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“Blind guides! You strain your water, so you will not accidentally swallow a gnat, but you swallow a camel.” — Matthew 23:24 (NLT)
David O. Moberg in a lecture at Marquette University titled, “Holy Masquerade: Hypocrisy in Religion,” addressed the “hypocrisy in the church” that is neglected in research on religion. Hypocrisy is “the practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one’s own behavior does not conform.”
Hypocrisy also overwhelms our politics and even our news – well, some platforms that have news attached to it. Currently, there is a $1.6 billion Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox News. In short, Dominion alleges that Fox News uses “lies” to defame it.
John Adams declared that “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” News is fact. Anything else could be hypocrisy.
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The joy of reading editorial pages is that they allow differing commentators with often very different perspectives, ultimately giving balance to the exchange of thought and thinking. There is no single path to the truth, and it is by testing ideas that we sharpen them and gain greater understanding.
In its many years in print, The T&D quoted Thomas Jefferson who said: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter.”
Books, minds and umbrellas only work if they are open. The editorial section opens minds. In our modern era, Merriam-Webster has defined “stay woke” as “awareness and active attention to important facts and issues, especially racial and social justice.” What is not open is closed. Minds were designed to be open.
Critical thinking as taught in schools encourages questioning, analyzing, interpreting, evaluating and making judgment about what one reads, hears, says or writes. Reasonable people come to reasonable conclusions when facts are presented. Therein lies truth. All inventions and innovations are rooted in thinking.
Returning to Moberg’s lecture, a recent characterization about “the religion of wokism” is analogous to what Moberg contends. Hypocrisy in religion and even in politics is “Defined as simulating qualities in a false pretense of being holy or virtuous.” Moberg further suggested that “hypocrisy is widespread in all domains of life. It has played a significant role in the history of bigotry, wars, persecution and church-state relationships.”
The pushback to “stay woke” is to see aspects of historic fascism. In its definition, “fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation and race.” Sound familiar?
The absence of awareness and active attention to important facts and issues, especially racial and social justice, has resulted in authoritarian states that even led to the Holocaust. Six million Jews and 5 million non-Jews were summarily annihilated. It has its genesis in those unawake.
In America, some are even using Christianity in politics to legislate, though the Constitution recognizes freedom of religion that also suggests that people also have freedom from religion. For “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
To secure these rights, governments are instituted among people, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. America is a pluralistic society and a nation of laws. Its government is to be for and by the people that include every vote counts and the majority rules – not by fiat or by authoritarianism.
America is also now a nation wrestling for its very soul. A former president purported to assume unlimited power without checks and balances of the other two branches of government. As a result, across the nation we see some right-leaning governments banning books, critical race theory, African American studies, adopting measures like “don’t say gay,” eroding women’s health and reproductive rights (Roe vs. Wade), insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, cant and propaganda flooding all mediums, political divisiveness at tribal portions unseen in the modern era, vaccine opponents and unprecedented assertion of unfounded parental rights in schools to enumerate several.
For instance, far-right extremists’ agenda are not just national, for it is true that all politics is local. Groups like Moms for Liberty, the 1776 Project and Patriot Mobile have invested millions to control local school boards as a start to overtake some school districts under a guise of parental rights. However, the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Prince vs. Massachusetts in 1944 declared: “Although parental rights and duties are well-established under federal law, those rights are not absolute. But the family itself is not beyond regulation in the public interest, as against a claim of religious liberty and neither rights of religion nor rights of parenthood are beyond limitation.”
Even in this state, there are efforts to use taxpayers’ dollars to create private schools that will diminish the resources for public education. In 1975, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes famously sang, “Wake Up Everybody,” no more sleeping in bed. Once awake, stay woke.
At the 1965 commencement at Oberlin College in Ohio, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the address, ”Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution.” King said, “There is nothing more tragic than to sleep through a revolution.” Today, it is simply, “stay woke.”
If “Wokism is not only a religion but it is becoming ‘the’ established religion,” as has been penned, it is a fact that “the religion of hypocrisy” has existed since man became a living soul.
Terrence M. Cummings, a native of Orangeburg, is a freelance writer and contributes to The T&D editorial pages. He can be reached at 803-735-8486 and cummingst@icloud.com.
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