In the Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche criticized Christianity as a religion for the weak that teaches “slave morality.” He illustrated this with a story about lambs and the birds of prey that eat them. Nietzsche suggested that if the lambs invented a morality, it would be inverted, depicting the powerful birds of prey—their natural “masters”—as evil and the vulnerable lambs—the natural “slaves”—as good. Nietzsche believed the birds of prey should follow their instincts, and so considered this type of inverted morality deeply unnatural:
To require of strength that it should not express itself as strength, that it should not be a wish to overpower, a wish to overthrow, a wish to become master, a thirst for enemies and antagonisms and triumphs, is just as absurd as to require of weakness that it should express itself as strength.
Recently, billionaire and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel agreed with Nietzsche—sort of. Appearing on the TriggerNometry podcast, Thiel criticized “woke” political ideology for its fixation on victimhood and suggested that it got that fixation from Christianity:
Christianity, the main religion of the Western world, always takes the side of the victim … And maybe you should think of wokeness as ‘ultra-Christianity’ or ‘hyper-Christianity.’ It’s just like an extreme intensification … and there’s no forgiveness … you still have Original Sin, and you have all these bad things that happened in the past, the past is terrible, and you can never overcome it. But there surely is a religious interpretation of this…
Thiel then pointed out that although churches and organized religion have been in decline, people have not become “atheist” or “rationalist” en masse. Instead, they have adopted a “woke religion” that borrows Christianity’s belief about the meek being blessed and the least being greatest, but without Christianity’s God, Savior, theology, or Church. This woke religion also lacks atonement, and so it endlessly demands that the “oppressed” be elevated above their “oppressors.”
Is he right? Is “woke” ideology a form of “hyper-Christianity”? Well, yes and no.
It may sound strange to those who’ve watched Christians oppose progressive ideas about marriage, sexuality, race, and gender in recent decades. But this division of society into oppressors and oppressed, and the instinct to take the side of the oppressed, really is a distortion of Christianity. It certainly didn’t come from pagan worldviews.
Atheist historian Tom Holland described in his book Dominion how Greeks and Romans would have been baffled by modern concepts of “equality” and “human rights.” The Caesars would have balked at our instinct to lift up the oppressed. Instead of birds of prey, Holland likened these powerful, pre-Christian civilizations to carnivorous dinosaurs. Both the Romans and T. Rex, he said, are exciting precisely because they’re “big, fierce, [and] extinct.” And thank God they are.
Despite Holland’s boyhood admiration for the empires of old, he confessed he was revolted when he learned about their morality:
It was not just the extremes of callousness that unsettled me but the complete lack of any sense that the poor or the weak might have the slightest intrinsic value.
It was Christianity—with its God crucified under a Roman governor—that changed all that; the religion of Jesus instilled in the Western mind this belief that everyone has inherent worth, and that the strong are answerable for how they treat the weak, precisely because God identified with the weak. It really was an inversion of pagan morality. But this inversion was God’s way of putting a fallen world right side up.
Yet, contrary to Thiel’s analysis, by rejecting the Christian God and His revelation, the modern social justice movement has veered far from Christianity. It has jettisoned the worldview in which we are beloved-but-fallen creations in need of mercy from our Creator, but still tried to keep the ideas of sin and judgment. The result has been a merciless and insatiable ideology—not a hyper-Christianity, but a sub-Christianity—a Christian heresy. As Anglican priest and apologist Glen Scrivener put it:
In order to pursue the kingdom without the King, we have had to dethrone the person of Christ and install abstract values instead. The problem should be obvious: persons can forgive you; values cannot. Values can only judge you.
If we really are dealing with a Christian heresy, then the response isn’t a political ideology of our own but good theology that embraces all the truths of Christianity.
We truly do live in a world filled with oppression, whether economic, social, sexual, racial, or ethnic. There really are wrongs that cry out for justice, more than we could ever adjudicate. But Christianity alone—the orthodox, biblical kind—recognizes that we’re all on the guilty side in God’s eyes and all in need of His forgiveness.
Neither Nietzsche’s “master morality” nor modern woke heresy answers this deep and fundamental need for reconciliation with each other and with our Creator. Only Jesus can do that, precisely as a Lamb who is weak enough to enter our sorrows and a Lion who is strong enough to overcome our real oppressors of sin and death.
This Breakpoint was co-authored by Shane Morris. If you’re a fan of Breakpoint, leave a review on your favorite podcast app. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to breakpoint.org.
Photo Courtesy: ©Getty Images/Aaron Amat
Published Date: September 13, 2024
The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of CrosswalkHeadlines.
BreakPoint is a program of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. BreakPoint commentaries offer incisive content people can't find anywhere else; content that cuts through the fog of relativism and the news cycle with truth and compassion. Founded by Chuck Colson (1931 – 2012) in 1991 as a daily radio broadcast, BreakPoint provides a Christian perspective on today's news and trends. Today, you can get it in written and a variety of audio formats: on the web, the radio, or your favorite podcast app on the go.
