Judas, Congress, and the Betrayal of the Family

The oldest institution on the planet, the family, is being betrayed. To understand this woke, trendy betrayal, let’s do a little Lenten reflection and consider the most famous traitor of all time: Judas Iscariot. Judas was a social-justice warrior—a well-connected Ethno-zealot deeply concerned about the injustices wrought by Roman imperialism. But, was he woke?

The Cambridge Dictionary defines wokeness as, “a state of being aware, especially of social problems such as racism and inequality,” an entry so new that perhaps we need to round it out a bit by giving a current example from a very woke institution, the 117^th Congress.

Zealous, supposedly woke congresspersons ask the important questions; for example, how dare we refer to family members by traditional, non-inclusive titles such as father or mother? This is the pressing issue that the 117^th Congress felt compelled to put immediately to rest by adopting House rules barring members from using intimate traditional family titles either on the house floor or written into legislation, replacing all common pronouns with “gender-neutral” pronouns so that no one will feel left out (as someone who’s not gender-neutral, I feel left out). But is this Congress truly woke, or just engaging in theatre?

And how about Judas Iscariot? Woke or not? Pre-Christian Judaism was a religion of preparation for the Messiah who would rescue Israel from exile. For Judas and ilk, that hope incessantly degraded to the hope, not for The Messiah and spiritual salvation from the fall of Adam, but for some fantasized version of a messiah and an eternal recapitulation of the glory of Solomon. The real Messiah, of course, had come to fight battles other than those that interested Judas.

Though Christ’s victory was final, the battle he came to fight, and his engagement with the culture, was not unlike that of the prophets before him. Like them, perhaps the greatest battle any of us will ever have to fight may be with those nearest us who do not want us to improve, lest in doing so we raise the bar. For example, no serious drunk wants to lose a drinking buddy; at least, certainly not to sobriety. It’s not about the buddy, and it’s really not even about the drinking—it’s about the need for unearned affirmation; in other words, it’s about misery-loving company.

It’s about sin equity.

One’s comfort zone firmly resists the raising of the spiritual bar. Many may actually say, “Lord knows I’ve got my problems, but hey—I’m no worse than the next guy.” Jesus, of course, is the quintessential spiritual bar-raiser. He assured us that no man is a prophet in his own land, or amongst his own kin. Standing out from the crowd for one’s personal virtue or unbridled honesty does not bode well socially; in fact, it has often been just as deadly for Christ’s followers as it was for the Savior himself.

In our own times, the push toward a fully egalitarian culture is ultimately the push to make everyone equally sinful. We’re not talking here about temperance, about an Aristotelian path of moderation and restraint. Setting the bar at a normative level of sinfulness aims to completely obliterate any social pressure toward real justice. It brings the dumb, numb peace that comes with wallowing in an immense comfort zone—a false peace that cannot be maintained in the presence of prophets.

As evidenced by the Congressional rules change, there is a powerful element within our culture attempting to stigmatize anything or anyone that is pro-family as backward and intolerant. Celebrating family, marriage, life, existence—or heaven forbid, what used to be normalcy—has now been labeled the insensitive bragging of white privilege. Just ask the 117^th Congress. The family has been canceled. This, they would have you believe, is the new normal.

As it becomes statistically clear that making sodomy an acceptable social institution has in no way paved the way for improving fulfillment within those relationships, and of therefore improving their longevity, no path toward social legitimacy remains but to further demonize, in any way possible, the privileged nature of stable, normal family relations.

We must have equality of outcome—we must have sin equity. The U.S. House of Representatives rules about the insensitivity of using normal family titles in congressional communications and legislation is just the tip of a very treacherous iceberg.

Our grandparents witnessed the waning of the clearly racist pseudoscience of phrenology, the insidious rise of the uber-racist pseudo-theory, eugenics, and of course the triumph, such as it was, of the murderous social faux-science of Marxism. As we witness the acceptance of the Marxist drivel embedded in critical race theory and are told to honor every gender pretender, while surgeons carve up bodies in the vain attempt to make sexual pretense physical reality, we can hardly ignore academia’s complicity in the lowering of the bar—in the effort to ensure universal sinfulness. The current pseudo-theories contain no more scientific meat than did phrenology or eugenics.

Congress’ end-game—their coup de grâce—is the passing of an Equality Act, a brazen regimen to force upon us complicity in the crimes of our generation—we will be complicit or we will be persecuted.

Jesus spoke of being rejected in one’s own land and by one’s own kin. But what if there are no borders? No countries—no “one’s own land”? What if the concept of the family became amorphous? What if forced complicity cleverly disguised as inclusivity destroys all cultural differentiation? Whom does a prophet convert then?

Morally anesthetizing the population requires shielding them from anything remotely resembling a prophet, because prophets don’t go along to get along. Woke leaders are assigned; all others, are maligned. The all-important selection of leaders must be a controlled process.

It is not enough for a prophet to be rejected in his own land, by his own kin; all the globe must become his own land and all humanity must become his own kin without differentiation: a global, faceless kinship, ensuring every potential prophet’s unilateral/universal rejection. In fake-woke-land, the truth cannot stand on its own. It is neither discovered nor uncovered; it is decreed to meet the need—therefore, prophecy cannot be tolerated.

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you,” Jesus lamented. The Temple and the Praetorium scratched each other’s backs. Prophets never fare well when society is strategically monolithic, a simple historical reality cleverly leveraged by the demonic.

Progressivism changes from month to month, but its most enduring and least endearing quality is its monolithic nature; it has no room for prophets, past or present. What is culture but the annals of prophecy? To cancel culture is to prosecute prophecy out of existence. Allegedly wise, woke leaders will be appointed—and unappointed—frequently. The intelligentsia—the Temple and the Praetorium—will let you know if you’ve been appointed, and trust me, you’ll know when you’ve been unappointed.

As mentioned, Judas was a zealot, an ideolog whose ideology justified whatever means became necessary to achieve the desired end. The Judases among us today are ideological as well, and though they both hale from and promote a rigidly monolithic culture, unlike the culture of the original Judas and ilk, these new traitors are openly Godless.

All of the racial strife of past centuries has only been a demonic practice run, and the traitors of God and humanity are, via the race-baiting of critical race theory, busy trying to lead us back to that same, tired distraction. But the next contest, the one they want to draw our attention away from, is for our very existence—the culture known simply as “family” is on the chopping block.

An avalanche of anti-racist rhetoric pours out of D.C., but is racism really a focus of the 117^th Congress or the Biden presidency? Of course not. For them, enemy number one is the family, because families inculcate and enculturate and simply cannot be trusted with the fate of the world. A multiplicity of families doing their own thing creates a multiplicity of ideas, and ideas are very dangerous things.

So, was Judas woke? Let’s remember that the apostles abandoned Christ and that Peter was, to a great extent, a traitor. But Peter did not abandon the hope of Christ for any false hope in the here and now. His sin was one of weakness, not wokeness. Judas, however, was naïve enough to believe that the Pharisees actually hoped for the coming of a Solomon-Esque kingdom that would reign eternally. He was indeed woke, too woke to see that neither pharisee nor scribe had any real interest in anything other than selfish short-term gain.

Jesus did not excoriate Judas as he did the Pharisees. Though Judas liked money and power, those things were not the primary drivers of his decisions. Had they been, he would have had no cause to take his own life. No. Like many in our own day, Judas, despite his innate intelligence, education, and business acuity, proved himself to be a starry-eyed, disposable pawn—a social-justice warrior conscripted by the Pharisees and scribes, only to be cast aside as a useless, dangerous fool when their immediate purposes had been served. When it became clear that he had been used, his world dissolved before his eyes.

Today, many in government, medicine, industry, academia, and the Church wear wokeness on their sleeves, but it is just a Pharisaical banner raised to attract and rally the lost and ill-advised—the truly woke. Jesus did not shout at bullying Roman soldiers, adulterers, thieves, or ethno-zealots. Why did he shout his indignation at the Pharisees? Because, of all evils, the most abysmal is that which, in the name of God or good, leverages the sincerity of others—such as it may be—toward an evil end.

If we would make our prayer the most efficient it can be, let it be for our worthy enemies—that is, let it be for the truly woke: the useful, disposable pawns of the world—that they will not succumb to the despair that is the nature of their lot; that we will all become woke to the love of Christ and to his sacrificial death and resurrection and become truly useful for the Kingdom of God—starry-eyed pawns for Christ.