The False Sacramentality Of Woke

By PAUL KRAUSE

In The City of God, St. Augustine noted that the cities of men will be doomed to destruction and slavery unless the people reach out to God and the worship of true religion. This wouldn’t ensure man’s political salvation but would ensure that man would become part of that society which would last forever in love instead of domination and his soul would be transformed, redeemed, and saved. The city of God demands even more than the city of man.
The revival of pagan political ideology arguably begins in the late Renaissance and starts to run apace in early modernity, leading to its horrific climax in the twentieth century with fascism, Nazism, and Communism. Pagan political mythology rests on the belief that an earthly polity can achieve perfection and eternality. We find this in Plato. It was the core underpinning of the Roman notion of “Romanitas.” It is what drives tyrannical utopianism today under its various names.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Boris Pasternak, two of the greatest Christian voices of the twentieth century suffering under the yoke and boot of Soviet tyranny, understood that the socialist ideology of the Soviet Union demanded a new consecration of humanity to the Marxist cause.
Hence the brutal Soviet persecution of Christianity within Russia. The state owned all schools and forced all to be “liberated” into the socialist mentality.
What Augustine understood about the politics of man two and half millennia ago was that the demands of God and the idolatrous state was totalizing. There was no middle ground. Either God commands your entire being or the state, with its idolatry, will come to poison and enslave your soul. It’s the story of Exodus replayed over and over again.
This understanding of the totalizing nature of politics is something that must be understood today. The martyrs and prophets of the twentieth century understood it and warned us of this danger.
We who live in nominally Christian and democratic societies, accustomed to the idea of compromise and the public-private distinction, often sleepwalk into the problem the greatest minds of the past have all recognized: There can be no compromise in the long run. The contest between Good and Evil, and there is Good and Evil, must be met head-on.
Much has been made, lately, of the drive by woke ideologues and others in promoting Drag Queen story hour in schools and libraries, the indoctrinating ideologies proliferating through public education in America — infiltrating even into private and Christian institutions — and the supremacy of the state and its school system over parents and their children. This is not accidental.
The woke, like their totalitarian predecessors of the past century, understand that the new life they seek to build demands nothing less than the entirety of one’s body and soul. Hence the mutilation of the body and the indoctrination of the soul. The younger the better too! Though one can still come into the good graces of the woke cathedral through later in life “conversion.”
What we find in the woke ideology of newness is a false sacramentality, a complete inversion and deconstruction of the Christian sacramental reality. The woke ideology has its priests, its martyrs, its sacramentalism and symbolism. All societies operate under the auspices of these sacramental practices and symbols — that is the great insight of Plato. The question we have to ask ourselves is which sacraments and symbols will win the hearts and minds of society.
This is what Christians, especially Catholics, have long known — which is why there used to be a healthy Catholic education system starting from an early age and running through early adulthood.
To immerse oneself in God and to be a strong soul in the world of pilgrimage and struggle was the goal of Christian education; this, though, has fallen by the wayside with the accommodationist theology of worldliness and social relevance. What happened, as we have seen, is that many of the structures set in place to shepherd souls to God have sold out and are now — for all intents and purposes — cathedrals of blasphemy and heresy that sanctify the diabolical alternative to God.
This is what the woke want. The only group of people with their institutions of education, social work, and civic engagement that pose a threat to the new city of man being constructed in the wake of the failure of the Soviet Union are Christians.
Insofar that some woke activists accept Christians, it is only when Christians cease being Christian and serve to strengthen and support the ideology of the city of man. Whenever Christians become useful idiots and puppets to woke causes, they are tolerated. Whenever Christians standfast in opposition to the city of man, this merits the condemnation and scorn of the dark apparatus that the city of man utilizes to enforce itself over society.
The woke ideology of consecrating a new and false humanity demands complete subjugation — body and soul — to its cause. It cannot start with children for those who are already beyond that age.
But that’s what the media, Internet advertising, and higher education are for. For the next generation, the time is now and always now. The diabolical schemers and planners of the city of lust look to the earliest age possible because that is when totalizing control over someone is most impressionable.
If children, who represent the next generation of leaders in society, are captured as early as possible and fed to the altar of wokery, then the threat of any possible opposition in the future is eliminated.
This is another reason why the woke challenge and despise private and religious education, any support shown to private and religious education, and why they hate the concept of religious liberty which protects children, and people, from the totalitarian ambitions of the new earthly city.
This shouldn’t be that hard to comprehend. Catholics baptize infants because this consecrates them to God. It removes the stain of original sin and purifies the soul and is the first step in the soul’s love of God and all things Good, True, and Beautiful.
The woke target infants and children for their maniacal ideology for a similar, albeit diabolical, reason. The woke campaign aimed at children will remove the stain of “original sin” (western, Christian, “heteronormativity”) and consecrate their soul to the city of man and all things Evil, False, and Ugly.
It is, therefore, imperative for the city of God to resist this evil, and it is evil, and help shepherd and convert souls to the true source of Love, Life, and Beauty.