Woke is?????

The word woke is borrowed from those who advance it as a shorthand term for the larger agenda of diversity, equity, and inclusion.  While it includes race and the construct of critical race theory, it seems to be even more focused on sexual matters -- sexual liberation and gender identity.  Yet we who would question this concept suffer from the lack of a precise or careful definition.  It is and has been a moving target.  But it is clear that the woke agenda is working to gather the force of law and moral consensus behind it so that any discussion will be limited.  Once a culture grants LGBTQ+ ideology, the idea of systemic racism, and a gender identity which is both the goal of life and its own personal identity a favored legal status, it will be too late to question it.  When that time comes, all the forces of law and media, morality and politics will be placed in service to enforce it without compromise and, when that happens, any and all dissent will end -- at least in the public square. 

This is not a benign idea that orthodox Christianity can dismiss or ignore.  It involves nothing less than the comprehensive rewriting of our history and the destabilization of the present form and structure of society until the revolutionary form takes over. In service to this goal, the definition and structure of the family must be dismantled.  Science and biology must surrender the pursuit of truth to the given of gender ideology which posits identity upon the uncertain ground of feeling.  It will not be good enough to guarantee equal access but the perceived wrongs done to any minorities (as judged by the woke) must be reversed and the heirs of this discrimination punished.  Furthermore, any dissenters from this woke agenda must be discredited and vilified.

The battlefield for now lies in the university and in all levels of public education.  We engage it not simply with a debate over the particulars but over access.  Surely part of the push for universal, federally paid, preschool is to control what is being taught to children at the earliest stage of their educational process and the end result of such free preschool access will be not only to segregate those who disagree but to force them to pay for their privilege of disagreement not only for their children but also for the children covered by the public institutions.  In addition, viewing homeschoolers with suspicion and parents as enemies of the classroom is but another venue where this war is being fought.  The big slip came when one politico was caught admitting that parents have no right to know what goes on in the classrooms of their minor children.  But the real arena for the woke agenda of diversity, education, and inclusion now is the university.  Professors who are not on board are suspect and in danger of losing their jobs.  The universities as institutions fear they cannot continue to live off the train of government money (including federally guaranteed student loans) unless they mirror the gobbledygook coming from Washington and the liberal and progressive voices throughout America.   Surveys of the positions and values of the sons and daughters of conservative and orthodox Christian homes show how influential this invasion of the educational process has been.

It is at least this that is at work now as Christian bodies like the LCMS must consider what to do with the colleges we established to train church workers and now have become private universities in which their role as institutions for the formation of church workers plays a minor or non-existent role.  It is this that must be considered as much as the case of a single professor and his views on what is being promoted at one school.