Why is cancer usually worse than some foreign infection? Because it takes our body’s own cells and turns them against us. Cancer is a mutation of our very own chromosomes, which often can mask itself so our immune system can’t spot it, much less kill it. And that’s the kind of threat the Christian West faces from the Woke frenzy wrecking our cities: A home-grown tumor, with hijacked DNA from the New Testament itself.

Think about it: In which Muslim land are mobs destroying the memorials of the founders of their country? How many Buddhists are claiming that the real “essence” of their faith entails repressing Buddhist history and culture, and welcoming millions of strangers with other intolerant creeds? How many Hindus are apologizing for trying to reverse brutal Muslim conquests in past centuries, as Christians now cringe about the Crusades?

Confucianism never turned against itself. The Cultural Revolution in China, which tried to uproot that nation’s whole cultural past, was a vandalism project of the nation’s Marxist elite. They preached a foreign, Western post-Christian heresy. The same with the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

The Vulnerability of the Gospel

No, we have to face it squarely. Our very own churches get hijacked by social justice warriors, precisely because it’s easy to misread the very essence of Christianity. And the Enemy is ever ready at our elbow to help us do that.

I’m no biblical scholar or theologian. But as student of history, I can diagnose our symptoms. Our civilizational immune system has turned against itself. Not only won’t it attack cancer cells, but it goes after healthy tissue and vital organs. That’s why the West is failing. The Church which built up its limbs and formed its brain has been replaced by an ape church that’s trying to kill it.

I could point to a hundred headlines. But one jumps out at me: the left’s effort to impose on us the term “womxn” instead of “women.” The made-up word “Latinx” was bad enough, mutilating the Spanish language with its gendered word endings, while pretending to honor Hispanics. But “womxn” is different. It’s special. It’s so completely insane that its origin could only lie in a hysterical, false religion, akin to the cult of Cybele that drove men to castrate themselves.

The Mystery of Womxn

The Urban Dictionary explains the mystery of “womxn” this way:

a spelling of “women” that is a more progressive term that not only sheds light on the prejudice, discrimination, and institutional barriers womxn have faced, but to also show that womxn are not the extension of men (as hinted by the classic Bible story of ) but their own free and separate entities. More intersectional than because it includes trans-women and women of colour.

The Woke left really expects half the human race to start calling themselves by a neologism that is impossible to pronounce, as useless as the glyph the singer Prince adopted instead of his name to torture the record company he hated. Like the name of God in ancient Israel, the word cannot be spoken. Not because it’s genuinely sacred, but because it swaps out a crucial vowel (the one that marks off a singular “woman” from plural “women”) for a consonant. Suddenly an honest, ancient English term looks like some loan-word from Albanian.

Embracing the “Excluded,” Punishing the Normal

All this to accommodate the demands of biological men whose psychological issues (ranging from genuine mental illness to the creepy fetish of autogynephilia) drive them to dress up in drag, pop female hormones, or mutilate their bodies. Women who object to their locker rooms, bath rooms, sports competitions, and their sex as a whole being invaded have been designated a hate group. Woke-ists now call them “TERFs,” or “transgender-excluding radical feminists.” The word is a term of abuse.

Taking Jesus Hostage

What most of us don’t realize is how this phenomenon is a direct perversion of Christianity. But indeed it is. In one passage after another, Jesus asserts His divine authority over against the Pharisees by inverting their expectations. He violates the Sabbath, to show that He owns the thing because He decreed it. He mixes with penitent prostitutes and tax collectors and scorns the self-righteous, to emphasize His own centrality, above human customs. He speaks of leaving the 99 “found” sheep to seek the “lost” one. He tells the story of the Prodigal Son, to encourage penitent sinners, and warn the self-satisfied, like the elder brother.

And all of these stories make sense, and point to genuine orthodox Christianity, if we understand them properly. That is, as Christ insisting on His divine authority, and offering mercy from the Father. To keep that meaning, we need to remember some other things Jesus said. For instance, that He had come “not to abolish the Law, but fulfill it.” That is, He spoke in perfect continuity with the Hebrew scriptures (the only ones in existence at the time). He came first to the “lost sheep” of Israel. The Gospel must be preached first to the Jews.

The vision of life in the Hebrew Bible which God offers as a reward for faithfulness cannot be evil, as some theologians like David Bentley Hart suggest. That vision includes economic prosperity, secure property rights, firm national borders, and hierarchical differences as the result of different levels of talent. Any version of Christianity which claims that Jesus pronounced such things as damnable sets Him as hopelessly opposed to His own Father.  

The Son Against the Father?

But what if we cut the New Testament off from the Old? If we treat Jesus almost as a new God who’d come to rescue us from the “judgmentalism” and “wrath” of the Father? The first major Christian heresy, Marcionism, taught that.

And that Marcionite temptation has popped up again and again ever since. What better way, some Christians seem to think, to emphasize Jesus’ uniqueness than to push their interpretation of His words and deeds to the wildest extreme? Highlight and celebrate Christianity’s differences from Judaism, by refusing even to see His works in their Jewish context. Instead interpret them “radically,” and make them an ideology. Embrace the most counter-intuitive and even irrational implications we can draw, to prove that we honor faith over reason.

Destroying Mankind in Order to Save It

When anyone in the Church tries to mitigate the irrational, inhuman, destructive logic of such “radical” Christianity, call him “worldly.” Compare him to the Pharisees. If he points out that your pet project of pacifism, socialism, open borders and “radical hospitality,” or universal celibacy would devastate the human race, say that maybe humanity must lose its life in order to save it. And abracadabra, presto-changeo, you’ve transformed the Savior of mankind into its enemy.

Suddenly, the Prodigal Son doesn’t just get welcomed back by his father. No, the father expels the faithful son from the home and hands his inheritance to the prodigal. When the “lost sheep” returns to the flock, he is so much more beloved than the 99 that he’s permitted to eat them — and promptly does.

That’s the kind of deranged post-Christianity at work when a tiny contingent of sexually confused men get to redefine what it means to be a woman, and the 99.999999 percent of real women must grin and bear it. Or when marriage itself gets redefined by law to accommodate homosexuals. Or when the culture starts preparing itself to accommodate the pedophiles, as it’s clearly doing now.

The impulse to scorn the normal, spit on the virtuous, and embrace any oddball or rebel as somehow inherently holy? That’s a Christian heresy, and a deadly one. If Christianity really, truly led to Wokeness it would be false — and instead of following it down the Gadarene slope to the sea, we should instead rend our garments at its blasphemy. The creed of the Antichrist is worse than any paganism the world has known. 

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.”