I long for the day when the self-serving, virtue-signallers who jump on bandwagons will be exposed, writes Fr Nicholas Grace
To be a social media pariah, or frowned upon by your peers, abused by your enemies, cancelled by your favourite platform, even fired by your employer, are a few of the punishments meted out directly or indirectly by the high priests of social media in today’s beautiful, tolerant and free western world.
Freedom of speech is out and subservient snivelling is in. People are afraid to say what they really think or believe because they are literally terrified that the moral authority of the new secular religion will have them branded as racist, ignorant, or culpable of any number of phobias.
Social bullying
I was recently reflecting on this, and the ever growing list of social bullying we are being exposed to, and I thought that there is a great similarity between the current moral authority, and the moral authority that was so abhorred by the penniless preacher from Nazareth all those years ago: the Pharisees.
In the Holy Land when Christ walked the earth some of these had a lot of political influence and most of the moral authority, and some of them used and abused it through their interpretations of Jewish laws which they certainly liked to burden the people with in almost every aspect of daily life. They liked it, they fed off of it and they used it to bludgeon the simple people into submission.
Now when Christ emerged as a man on a mission, the God-man nonetheless, the Pharisees were at the zenith of their power over the people. Jesus understood clearly that many of these Pharisees had become nothing more than corrupt overbearing bullies who used religion to subject, silence and censor a huge swathe of the good honest people who were threatened by them, it seems, with being ostracised from society if they did not comply, agree, or submit. Remember we are talking about a society whose life blood was religion.
What did Jesus do? He let them have it: “Woe to you Pharisees! You love the seat of honour in synagogues and greetings in marketplaces…Woe also to you…You impose on people burdens hard to carry, but you yourselves do not lift one finger to touch them…” (Luke 11:43-46).
Hope
Christ’s take down fills me with hope that someone will not only stand up and castigate, but also silence and depose the ‘new Pharisees’ – the new moral leaders, the self-important bullies who lord it over all of us and threaten us with exclusion if we do not submit and subject ourselves to every detail of their doctrine, ideology, cultural and moral world view and take truth as completely relative and subjective.
I’m talking about what I like to call, the professional wokeists. Who or what is a professional wokeist? Well wokeist, as many, but not all of you know, comes from woke. Now woke is the end of an evolution that started with wide awake, a term which appeared in political ads during the 1860 presidential election in support of Abraham Lincoln (the Republican Party promoted the movement primarily to oppose the spread of slavery). In more modern times it referred to a perceived awareness of issues that concern social and racial justice. The term has been around ever since but over the last ten years and particularly since the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement after the death of George Floyd in 2020 woke has, according to journalist Aja Romano, evolved into a “single-word summation of leftist political ideology, centred on social justice politics and critical race theory”.
The professional wokeist – the new Pharisee I am talking about – is one who uses left-wing politics, anti-racism (when it translates into the promotion of white guilt), LGBT rights, feminism and environmentalism, to name just a few (in an age where ‘victimhood’ is a virtue, these wokeist ‘causes’ are increasing all the time) as platforms to constantly promote themselves. They parade their compassion, high culture, and all their ‘values’ (what happened to virtues?) to their social media devotees. It all seems so plastic given that it usually amounts to little more than words, tweets and likes. But, all the same it seems to succeed in framing these phonies as the secular saints that the new religion craves.
Phonies
Well, the phonies didn’t fool Jesus, (“whitewashed tombs, which appear beautiful on the outside…appear righteous, but inside…are filled with hypocrisy and evildoing”) and they don’t fool us. We see their cheap ambition, which every other day tries to cancel those more talented and deserving of public applause than themselves.
For every wacky cause the wokeist ‘supports’, for every victim claiming and cringe-causing narcissist that they applaud (from their iPhone), they make themselves more worthy of ‘likes’ for that inevitable day when they will come to cash in their chips and be jettisoned to the upper echelons of the wokeist high priesthood, to sit in judgement and to beat, bully and brainwash the rest of us into giving them the adoration they crave.
Let us hope for finer days, days when the good become great because they have acted rather than tweeted, truly merited rather than simply moaned. In a word, earned the respect and esteem of worthy people, even though they never sought it.
Let’s never stoop to the level of the professional wokeist – not to be confused with the many good people who might identify as woke, citizens who really do put their heart and soul into causes outside of themselves (even if some of their causes are a little misguided) – who pretend to care for certain popular causes where it seems the worse the cause, the more praise they receive. Being praised for pretending to care about important social matters, amounts to taking the credit from those who really do take action for what really does actually matter.
So, if you are appalled at the idea of ever becoming a self-serving, self-praising, virtue-signalling, attention-seeking, trumpet-blowing hypocrite and indeed feel a passionate desire to call out persons for being such – resign yourself to being unpopular, or passed over, or cancelled, and keep your dignity for the day when they are found out for what these professional wokeists really are: an unoriginal, mediocre, ‘update’ of the worst type of Pharisee.