"My Church Has Gone Woke! What Should I Do?"
The Left's Atheistic Agenda Began A Century Ago. The "BEC's Guest" Reverend Larry Beane Addresses This Issue
Though schism events seem all too common throughout religious history, current stresses, fueled by social media and the wokeness it engenders, are pushing traditional denominational relationships to breaking points not seen since the upheavals of the 1960s. Relegating debate about women’s ordination to “seemingly quaint” by comparison - and yes, the Overton Window has shifted - the divisiveness derives now from far more troubling sources: transgenderism (particularly among youth), same-sex married clergy, and even climate catastrophism.
The BEC reached out to Pastor Larry Beane, who helps us understand not only the current divisive forces, but their origins. Ordained in 2004 and pastor of Salem Lutheran Church (Missouri Synod) in Gretna since 2005, Pastor Beane goes beyond a study of things: he also offers actionable options to Conservative faithful who are increasingly unmoored and left adrift from the churches they’ve known for generations.
Where has all this come from, and just what can you do when your church is going woke?
We’d like to create some context before moving on to Pastor Beane’s piece…
Today’s woke Christians suffer from being just too Nice. A thin and rather undefined understanding of Christianity that places “kindness is everything” and “being nice to others” at the center of religious identity and expression…
“Nice” challenges, indeed surpasses, the sacramental element of church. Nice: that sweet sickening odor impacting your spiritual senses; the destructive mix of being controlling, feeling superior, and acting out one’s narcissism in a self-satisfying Oneness with the SuperVeryNice Jesus; it’s gross.
To object to same-sex married clergy on a Biblical basis, for example, is to be unNice, and it will not do. With an emphasis on acts over faith, trends over tradition, and avoiding offended feelings over a resurrected Jesus Christ, woke churches stand antithetical to sacramental praxis.
For anyone forced to endure others’ Nice, it will eventually come down to fight or flight, and be assured: on your way out the Nice Christians will be their Nicest to you by being mean to you, all in service to SuperVeryNice Jesus.
Consider the (no longer united) United Methodists, who just voted for schism because sacramental marriage isn’t a redefinable thing. A retired bishop named William H. Willimon wrote a pleading piece just this August, ahead of the vote. It’s not hard to sense the snarky dynamics that drove this “divorce.”
Speaking as the schismatics, the bishop wrote:
Unable to convert you to my point of view, I’ll hunker down in my gated community of buddies who think as I do and call that ecclesia. We thereby say to the world that Jesus Christ can’t make and sustain community out of people whom I don’t like and are not my type. Rather than ask, “What’s Christ up to in our neighborhood?” we say, “I refuse to be part of a church that doesn’t reflect my values before I came to church.”
In May the conservative (they prefer “orthodox”) breakaway Global Methodist Church had an inauspicious birth. It’s a church created by a couple of right wing (oops, “traditional”) caucus groups. They don’t accept the label schismatic (what schismatic ever has?) and prefer instead to say that they have been pushed out of the church they once loved.
Give me a break.
The bishop continued with this tone:
In a decade or so, when asked by some young, upstart clergy, “Why are we doing church this way?” you’ll have to say, “Well, back in the 2020s, there was a Methodist out West somewhere who said she didn’t believe in the resurrection, or maybe it was a preacher who was a drag queen, I forget, but anyway, we took out our rage by forming a new denomination. … [T]he Global Methodist Church will have the most autocratic, powerful episcopacy in the history of Methodism, badass bishops who are free to kick out errant clergy faster than you can say, “to heck with due process.”
Offering no suggestion that the bishop sees marriage as sacramental, he wrote:
So the GMC’s big idea to set right what’s wrong with the UMC is to form another denomination—destined to be one of the smallest Methodist bodies in the world—that will end debate on the issue that they swear is not their one issue?
GMC advocates charge that the UMC has sold out to contemporary culture. But who told the GMC that same-sex relationships are the chief challenge in the UMC? Not the Bible. Not Jesus, who makes not even a cameo appearance in most of these debates.
If it’s not same-sex marriage, it’s child transgenderism straining the seams. The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Denver just this week is under attack for holding firm to this inconvenient bit:
So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.
Setting policy for school administrators, the Archdiocese published these guidelines, which included: "A Catholic school cannot affirm a student's identity as transgender, gender-nonconforming, non-binary, gender-fluid, gender-queer, or any other term that rejects the reality of the student's given male or female sexual identity; any asserted identity that rejects the reality of biological sex is incompatible with Christian anthropology.”
And yes, the Archbishop of Denver “went there”:
“Catholic schools must at all times must uphold the nature and meaning of marriage as a covenantal relationship between one man and one woman that is marked by exclusivity, permanence, fidelity and openness to life. Catholic schools should take care not to convey any equivalence between same sex or transgender legal unions or relationships and marriage. Same sex or transgender romantic partners and children of these unions should always be treated with dignity and kindness. Catholic schools cannot recognize cohabitation as equivalent to marriage. However, children born to cohabiting couples must always be treated with compassion and respect. The truth about marriage is accessible to everyone because it is grounded in the nature of the human person. Promoting and protecting marriage witnesses to the dignity of every person and serves the common good.”
This is not Nice, of course.
“Sally Odenheimer, a former Catholic who left the faith over differences of belief on LGBT issues, told the Denver Post, ‘I felt if I was staying in the church, that meant I was supporting their ideology, but in order for things to change, I have to be involved. People are leaving in droves. I came back because they are not going to win. There are more of us who do not agree with them, and we will not let them do this,’" she said.
(We suspect Sally believes fiercely in Joe Biden’s “democracy” mush.)
Another Nice Catholic “told the Denver Post that the church was ‘hurting people’ and ‘separating them from God’ by following the policies.”
Confusing “following” policies and “forming” policies on Biblical Truth, Nice people always get all the things symmetrically backwards.
Let’s turn now to the learned words of Pastor Beane…
“My Church Has Gone Woke! What Should I Do?”
By: Reverend Larry Beane
Increasingly, conservatives – socially, politically, and theologically speaking – are being marginalized out of all institutions in society. And this is part of a very long strategy by Marxists to infiltrate and take over every aspect of society. It was an ambitious agenda a century ago, but it is bearing fruit today.
Historical Background
In a nutshell, Marxism went from its original “revolutionary” flavor of the mid nineteenth century to its current “evolutionary” variety, as prominent Socialists saw that the working classes were actually getting richer and better off, and did not join the Oppression Bandwagon. By the end of the nineteenth century, as the great workers’ revolution failed to materialize, the Left realized that they needed to take a new tack.
Now, the exception was the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution (a successful follow-up to the failed 1905 coup), but arguably, Russia is not a Western country. And even in the USSR, the failure of Communism early on led to the 1921 “New Economic Policy” (NEP) and a backing away from the more radical attempts to usher in the Workers’ Paradise.
The Fabian Society (1884) was one of the groups that founded the British Labour Party (1900) and the London School of Economics (1895). The Fabians saw the success of Socialism to be not in armed mobs of factory workers frog-marching the plant-owners outside in a spontaneous overthrowing of the government, but rather to be a more gradual working within the system.
The Fabians initially adopted the wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing as their mascot (knowing that their Marxist Evolution would happen by deception and cunning), later changing their preferred symbol to a turtle. Slow and steady wins the race. Socialist theorist and jailed Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) also advocated for Evolutionary vs. Revolutionary Socialism. His German disciple Rudy Dutschke (1940-1979) popularized Gramsci’s philosophy by describing the “long march through the institutions.”
And so, here we are, as nearly all of our Democrats, many of our Republicans, nearly every university, most of our schools, Hollywood, sports, media, and yes, our churches have been “long-marched” and are firmly in the grip of Socialism and radical social theory. And this has left conservatives flat-footed and scratching their heads. After years of scoffing and comforting themselves with the soothing lie: “That’ll never happen here,” we are now living it.
It may seem as if wokeness in our churches is a new thing. After all, even very recently, prominent Democrat politicians – including Obama, Biden, and Bill and Hillary Clinton, not to mention the constitution of the State of California – were still defining marriage to be between one man and one woman. But once the Obergefell ruling (2015) compelled the states to partake in the theater of the absurd, it seems like church after church has been willing to be sodomized by the Socialist Sitz im Leben.
But even as the Long March is not a new phenomenon, neither is ecclesiastical wokeness.
In the nineteenth century, the Historical Critical Method (HCM) or Higher Criticism began to change the way Leftist Christians read and understood the Bible, which in turn changed the hermeneutic of the faith. This movement was led by German Protestant theologians – both allegedly Lutheran and Reformed, mainly from the “state church” in Germany dating back to the King of Prussia’s compelled union between the Lutherans and the Reformed in the early nineteenth century.
The Historical Critical Method was a development from the earlier Enlightenment (so-called) denial of the supernatural, and the replacement of faith and revelation with reason. Thomas Jefferson famously took scissors to his Bible, eliminating miracles and references to the afterlife and the atonement. All that is left is the moral teachings of Jesus. [SuperVeryNice Jesus, we would add]. Thus when the supernatural and transcendent are denied, all that is left is moralizing in our temporal and mortal world. The German liberal theologian Rudolph Bultmann’s (1884-1976) “Demythologization” and the various incarnations of the Quest for the Historical Jesus also grew out of this movement.
This de-emphasis on the eternal in favor of the here-and-now was also manifest in the “Social Gospel” movement in the late nineteenth century. The Salvation Army – a church body which has no sacraments, and focuses on good works in this life (and which incidentally is today an enthusiastic cheerleader for the homosexual and transgender ideology), is an example of this theology – and as a result, most people see the Salvation Army not as a church, but as a charity.
The Long March took advantage of these trends, and wormed their way into mainstream confessions of Christianity, some then, others now. Liberal Lutheran exegetes were playing with the Historical Critical Method in the nineteenth century, and by the 1970s, they were ensconced in the conservative Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod (LCMS) seminary in St. Louis. It took a radical reorganization to throw these cunning and lying professors out and start all over again (which resulted in the liberal “walkout” from the seminary, and the LCMS’s recommitment to biblical and theological conservatism). As this documentary shows, though it is biased toward the leftist separatists, it is important to note that all of these pre-woke professors and students are today in fellowship with the radically woke ELCA.
The Roman Catholic Church, interestingly enough, resisted the liberal/modern skeptical interpretation for a good long time, until well into the twentieth century, when it succumbed to the Historical Critical Method, evolution, and with the coming of so-called Liberation Theology and its conquest by Jesuits in South America. The culmination of this open takeover of Rome by Marxists has given the Roman Catholic Church its champion of Socialism, Pope Francis.
Even Fundamentalist Baptist Churches are wrestling with issues of wokeness, especially in matters of race, sex, and so-called gender. And lurking behind it all is the Long March, with the Luciferian Poet Karl Marx at the fountainhead of the stream of sewage.
.
What Now? So what can one do if one’s church has gone “woke”?
You have essentially two options: 1) Stay and fight. 2) Cut and run.
Staying and fighting is attractive, for it reflects Christian optimism and courage. But there are some considerations to keep in mind. The church is your refuge. You should be fed with God’s Word and, according to your theology, His presence through the means of grace (which in my tradition are called “Sacraments”). The church is where you go to be refreshed.
If Sunday morning is nothing more than a battleground, if it grinds you down and harms you spiritually, it is not wrong to cut your losses in search of a faithful church. Apostasy is apostasy. Sometimes, it simply can’t be defeated in a given place.
If your church body is on the whole conservative, then you might be able to push back against a woke pastor or leaders in your congregation. But if the church body or hierarchy is woke, it will be a fools errand.
So how does one find another church that is not woke?
This will vary based on your denomination or confession.
Roman Catholicism
Throughout south Louisiana, the Roman Catholic Church is dominant. And the divide between conservatives and the woke can be quite sharp. New Orleans’ Archbishop Gregory Aymond is perhaps more conservative than some others around the country, but he is hardly a champion of traditionalism. In most cases, if the bishop is conservative, Roman Catholics can find a faithful parish. If not, they will have a tough time of it.
Some options for conservative Roman Catholics are: find the Latin Mass (such as that offered at St. Patrick’s in New Orleans), as even the Vatican recognizes it as a rebellion against modernism and wokeness (and has become strident in stamping it out, of course, not at once, but rather by boiling the frog gradually). Other options are to seek out Eastern Rite churches that are in fellowship with the papacy, but operate with greater autonomy, such as the Maronite Catholic Church, Greek Catholic Church, or the Ukrainian Catholic Church. The liturgy will be different, and your priest might be married, but this is a way to remain under the pope and still have some independence from his wokeness.
Although it isn’t currently an option in the New Orleans area, the Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter offers a similar option for Roman Catholics, as it is essentially a Roman Catholic diocese comprised of former Anglicans. They tend to be more conservative as well.
A more radical alternative would be for Roman Catholics to seek out a conservative Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, or Lutheran congregation – but this will mean leaving the jurisdiction of the pope.
Episcopalianism/Anglicanism
The Episcopal Church USA (ECUSA) is one of the most radical and woke ecclesiastical bodies in the world, and the American wing of world Anglicanism is firmly in the hands of the Long March. Fortunately, the structure of Anglicanism – being focused on validly ordained bishops more than seeing unity with the Archbishop of Canturbury – gives conservative Anglicans more options.
When the Episcopal Church began to “ordain” women, a group of bishops, priests, and parishes severed their ties with Canterbury and became known as the Anglican Catholic Church (ACC). They are conservative, traditional, and anti-woke. There are other “continuing Anglicans” that are an option.
Lutheranism
Lutherans in the United States are divided among the radically woke Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) – which supports every Leftist and Socialist cause imaginable, including sexual deviancy and goddess worship – and the more conservative church bodies, chief of which are the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod (LCMS), Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS), and the Evangelical Lutheran Synod (ELS). Of these three, the LCMS is the largest. But even in the LCMS, there is a loud minority pushing the woke ideology upon the majority and mainstream of that church body. The Rev. Dr. Gregory Schulz recently blew the whistle on wokeness in one of the LCMS’s universities, and was removed from his classes and banned from campus. There is a strong movement in the LCMS to quash wokeness.
This is a cautionary tale for all conservative church bodies not to say, “That’ll never happen here.” Don’t underestimate the power of the Old Evil Foe.
So if your congregation is woke, it will likely be ELCA. You can generally find an LCMS church anywhere where there are ELCA congregations. If your LCMS church is going woke, you might be able to save it, as the leadership of the church leans well-conservative, and as the wishy-washy baby boomers die off, the LCMS seems to be moving in a more conservative direction.
Reformed/Presbyterian
Presbyterians are likewise divided between hardcore liberals who long ago fell to the Socialists in the Long March, conservatives who are fighting to maintain their church’s status quo, and smaller independent congregations.
The Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA) is the most liberal and woke. The Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) is a more conservative church body, as is the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC). The Evangelical Presbyterian Church (EPC) is less woke than the PCUSA, but more so than the others.
Fortunately, if you are in an area where there are Reformed and Presbyterian churches, you should be able to find one that is conservative.
Methodism
The United Methodist Church (UMC) is anything but. The denomination is currently undergoing a split over the issue of homosexuality. If you find yourself stuck in a woke parish, find one from the conservative faction. You will not be able to reform the Long March United Methodists. They are a lost cause.
Baptists
Baptists tend to be far more independent as congregations. This is a double-edged sword, as this means that you can find Leftist extremists even flying the flag of conservative denominational labels. The once arch-conservative Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) is fighting for its life against an emerging woke faction. As a Baptist, you may just have to go church shopping. Fortunately, you are part of the largest confession in America. You should be able to land on your feet.
Pentecostalism
Pentecostal Churches tend toward conservatism, but their decentralized nature can lead to some major differences between them. Some may be very conservative in matters of sexuality, but may at the same time be woke on matters of Critical Race Theory (CRT). The same advice stands: shop around.
Non-Denominationalism
By their nature, Non-Denom Churches are independent. They may be woke, they may be conservative. If your church is woke, chances are, you just need to move on.
Eastern Orthodoxy
The Eastern Orthodox Churches tend to be in a position to fight off wokeness because of their inherent traditionalism and conservatism. But even there, the woke ideology is making surprising gains. The late Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, a popular teaching theologian and convert to Orthodoxy, seemed to signal some acceptance of committed homosexual relationships in 2018.
Earlier this year, Greek Orthodox Archbishop Elpidophoros raised eyebrows by conducting a high profile baptism on behalf of a celebrity homosexual couple that has custody of children by means of surrogacy.
This is yet another example of the need to be vigilant and not fall back on the attitude that the Fabians and the Long Marchers are counting on: “That’ll never happen here.”
Conclusion:
If your church is woke, it is probably too late to fix it. If you stay and fight, fight to win. Make use of denominational resources if available. You may need to become active in your local congregation’s government. It may well also get ugly. Weigh the cost against the likely outcome.
If you must leave, research your options. Carefully examine the websites and social media accounts of possible new churches. Talk to your friends. Visit. Don’t be afraid to ask the pastor tough questions. Chances are, you’ll be able to tell quickly if you are dealing with a woke church or not.
If you find a new congregation that shares your conservative values, throw yourself into it with your full support: your time, your talent, and your treasure. Encourage your friends to leave their woke churches and join you in a congregation that is not falling for the Marxist grift. Remember that your church is first and foremost about Jesus and the cross.
The faith is not a means to political conservatism, but political liberalism is often the downfall of a theologically conservative church. Keep the secular and the ecclesiastical in their own realms, while not being so naïve as to think that political wokeness is compatible with Christianity.
Our Lord Jesus Himself is the one who warned us to “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves” (Matt 7:15).
--
Rev. Larry Beane
Pastor, Salem Lutheran Church
Gretna, LA
"In our churches Mass is celebrated every Sunday and on other festivals when the sacrament is offered to those who wish for it after they have been examined and absolved. We keep traditional liturgical forms, such as the order of the lessons, prayers, vestments, etc."
-- Apology 24:1
The BEC is quite grateful to Pastor Beane.
As a lagniappe for The BEC community, you may appreciate this insightful and very recent conversation between Jordan Peterson and Yoram Hazony:
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Thank you, BEC!