Wicked Culture Will Trump Politics

The End of Woke?

Whatever your hopes for an end to the collective cultural brain-fade in society, politics is not going to wind back the clock.

It just isn’t. Not in the USA. Not in the UK (though political change is a long way off there), and not here in Australia (where political change might be six months away).

But whatever you think of the so-called “end of woke” – (and yes, I’m using that word in the same lazy manner in which its proponents use “bigoted” or whatever) – things are not for changing. Politics is still downstream of culture. And culture has been captured and captivated.

So politics being downstream of culture now means that the Wicked movie, and its second part to come out next year, will be the rubric through which the progressive sees the current political reality.

Sure, as a Christian, see the movie, buy the merch, whatever, but the storyline will become the totem around which the millions of anguished souls on Threads will dance, and lament, awaiting the changing of the political winds change again (as they inevitably will), before “as you were” kicks back in.

Besides, it’s too late to head this thing off. It’s ingrained. As Rory Shiner put it several years ago in The Gospel Coalition Australia:

We are not argued into expressive individualism, we are formed into it. To live in modern Australia is to be a part of a relentless discipleship programme. Every Pixar and Disney film, every graduation speech, every new novel and Netflix series is one hundred percent on point: your purpose in life is to find the true inner you and then to express that to the world.

The Beginning of Wicked

Or, in the case of Wicked, Universal Pictures.

So I walked past a bus shelter advertising hoarding the other day that indicates just how discipled we are. There it was: a New South Wales government ad campaign announcing the importance of  cervical cancer screening. And to whom was this service being offered? “Women and people with a cervix”. That’s who.

Which up until about yesterday (in terms of history) was a tautological statement. A one hundred per cent out of one hundred statement, in fact. Women were the only people with cervixes.

Until of course they were not.

This would be the point to cue anger or anguish, and it would certainly merit a few scornful and well placed tweets by JK Rowling (the patron saint of women/people with cervixes) IMHO.

But it’s probably merely sigh-worthy now, isn’t it? I mean, do you really think if the government changes to one of a more conservative bent in the coming years that this sort of advertising – reflecting of course this sort of thinking – will change at all?

Someone did say to me the other month that we shouldn’t be fussing about all of this because we’ve probably reached “peak-trans”. If by that he meant that we’d wound the clock back successfully, or we’d managed to dial it all down, then he was wrong on both counts.

We’ve reached “normalised trans”.  Now on to the next thing!, as the permanent revolution would say. Does say. Is saying.

Besides trans isn’t really about trans. It’s about presenting a competing vision of humanity to the culture that reframes reality, redirects our teleology, which is now trans-human, actually. Faced with withering hopes for this world and the failing bodies we inhabit, we are seeking to loose ourselves from their surly bonds. We are seeking an identity to be constructed, not to be received.

Do you really think there will be directives from on high from a newly-elected, socially conservative government that will have the boffins in our Health Departments scurrying around photoshopping the alternative realities out of existence? Course not.

Downstream Politics

Politics is downstream of culture. That’s why there is so much surprise – and despair – from religious conservatives over the Trump/Vance administration’s stance on abortion.

I mean, what were they thinking would happen? In some sense, the Handmaid’s Tale crowd wailing about the onset of a dystopian religious nation, and the reconstruction crowd hoping for a utopian religious nation, were as misguided as each other in the US election campaign.

Trump pushed it back to the states. That’s it. The states voted, and many of those voting for Trump also voted for abortion rights. What it means to be human – and who gets to decide – that’s a long-term losing battle for anyone holding an orthodox view about the beginning of life, and the image of God in humanity.

Whatever you think about the election, wickedness comes in all guises and election colours.

Writing in First Things, Francis X Maier, issued the reminder, that woke is not dead and buried. I know when it comes to zombies you have to put one in the brain, but let’s face it, woke lacks a brain, so that’s going to be much harder.

It is, as we were reminded time and time again by the Kamala bus, replete with abortion clinic on wheels, all about the vibe.

Maier nails it when he says this:

Others have danced on the grave of this year’s Democratic party fiasco. The gloating will be brief; 2026 is right around the corner. And it’s not my purpose here. My concern is religious. Those of us with normal lives to pursue, mouths to feed, and bills to pay might earnestly wish woke ideology to be dead and buried. But like Nosferatu or a bad case of shingles, it will keep coming back, because—in its essence—it isn’t a purely “political” creature at all.

And that’s right, isn’t it? It’s not a political creature. It’s a religious creature. Witness the cries of the heart among the high priests and priestesses of the cultural class when the results came in. It was religious anguish, wasn’t it?

Maier goes on:

Woke thought is classically “religious” in the original sense of the Latin word religare, which means “to bind.” It’s expansionary and immune to counterargument. In a weird mutation of Augustine’s “I believe that I might understand,” woke reasoning and programming bind themselves to a preceding set of beliefs that explain the world and amount to a kind of degraded Christianity. It’s a faith without the irritating baggage of a personal God who judges our actions and demands love, mercy, and patience from his followers, not merely justice.

Immune to counterargument. A bit like a two-year-old that has been told that she cannot have a donut.

Which means, as Maier goes on to say, the solution cannot be political.  Not solely or finally at least.

Am I glad that this has been a wake up call to the more eye-popping expressions of woke culture? Only in as much as it put the brakes on the crazy-train for a while. But that will only make it more determined the next time around.

Do I sound politically defeatist? Depends what one means. I think that in the public square we should stand up for what corresponds to received reality because that’s how the Christian framework works. And that’s how the West worked for so long, even when it got things wrong and need to adjust or correct itself.

The adjustments and corrections were within the Christian framework, as even a cursory glance at history will show. Except of course, we now live in an ahistorical age, or one that is keen to rewrite history.

Woke culture says that the very framework is wrong. It’s wicked, in the original sense of the word. Yet in in the long run, it won’t have to legislate the Christian framework out of the public square. At least not forever. In fact legislation and intellectual rigour won’t be doing the heavy lifting.

As Rory Shiner observes:

The success of secularism is not in its intellectual coherence, but its discipleship programme. Intellectually, it is fairly weak. The moment secular thought encounters beauty, agency, or morality, it very quickly runs out of resources. The self it creates is unstable, anxious, listless. Its immanent frame is a practical strategy, not a reasoned position. It’s account of how self, body, and gender all relate often border on incoherent.

Which points to the chink in the wicked armour. Beauty, agency and morality belong to the Christian frame. Everything else is either a derivative, parody or rejection of those three.

Not In Kansas Anymore

We can’t go back to pre-Christian, we can only go forward to what the likes of Wicked might do with the Christian detritus lying around the wreckage of a secularism that is already past its use-by-date. We’re not in Kansas anymore. The world has changed.

Wicked becomes the political/religious message of our times, as review after review is now saying. So this, for example, from Flicks website:

Wicked makes its cinematic premiere at an awkward time, so soon after so many American voters acted against virtually every moral idea the production unsubtly espouses. They comprehensively rejected the first female person of colour to run for President, known for soapy quotes like “the American dream belongs to all of us,” and elected a person whose campaign not just leaned into racism but spewed it out like projective vomit, Regan MacNeil style. If you’re reading this thinking “why does everything have to be political?”, welcome to art, welcome to movies, and welcome to Wicked.

If culture and politics are that entwined then where to from here? Christian Disney? Christian Netflix? Please no!

As Francis Maier and Rory Shiner both point out, a deepened discipleship is vital. Shiner states:

The task before us is to build a culture of discipleship strong enough to out-disciple the wildly successful discipleship programme we are all enrolled in from birth. To be a Christian in 2021 is to be an alternative to the culture, not an intensive form of it. To nurture and sustain Christian faith we will need to form thick communities, geared at producing resilient disciples of Jesus. What we lack in breadth of numbers we will need to make up for in depth of formation. This is a formidable task. But it is the task, in the power of the Spirit and under the rule of the risen and reigning King Jesus, to which we are called.

And as Maier says:

We can start to be the kind of leaven in our culture that the Word of God calls us to be. We can support each other as friends, to save the good that can be saved, and to build something new and better over time. We can do the right thing despite the cost. It’s a generational task. But we can start today. And it’s the only kind of revolution that might really, one day, change the world.

We may not be able to write it on the bus shelter advertising, but we can fulfil our Deuteronomic 6 mandate – completed by Jesus and the Holy Spirit, to talk about these things to our children, write then on our foreheads and door lintels, all in the knowledge that God has scribed his law on our hearts.

We’re going to need a heart, a brain and a spine –  the tools of the original movie from which Wicked derives, – if we are to see this thing through. Loving, brilliant and brave. Keep doing that.

And keep doing the political thing for sure. And keep creating beauty that overpowers transgressive wickedness, even as your children, or your partner clamour to see the spectacle that the two part Wicked movie will undoubtedly be, given the cultural hegemony of the aptly named Universal Studios.

The legislated bus advertisements tell us we’re not in Kansas anymore, the cultural stories captivate our imaginations to ensure that we forget the Kansas of old. But as we discover in the Wizard of Oz, one way or another, the spell will be unmasked.