Mr K – Our Secular Theocracy

This post is snippets of an informal conversation with Mr K, which I’m posting while on vacation. I don’t necessarily endorse any of these views, and may oppose some of them. I won’t be around to respond to comments for a couple weeks.

Puritanism was like the cutting edge of wokeism in its day

one of the mutations that happened to Puritanism was that it dropped the God meme

modern wokeism is just Protestantism without the God meme

this idea that everyone needs to be enlightened and think for themselves is the literal descendant of the Protestant doctrine of a personal god. Modern egalitarianism comes from the idea that we are all made equal as children of God. The Whig theory of history, including its modern forms such as economic progress, technological progress, and social progress, is the literal descendent of divine providence. Academia in its modern usage derives by direct descent from referring to a kind of Protestant seminary. Harvard itself was such seminary when it was founded

etc.

This is not just an analogy. You can trace all these modern concepts backwards through history, and you will see they’re continuous descendants from the English dissenters. There was no discontinuous change like when the English dissenters originally overthrew the Catholics. The English dissenters are still in power, though they’ve changed a bit – but not essentially – over time.

In reponse to: I don’t associate “everyone needs to think for themselves” with wokeism. More like “everyone needs to recognize/believe this thing, and act this way”, which seems like the opposite of a “think for yourself” approach

  everyone needs to think for themselves and arrive at the One True Faith

Now, see if you can identify the descendent of the doctrine of “salvation by faith alone”, and ask yourself if modern day progressives are any less devout than the Puritans who wanted to cancel Catholicism for being behind the times.

if you look at the woke opposition to basically cult-like living

and if you look at those aspects of individualism that still exist in wokeism

and you trace them back through history

you will find that they descend from the doctrine of a personal god