The State of Georgia’s Republican legislature, with the governor’s grudging consent, has claimed its constitutional power to regulate its own elections. This after the obvious fraud and massive irregularities of 2020. As you read this, the US Congress seems poised via HR1 to impose partisan electoral chaos on each of the 50 states. The result would be one-party rule.

The excuse, as usual, is combating “racism.” Oppose Stacey Abrams stuffing ballot boxes with dubious votes? Then you’re a “racist.” That word’s meant to prick all our consciences or at least fill us with fear. Will a mob of witch-hunters backed by trillion-dollar companies come after us next? Will businesses goaded by Woke inquisitors flee from Georgia and reduce its people to hunter-gatherer lifestyles? Why can’t the governor of deep-red South Dakota find the spine to protect little girls in their locker rooms?

If you wonder how we got to this pretty pass, the answer is easy. Our country switched religions, from a rational, tolerant one to a primitive, pitiless cult.

The Golden Calf Eats Human Brains

This headline appears in the Washington Post: “Church membership in the U.S. has fallen below the majority for the first time in nearly a century.” And yet our politics are full of intense moral controversies, and constant demands that we rectify “inequities” in the pursuit of “justice.” It doesn’t seem as if Americans are lapsing into happy, stupid hedonism. Instead, they are tortured by guilt — or energetically torturing others. So what’s going on?

Wokeness is replacing Christianity as America’s civic religion. This new, post-Christian creed is nowhere near as coherent, of course. Looked at with the cold eye of reason, it amounts to a kind of syncretistic cargo cult, with a dash of voodoo too. It takes its metaphysics, its rock-bottom claims about reality, from Darwinist Materialism. It affirms no transcendent truths, says nothing about the afterlife, and denies that mankind has any lasting or changeless nature.

Instead, we face a constant, unforseeable flux, permitting Woke adherents to gin up or sign up for new moral panics every few years. “Transphobia,” for instance, was the almost universal reaction of the whole human race for millennia to gender-bending eccentrics. Then someone with a reality TV show, Bruce Jenner, decided to “transition” himself. Suddenly we discovered the next great moral menace that must be ruthlessly extirpated (as Joe Biden promised).

Nor do the Woke make universal claims that they’d apply to every culture on earth. Instead, they can work up their outrage at minor or nature-based inequalities between the sexes in Western culture. Then they wink at massive mistreatment of women in Muslim countries, and wave off those who criticize it as displaying “Islamophobia.” Slavery two hundred years ago vitiates the entire American founding. Slavery now in China shouldn’t stop you from buying its iPhones.

We Out-Stalined Uncle Joe

Consistency isn’t a virtue. Logic doesn’t matter. The political line can shift overnight just as dogmatically as the old Communist Party line dictated from Moscow. The difference is that now there’s no rigid, centralized authority issuing such diktats.

Instead, Woke’s infallibility is decentralized, distributed. It bubbles up from millions of thin-skinned, self-righteous “progressives” in wealthy countries. They roam the earth, hungry for new pretexts to flagellate themselves, then others. That slakeless appetite for a new “civil rights” jihad to fight every few years guarantees that we will never rest peacefully. There will always be new injustices for activists to unearth, and demand that Leviathan expand in order to remedy at our expense — both in liberties quashed, and in cash seized on pain of imprisonment. Of course, not one of these ethical claims flows from or fits with Darwinist materialism, whose logic scoffs at such sentiments in favor of “the survival of the fittest.”

But your ethics only have to flow from your metaphysics if logic matters. If you’re pursuing the Truth, instead of power. If you’re not merely feeding some moral appetite left over from the way that God really made us, with whatever junk food and diet pills you find on Facebook today.

There’s no source of divine revelation, of course. Instead, the Woke live parasitically on the old Christian ethics, which affirm moral equality, a concern for the rights of the weak, and a sense that the individual has enormous dignity which can trump the needs of society. They take these ethics out of context, of course, shorn of all moral limits found in scripture or natural law. Instead, they launch freelance, insatiable demands like pirate ships to prey on us.

Hence a few boys shameless enough to claim female identity so that they can beat up smaller girls in sporting events override the interests of half the human species. It is not just fine but admirable for privileged men to cavort as women. But it’s now virtually criminal for whites to pretend to be black (even while playing Othello), or “appropriate” recipes and clothing items from foreign cultures. Never mind that the differences between the races are mostly trivial, while the chasm between the sexes is profound in mammal species. As I said, logic doesn’t matter. We must go on feeding the Beast.

Worship the Beast, or Prepare to Suffer

The Beast is not an individual or government, nor even a conscious conspiracy. Instead it’s something much more like a hive, or the Borg of the Star Trek universe. Or perhaps we should call it the “hive-mind” of the Woke, linked via purged social media, that waits for each moral panic to reach a certain threshold, before imposing it on the rest of us via ruthless economic and legal pressure. If we must identify it, and give it a name, I offer this modest proposal: The Mystical Body of Antichrist.

Drop that line at your next party. Or else meet each Woke demand with the question, “But how does that promote the Survival of the Fittest? What would Darwin do?”

From a lifetime of dropping such truth bombs, I can promise you, those are conversation-stoppers. They’ll leave the Woke cultist pestering you briefly speechless, so you can escape to the snack table.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream, and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. He is co-author with Jason Jones of “God, Guns, & the Government.”