There is a curious comfort in the spectacle of a fashion that has outworn itself. The great wave of what men now call “woke” has broken upon the shore, and the tide is ebbing. One hears the same voices that once thundered are now murmuring that the excesses were “perhaps a bit much,” that the language of purity and heresy had grown tiresome, that the public has simply grown weary.

The banners are furled, the tribunals grow quieter, and a certain nervous laughter is heard in the universities and the newsrooms. It is tempting to believe that the thing is finished and we’ve all just recovered from an illness and may now return to daylight and normalcy.

Do not believe it. What has been rejected is not the root but the flower. The plant itself remains, and plants of this kind do not die merely because their blossoms have been cut. They send down deeper roots and wait for a more favorable season. The peculiar quality of the recent ideology was never its novelty; it was only the latest and most self-righteous expression of a much older hunger to be righteous without repentance, to possess moral power without moral law, to judge the world from a height that requires no kneeling.

I think it was C. S. Lewis or GK Chesterton who once said that when men cease to believe in God they do not believe in nothing; they believe in anything. The “anything” of our time has been a secular religion of identity, grievance, and perpetual revolution. It supplied its adherents with original sin (the inherited and inescapable guilt of privilege), a doctrine of election (the elect being those who confess the correct catalogue of oppressions), a priesthood of activists and administrators, and an eschatology in which history itself would be forced to its knees. When the public at last grew sick of the perpetual inquisition, the religion did not repent. No. It merely went underground, muttering that the world was not yet ready for so pure a gospel.

But a vacuum does not remain empty. Nature abhors it. If the Christian understanding of man, fallen yet redeemable, equal in dignity yet unequal in virtue, free yet under authority, is not restored, something else will occupy the throne. And that something will almost certainly be more ruthless than what preceded it. The soft totalitarianism of the recent past still felt obliged to speak the language of compassion, equity, and care. The harder form that waits in the wings need not. Once the moral capital inherited from Christianity is fully spent, there will be no residual shame to restrain the new managers of the human soul. They will not need to pretend that their power is exercised for the sake of the wounded; they will simply declare that power is the only reality, and that those who resist are obstacles to the inevitable.

History is not a gentle tutor. The French Revolution began with the Rights of Man and ended with the Terror. The Russian experiment began with the liberation of the proletariat and ended with the Gulag. In each case the earlier, more idealistic phase was repudiated by the very forces it had unleashed, only to be succeeded by something colder and more efficient. The pattern is not accidental. When the image of God in man is denied, man becomes raw material for the projects of those who claim to know what History, or Justice, or the Future requires.

A society that has rejected both the Christian vision and its recent secular parody will not, for long, remain content with mere liberalism. No. That thin gruel of individual rights and procedural neutrality was itself a fruit of Christian soil. Uproot the tree and the fruit withers. What grows in its place is not a garden of free spirits but a plantation managed by those with the will to manage it. The language may still be democratic; the reality will be hierarchical in the only hierarchy that remains once all higher hierarchies are abolished: the hierarchy of power.

There is, therefore, no neutral ground. Either the old faith is recovered. And I don’t mean as a cultural ornament or a political vehicle, but as the true account of what man is or the newer faiths, purged of their recent sentimentalisms, will return with greater force and fewer scruples. The choice is not between “woke” and something milder. The choice is between the Cross and the coming of a harder darkness that will no longer trouble itself to wear a human face.
The tide has gone out. The next tide is already gathering.