is a lower good than faith, family, and community. And politics certainly aren’t the reason for the season.
[Read more: Religion and charitable giving plummet in US]
