The Deification Of Victimhood Is Impossible Without the Weaponization Of Words
When a theology steeped in the primacy of language is assailed by revisionism, can such a theology maintain its cultural influence?
"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.” - George Orwell, “1984”1
“Watch your language.”
“Careful what you say.”
“Bite your tongue.”
How many times did you hear that as a kid? Me, it was at least every day of my life.
The things I said, the way I said them - my parents did their best to ensure I never spoke inappropriately for my age or my audience.
Now, mind you, it wasn’t any inherent goodness they had to restrain. They didn’t need to tell me to stop blessing others.
It was how to control my words. How to weather the words of others against me. “Sticks and stones” and all that.
Language, after all, is everything.
Language controls, conceals, and destroys.
Language builds up and tears down.
Its power is not in creating reality but rather expressing the desired will of others to impose upon that reality.
Language is central to the Gospel. In fact, Christ Jesus - God the Son - is called the Word of God in Scripture - the logos, the very expression of the Divine Nature.
Today, language is being weaponized to assault that one institution that not even the gates of hell can oppose: the living church of Jesus Christ.
Think pronouns. Think "racism". Think "peaceful protests". They want to change how you speak so they can change how you think.
Under the banner of what’s referred to Critical Race Theory/Critical Theory (CRT), the English language - and all it entails, all of its privileges, powers and reach - is being assailed by institutions both religious and secular, most notably American corporations hoping to convince employee and millennial cool kids that, hey, record profit margins are, like, super chill.
While this is manifesting itself in all sorts of ways throughout corporate America, its most brazen incarnation is the push to normalize hatred towards a specific people group - namely white (and generally Christian) Americans.
The most asinine and inherently contradictory tenet of the woke religion is what I like to refer to as the secular version of Calvinism’s total depravity doctrine - “racism everywhere”.
Just for starters: (h/t Christopher Rufo)
Verizon instructing its workforce to determine whether they are the “oppressors” or the “oppressed”;
Bank of America telling employees America is a “system of white supremacy”;
Google “anti-racism” initiative which teaches that all Americans are “raised to be racist”; and
CBS promoting CRT thinkers and ideology in its corporate communications and workshops and intimidating its Christian employees.
Of course, this is merely a taste of the ideological slop currently being force-fed to corporate employees across the U.S. - never branded as CRT, but unmistakably derivative of CRT nonetheless.
Under this new movement, all the theological terms introduced millennia ago under the banner of Christianity have been redefined or altogether removed from their original meaning as to create a new reality for today’s youth.
To be wise as serpents is now “woke”.
The utter and total depravity of the human race is now “whiteness”.
The act of rectifying historic wrongs by demeaning and systematically marginalizing those of a particular skin color or religion is now “equity”.
The exclusivity of eternal salvation found only in Christ Jesus is now the fight for “inclusion” for those who reject God’s free gift.
The mandated promotion of nonwhites in the workplace - even at the expense of demonstrated skill or talent - is now known as “diversity”.
The eternal reality of God’s justice for unrepentant sinners is now the secular religion of “social justice” for nonwhites.
What’s been removed is nothing less than the moral authority and person of the Judge Himself. It’s a world religion tailor-made for idolators who worship the creation (the human race) rather than the Creator.
In His place: the deification of victimhood through Orwellian language modification, up to and including the entire removal of certain prohibited modes of expression.
Words.
You know the words.
They’re the ones you’re not allowed to say in public.
They’re the ones no longer acceptable to use lest you incur the wrath of HR or Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, et al.
Not merely the swear words, but those which are only allowed to be spoken by some and not others.
The words this author is unable to write without fear of being censored or cancelled.
Since 2020, the “don’t say x” movement has picked up considerable momentum, finding its Reichstag moment in the global COVID theater, specifically following a summer of unrest that had its origins, we were told over and over again, in “systemic racism”.
It’s even spilled over into that former bastion of objectivity and bias-free reporting: the mainstream media newsroom.
The phenomena was birthed in 2020 during the “mostly peaceful protests” over the death of George Floyd, which resulted in 18 lives lost and as much as $2 billion in damages.
You know, from so much peacefulness.
Since 2020, “race and justice” reporters - which race? whose justice? - have appeared in almost monolithic fashion across the MSM asset spectrum to report the breaking news that America and Americans - at least those of a certain skin color - are super racist.
These “experts’” sole assignment was to persuade John Q. Public that what they saw with their own eyes simply wasn't what they think they saw.
Instead, we were told, the “violence” of language was the real culprit.
Take, for example, this headline from "race and social justice reporter" Julian Glover with ABC7 News in Los Angeles.
Notice there was no public condemnation in this editorial, no push-back against the community’s response, not even a whimper of an argument against using violence to address socioeconomic unrest.
No, Mr. Glover needed to be crystal clear: language is the most heinous crime committed here, not theft, burglary, destruction of private property, etc.
It’s “smash-and-grab”, not “looting”, you racists. How can you be so cruel?
Meanwhile, proprietors of those stores that were targeted in this “protest” lost $40,000 in merchandise from a Lululemon store and $7,000 in sunglasses from Westfield Valley Fair Mall in San Jose.
To say nothing of the trauma of watching your business or workplace scavenged and destroyed.
But don’t you dare say the (new and improved) “L-word”.
It begins to make more sense when you remember another phrase that has been surreptitiously - but very much officially - removed in the Godless State.
Back in the days of pre-COVID California, when state officials were preoccupied with squandering the state’s budget surplus and giving away hotel rooms to drug addicts, the city of San Francisco decided it would no longer use “felon”, “offender” and “criminal” in its official communications.
Instead, a convicted felon is now called a “justice-involved person” or - even more laughable - a “returning resident”. Young lawbreakers, meanwhile, are no longer juvenile “delinquents” but rather “a young person impacted by the juvenile justice system”.
Notice, once you stop laughing, at the passive tense utilized in these phrases.
They imply not an active role on the part of the person designated by the term - essentially that someone did something - but rather an external and implicitly unwarranted burden upon that person, in this case, the law.
Even if they also (allegedly) killed a human or destroyed their property.
Almost as though the criminal is now the victim.
Meanwhile, San Francisco, once known for its cable cars and steep rolling hills, now faces a soaring homeless rate, rampant crime, and human feces and drug needles littering its once storied streets.
But at least city officials can sleep well in their gated homes knowing the words “convicted felon” won’t be used on their watch.
Gotta love California.
In January, Pope Francis denounced cancel culture as “ideological colonization” in response to a draft European Union document that outlined speech guidelines that sought to replace the use of “Christmas” with the more generic and ultimately meaningless “holiday season”.
Francis specifically took aim at the attempt to secularize the name of the Christmas holiday as "a form of ideological colonization, one that leaves no room for freedom of expression and is now taking the form of the 'cancel culture' invading many circles and public institutions".
His speech deserves an entire post on its own, but suffice to say for now, simply by juxtaposing cancel culture with colonization, the leader of the world’s largest religious denomination bravely - and correctly - called it for what it is.
I don’t agree with the Big Poppa of Catholicism2 much on anything, but here we find some common theological ground.
We hear so much about “decolonizing” American institutions lately, because Christians coming to share the Gospel with the indigenous heathen was basically genocide and, besides, there are just too many darn white folks, dont’cha know?
But in fact, America itself is experiencing a 21st-century version of neocolonialism, in the form of cancel culture and social media censorship - two unmistakable imports from the Soviet era and other communistic regimes3.
So with the Pope’s statement in mind - is it so difficult to see the assault on language as a new and far more subtle form of colonization that seeks not the seizure of land but rather language?
All you conservatives and on-fire Christians who say you want to take back your nation, take back the culture - first, you have to take back the language.
We need to confront empty nonsensical abstract words and ideas and expose them for what they are - inherently vacuous and absent of any real objective meaning.
Remember: they’ve just spent the last how many years telling us the word boy doesn’t mean boy, the word girl doesn’t mean girl.
They’ve told us riots are peaceful and language is violence.
They’ve told us men can have babies and intolerance toward Biblical faith is actually tolerance.
They’ve changed definitions on you left and right, and yet while we struggled to catch up, we’ve allowed them to impose a Bolveshiek revolutionary standard upon a once-devout and vibrant people and then let them shame us with it.
Stand up.
Reject it.
Call it what it is.
By name.
(Editor’s note: I promise I’ve read more books than Orwell’s “1984” and yet for the second time in as many posts I had the irresistible compulsion to quote it again, this time in regard to language and its ultimate means by “the Party”, which for our purposes here will be played by the media elite.)
“Cancel Culture Is A Dangerous Totalitarian Trend”, Reason, Aug. 2020