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The WOKE Infiltration I
The editorial team, Prague, February 18, 2025A
We present a review of Kurt Mahlburg’s article of May 29, 2025, which appeared in Australia in The Day Declaration. In his book Live Not by Lies, Rod Dreher shares powerful stories of Christians who survived Soviet totalitarianism. One of these heroines was Milada Schirger, a Czech dissident imprisoned for her political views.
It is worth noting that believers like Milada warn that the growing “soft totalitarianism” in the West comes not only from outside the Church, but also from within. When Christian institutions begin to bow to the spirit of the age instead of standing firm in the truth, they risk losing their freedom and becoming objects of manipulation.
Experiences of state control
To judge the current situation, it is necessary to look at how the communist regimes in China and the Soviet Union controlled religion: not by simply banning it, but by instrumentalizing it for their own ends. In China, Protestant movements were subjected to the government-led Three-Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM), and the Catholic Church was assigned to a similar state-controlled body.
Crosses were removed, sermons were censored or revised to promote socialist ideas, and pastors had to swear allegiance to the state. “Underground churches” that refused to cooperate with the state were declared illegal, persecuted, and forced to meet in secret. Faithful pastors were imprisoned or executed, and religious education was banned, forcing believers to meet in hidden places such as basements or forests.
In both China and the USSR, perhaps the greatest tragedy was not the persecution itself, but the betrayal of Christians and church leaders who put survival before fidelity. Some believed they were being “wise as serpents,” adapting to keep their churches open. In reality, without knowing it, they became instruments of the regime, sacrificing truth to the demands of political power.
The current “woke” movement functions in much the same way in a nation. Rather than starting with overt state control, elites impose conformity through social pressure and institutional power. Instead of party loyalty, they demand virtue signaling and performative solidarity. And, like the communist regimes that preceded them, they do not seek to destroy the Church, but to get the gospel to spread their own ideology.
The Marxist roots of woke ideology
At first glance, “wokism” seems like a very modern moral shift, but it has ancient roots. In fact, it sprang from the same tree that produced Russian and Chinese communism.
When Karl Marx urged the masses to “seize the means of production,” he wasn’t just thinking about factories and farmland. He hoped to reshape humanity itself. He believed that capitalism drove man away from his true nature as a social being. According to Marx, communism would not only redistribute wealth, but redeem humanity by restoring its identity and completing history.
Marx saw history as nothing more than a permanent struggle between oppressors and oppressed. He believed that key social institutions, such as religion, family, and private property, were tools used by the powerful to keep others subjugated. Marx’s vision was revolutionary, materialistic, and atheistic. He sought to overthrow these structures and create a new society.
While classical Marxism focused primarily on economics and class struggle, 20th-century Marxists from the Frankfurt School, such as Herbert Marcuse and Antonio Gramsci, realized that communism could only be implemented in the West if it first undermined the key institutions of Western culture, changing the way people thought and the values they held dear. They believed it was necessary to take control of education, religion, the family, the media, and the law in order to reshape them from within.
Thus, the battlefield shifted from social class to identity. Categories such as race, gender, and sexuality took center stage. Victimhood became a source of moral authority. More importantly, justice was redefined as the breaking of all traditional norms associated with Western and Christian values.
The terms “cultural Marxism” and “critical theory” are often used to describe this phenomenon, but in reality, it is simply Western Marxism, i.e., Karl Marx’s utopian vision applied to the Western context.
Woke Christianity: a false gospel
Wokeness does not directly oppose Christianity by rejecting it. Instead, it subtly transforms the meaning of Christianity. In this new framework, sin is no longer personal disobedience, but “systemic injustice.” Salvation is not forgiveness and new life in Christ, but social liberation through cultural revolution. Repentance becomes a call to confess one’s “privileges.” The biblical gospel is not openly denied, but quietly replaced.
Fundamental Christian teachings on marriage, sexuality, the sanctity of life, and the unique lordship of Christ are stealthily reframed as tools of oppression. Scripture is read through the prism of power and identity politics. Jesus himself is reframed, not as the Savior who rescues us from sin, but as a revolutionary figure who upended the hierarchies of society.
Many religious groups, eager to avoid being labeled intolerant or out of touch with reality, began to accept this language. Sermons shifted from calling sinners to repentance and defending biblical values to calling for social justice. Pastors have set aside divinely revealed teachings in favor of politically correct ideological messages. And compassion is reinterpreted to silence uncomfortable truths. Similarly, the biblical concept of justice is replaced by ideas such as equity and redistribution.
This pattern is not new. Under communist regimes, churches were allowed to function, but only under strict state control. They could preach on spiritual matters, but they had to avoid any moral or political challenge to the regime. The result was a castrated church, a shadow of its true calling, serving communist propaganda rather than proclaiming the truth.
Woke Christianity falls headlong into the same trap, not so much under a heavy-handed regime as under the velvet-gloved tyranny of Western cultural elites, who use shame, cancellation, and exclusion as tools of control.
Woke Christianity: A False Orthodoxy
What many Christians have not yet understood is that “wokism” is not just a political movement, but a rival religion. It offers its own theology, moral law, sacred texts, sacraments, and eschatological vision. It has its own codes of blasphemy, inquisitors, and high priests. Most dangerously, “wokism” does not seek peaceful coexistence with Christianity. Its goal is to replace the Church by emptying Christianity of its truth and dressing itself in its skin.
This new faith has no God, but it espouses a false moral vision of salvation and judgment. It divides the world into two castes: the oppressed and the oppressors. It demands rituals of penance, confession, and purification. It replaces objective truth with a false moral narrative and discards contrary evidence in favor of ideological loyalty. And, like all religions, it defines what is sacred, what is profane, and who has the right to speak.
