The Great “Awokening”
The U.S. is in the grips of a Godless religious revival.
The “Great Awakening” refers to several periods of religious rejuvenation in American Christianity. Historians and theologians have identified three or four waves of increased religiosity occurring between the 18th and 20th centuries.
However, the latest version is secular, and its zealots are focusing their efforts primarily on youth. Writing in Real Clear Investigations, John Murawski does an excellent job of detailing the nuts and bolts of the new evangelism in “Woke History Is Making Big Inroads in America’s High Schools.” He begins by delving into California, where a hideous ethnic studies requirement was temporarily shelved in September, as many groups railed against its anti-capitalist, anti-Semitic bias. Armenians, Greeks, Hindus, Koreans et al. also called for changes.
No matter. While not a requirement – yet – the new religion is most definitely on the move. As Murawski reports, many students are currently being taught about “colonialism, state violence, racism, intergenerational trauma, heteropatriarchy and the common thread that links them: ‘whiteness.’” At a high school in southern California, students are assigned to write a “breakup letter with a form of oppression,” such as toxic masculinity, heteronormativity, the Eurocentric curriculum, etc.
And “wokeness” is not limited to California, nor is it being pushed only to high schoolers. In North Carolina, a mother complained to school officials “when her 8-year-old son brought home a handout explaining white privilege.”
In Seattle, there is a “Math Ethnic Studies Framework” for grades k-12, in which power and oppression are the ways in which “individuals and groups define mathematical knowledge so as to see ‘Western’ mathematics as the only legitimate expression of mathematical identity and intelligence. This definition of legitimacy is then used to disenfranchise people and communities of color.” (As a former math teacher, I always appreciated the simplicity of the subject because it was about the truth. 2+2=4. If you think otherwise, you are wrong. Little did I know I was an oppressor!)
Other members of the “Great Awokening” movement are the LGBTQQIAA+ers, who have done a masterful job of getting horribly inappropriate sexual information to children as young as 3 in the name of “tolerance.” As reported by The Federalist’s Joy Pullman, preschoolers in Illinois are being taught to celebrate transgenderism. “My Princess Boy” (the title says it all) is geared to 5 year olds. For the “polyamorists,” there’s a video about a boy who claims, “My two moms are Marilyn and Adrian and my two dads are Michael and Barry.”
While the perversity in most cases is done in the name of tolerance, one woman in England is truthful about the movement’s true ambitions. Elly Barnes, founder of Educate and Celebrate, an organization that “transforms schools into LGBTQ-friendly places,” says that the goal of her group is to train teachers to “completely smash heteronormativity.” Along the same lines, Sarah Hopson, a primary school teacher from Warrington, told the BBC that she “conditions school children as young as six to accept LGBTQ ideology while they’re young and impressionable, so they’ll be less likely to accept a Christian view of sexuality later on in life.”
Needless to say, many teacher union activists are woke zealots. At their convention in July, the National Education Association’s New Business Items – proposed directives and projects for action during the coming year – included incorporating the concept of ‘White Fragility’ into NEA trainings/staff development, literature, and other existing communications.” One NBI pushed for “reparations for descendants of enslaved Africans in the United States” and another to publicize “our vigorous defense of immigrants’ rights: defending the right to asylum, ending the criminalization of border crossings, opposing child separation, the construction of a border wall, and immediately shutting down immigrant concentration camps.”
At the same time, the union voted down NBI 2, which stated that NEA “will re-dedicate itself to the pursuit of increased student learning in every public school in America by putting a renewed emphasis on quality education.”
As k-12 schools proselytize the woke religion, it surely follows that many college students are even more possessed. Venerable academic and commentator Walter Williams writes about Williams College (no relation) in Massachusetts, where professor Steven Gerrard was declared “an enemy of the people.” It seems that the offending prof wanted the college to join other schools in signing onto the “Chicago Principles,” which call for free speech to be central to college and university culture. But many students were aghast, insisting that free speech is a part of a right-wing agenda as a “cover for racism, xenophobia, sexism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism and classism.” Not surprisingly just a handful of America’s 4,000 colleges and universities have endorsed or adopted the Chicago Principles.
A recent Real Clear Opinion Research poll revealed that “a majority of registered voters are dissatisfied with the performance of the elementary and secondary education system” in the U.S., and “have little confidence that public schools will improve any time soon.” Those polled said the two most important things a public education system should prepare students to do is “read and write” and “be good citizens.” Promotion of a new secular religion was not on anyone’s radar.
While certainly not all schools and teachers are part of the “woke” movement, far too many are. Parents must step up here – you must visit your child’s school, talk to the teachers, ask questions, and very importantly, check in with you kids daily, and deprogram them if necessary. If you don’t, you very well may wind up with a woke religious zealot you will not even recognize.
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Larry Sand, a former classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers and the general public with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues. The views presented here are strictly his own.