We’ve heard about so-called “Woke” policies, but what we need is not more people woke; we need more people awake.

Hi, I’m Rex Rogers and this is episode #111 of Discerning What Is Best, a podcast applying unchanging biblical principles in a rapidly changing world, and a Christian worldview to current issues and everyday life.

For some time now, reaching back before COVID, I have become increasingly concerned with the direction the United States and American culture have taken.

As I’ve noted before in other podcasts, if you are of a certain age, you could be forgiven if you say you don’t recognize your own country. Things have changed that much, and most of it for the worse.

As a believer trusting the sovereignty of God, these changes do not frighten me, but then again, I do not like them, and I believe these changes are a child of not simply wrong ideas but evil intent.

Another thing that bothers me is that I really don’t think that most people, i.e., the average person, however you want to define that phrase, is aware of how significantly and rapidly things have changed and are changing. I don’t state this observation in an arrogant way, meaning I know something no one else knows.

I don’t mean to imply that others are not smart, though they may be uninformed, just as I am uninformed about a host of things that do not happen to interest me or about which I haven’t heard. But still, I believe many hard-working, decent Americans, whatever their faith, may not be aware of the extensiveness of social change taking place and the threat it introduces.

To illustrate, let’s talk for a few minutes about politics and ideology.

When I write these podcasts, as I did long ago in blogs or writing content for a radio program that I voiced for Cornerstone University’s radio station WCSG, called “Making a Difference,” I try not to be intentionally partisan. I don’t want to write like another party hack, someone who thinks his or her political party and its leaders can do no wrong. Because for one, this is one of our problems today. 

Too many if not most media outlets and most journalists if they can be called that anymore are simply partisan advocates. They do not seek truth, only political advantage, leverage, and like-minded listenership. 

I don’t want to write more partisan drivel. I want to try to think critically, and I want to attempt to apply a Christian worldview to issues and events, which means I have to be free to critique not just the Democrats but also the Republicans, and Independents along with everyone else.

But things have changed markedly in just the few years since year 2000, and especially since COVID.

For one, the Democrat Party is now virtually entirely controlled by its most liberal or some would say, radical, wing.

Almost nothing leading Democrat politicians say or do, including especially President Joe Biden and VP Kamala Harris, and their Administration, presents anything but socialist policies enhancing big government and undermining personal property and free enterprise, then promoting immoral sexual libertinism, fear-mongering intended to increase their political power, climate change voodoo, authoritarian ideas dismissing freedom of speech, the press, or even religion, a promotion of irrational egalitarianism and victimhood, soft-on-crime lawlessness, globalist anti-Americanism, warped science, and abortion on demand as a civil right.

Well, you say, thank God for the Republican Party and its political leaders. Maybe, but mostly they are not much better. Not anymore.

Republicans, the supposedly fiscally conservative party, have participated in increasing the National Debt to its current level of $33 Trillion, run scared of end-of-the-world climate change lobbies, are just as susceptible as others to fear-mongering, ever-increasing taxes, immoral sexual practices, and a wishy-washiness on southern border security, and more.

Both party’s leaders have engaged in intentional prevarication, a fancy word for lying. Both party’s leading candidates for President in 2024 come with a long list of character flaws; neither is a paragon of virtue.

Worse than all this, I think most people do not realize America is no longer a two-party system, Democrat and Republican. No, now there is a group called Progressives, an inaccurate euphemism for The Left or Leftists or Leftism, an ideology wholly different from traditional conservatism or classical liberalism, an ideology promoting views that FDR, JFK, and Martin Luther King, Jr would not recognize.

Progressives lodge mostly in the Democrat Party, but they have plenty of allies within the Republican Party, especially among younger voices.

I’d rather call Progressives what they are – Socialist Leftists – but this is awkward wording, so I’ll stick with Progressives.

Progressives are not the same as Liberals. I’ve talked about this before in a podcasts called “Not Liberal But Left, That’s the Threat,” and “What the Left Believes.”

Progressives “hold that it is possible to improve human societies through political action.”Progressives are leftist, radical, secularist, socialist, Marxist, anti-American ideologues who are pushing an unrelenting attack on America’s history, culture, and core values. They are anti-Judeo-Christianity and its moral code, anti-meritocracy, pro-political correctness, anti-education in terms of critical thinking and objective truth while promoting indoctrination of their political narrative focusing upon what they call social justice.

Progressives have made climate change a religion and work to persecute anyone who disagrees with their views. Many of them would love China’s new social credit system that tracks how citizens behave and records demerits on their record for officials to reference later.

Progressives are anti-family, primarily because they are godless libertines who want the world to become non-binary and androgynous.

Let me repeat, Progressives or Leftists are not the same as Liberals. They embrace ideas and values – radical leftist ideologies – old fashioned Liberals would never have understood, not the least of which is anti-patriotism and anti-Americanism. Progressives are operating like a political party, but they are not organized as such and are therefore virtually unaccountable.

Progressives are masterful in making their message the prevailing acceptable narrative. “Progressives ask: ‘What is unfair?’ ‘What am I owed?’ ‘What has offended me today?’ ‘What must my country do for me?” They are not working in America’s best interest but in the service of a divisive, demoralizing, destructive political destination they market as an utopian heaven on earth.

Progressives promote racist “diversity seminars” in the name of, you guessed it, anti-racism. Their god is not equality before the law or equal opportunity, but DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion, words, and initiatives used to bludgeon institutions into obeisance to woke rules, beginning with public schools and universities and working out to entertainment, sports, corporations, and government.

Progressives, or the Left, and the millions now in their thrall, are a perfect example of what the Apostle Paul talked about in 2 Thess. 2:9-12, “The coming of the lawless one will be in accordance with how Satan works. He will use all sorts of displays of power through signs and wonders that serve the lie, and all the ways that wickedness deceives those who are perishing. They perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie and so that all will be condemned who have not believed the truth but have delighted in wickedness.”

People are operating today under what the Bible calls a powerful or strong delusion. As the Apostle Peter said, people “deliberately forget” or in other Bible versions, are “willingly ignorant” (2 Pet. 3:5).

Deliberately, willingly believing a lie rather than the truth. There could not be a more apt description of American culture today.

Erwin Lutzer observed that “secular progressivism is a passion to profane what is sacred. Anything that dismantles Christian influence and enhances the Left’s power is progressive. It seeks to deconstruct American laws and systems to replace them with socialism and tyranny.”

What I fear is not Progressives. What I fear is that many Christians and the average American are asleep. We do not need to be “woke,” but we certainly need to be awake. We must recognize that the battle has long-since been joined, that Leftist Progressives have all but taken over American culture.

Every day, ideas and values contrary to American Judeo-Christian foundational values that allowed this country to grow and flourish, are being systematically taught in American public education, kindergarten through graduate school.

Every day, youth are taught not to sacrifice, work hard, delay gratification, control impulses, act with integrity and moral restraint, but rather to make demands about what they consider theirs by right. 

Every day, Leftist Progressive values are integrated in television programming, including cartoons, and every day, these anti-biblical values are being repeatedly messaged in commercials. 

The Left, so-called Progressives, are more in control, more influential, more threatening than Liberalism, Democrats or Republicans.

We need people to wake up, reject the woke, and recognize Leftist Progressives for what they are, the enemy within.

Well, we’ll see you again soon. This podcast is about Discerning What Is Best. If you find this thought-provoking and helpful, follow us on your favorite podcast platform. Download an episode for your friends. For more Christian commentary, check my website, r-e-x-m as in Martin, that’s rexmrogers.com. 

And remember, it is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm.

© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2023    

*This podcast blog may be reproduced in whole or in part with a full attribution statement. Contact me or read more commentary on current issues and events at www.rexmrogers.com/, or connect with me at www.linkedin.com/in/rexmrogers.