Last Sunday’s shocking news of anti-ICE protesters disrupting worship at a Southern Baptist Church (SBC) in Minneapolis should sober American Christians to a new reality. Woke Religion is here to stay—and fight. Far from being put away, this competing system clearly still means to assert itself in the American public square over our traditional forms of religion.

The Woke Religion—with all of its dogmas, its categories of sin, its priestly class, and its path to salvation (scapegoating)—is an attempt to fill the religious void left by Christianity’s removal from the public square. (Side note: If wokeness as a religion is a new concept to you, I highly recommend Joshua Mitchell’s American Awakening as well as John McWhorter’s book Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America). 

This fact should unnerve American Christians of all denominational tribes. When one religion succeeds another as a society’s dominant public orthodoxy, it usually goes poorly for the predecessor religion. From Islam’s suppression of dhimmis, to the French Revolution’s slaughter of priests, to Communism’s murder of nuns in Spain, Christian peasants in Russia, and Confucianist monks in China, we see a near-universal pattern. It doesn’t matter if the predecessor religion is non-threatening. Mere reminders of the old order are an affront to the new order, and the new order solidifies its own legitimacy by demonstrating its ability to crush the old. Ancient rights and usages are often swept aside to make way for the new. 

During times of upheaval, often while the outcome is still in question, it is common that members of a predecessor religion will preemptively surrender and signal their intent not to resist. In Soviet Russia, the Renovationist faction sprang up in the 1920s as an attempt to modernize the Russian Orthodox Church. In the early days, Renovationists enjoyed the backing of the Soviet regime, denouncing adherents to traditionalist forms of Orthodoxy and, in many cases, enjoying assets seized from traditional Orthodox churches. But their moment was short-lived. In Stalin’s Great Purges of 1937-38, at least 86 Renovationist Bishops were executed, with countless followers killed, tortured, or sent to work in the tundra.

Until recently, the Woke Religion has generally not presented as directly hostile to traditional Christianity. It has at times even adopted language and concepts that, from a distance, appear compatible with Christianity, if one squints a little. The Woke Religion speaks of justice (Who can argue with that? Have you even read Micah 6:8?). The Woke Religion encourages adherents to lay down their privilege, as Christ set aside His (conveniently forgetting that Christ condescended to us, so that we could have the privilege of being raised with Him). 

Even though the absurdities should have been obvious to all from the start, in the early days, some SBC leaders bought into the idea that the Woke Religion and Christianity could be reconciled. Russell Moore, who led the SBC’s think tank, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), famously celebrated the decline of Christianity as a cultural force in America. Under Moore’s tenure, the ERLC was sympathetic to various social justice causes and also highly critical of Trump’s ICE, which the ERLC accused of “violating the tenets of our faith.” So too, J.D. Greear, the then-President of the SBC and pastor of one of the convention’s most influential churches, endorsed Black Lives Matter as a “gospel issue.” There are innumerable examples that could be cited across many of America’s Protestant denominations and even the Roman Catholic Church.

By all accounts, Cities Church is not a culture-warring church. The vast majority of their ministry revolves around preaching the Gospel, walking through scripture expositionally, worship, and faithful practice of the sacraments and discipleship. I’d bet good money that there’s not a single member of the church who could credibly be called a white supremacist. As in most urban evangelical churches, there’s probably a diversity of political views in the congregation. Nonetheless, Cities Church became a target merely for having a lay pastor (what other ecclesiologies will often call a “lay elder” or “ruling elder”) who works for ICE.

Nonetheless, Cities Church was explicitly targeted in toto—not just their one lay elder who works for ICE, but as a body. In the aftermath of the protest, Don Lemon has repeatedly asserted without a shred of evidence that Cities Church is “white supremacist.” In the Woke Religion, making this accusation is akin to designating a person or group as an enemy of all mankind. For the Woke Religion, the need to punish such a group overrides all concerns, even constitutional concerns. 

If the days of American Christians attempting to appease the Woke Religion are finally coming to a close, stories like what happened at Cities Church will be a big part of the reason why. 

But if the Woke Religion wins, no amount of winsomeness or political neutrality (no matter how well-intentioned) will shield your church from the mob. You will not be able to have a man who enforces our nation’s borders as a lay elder, no matter how qualified he might otherwise be. “It’s not enough to not be pro-ICE. You must be actively anti-ICE.” 

That’s the really sobering part. In the end, even the Constitution by itself won’t shield your church either if the Woke Religion wins. One might be tempted to brush aside Don Lemon’s ignorant invocation of the First Amendment to Pastor Jonathan Parnell. Most Americans know that the First Amendment binds state actors, not churches or other private actors, and doesn’t override private property rights. The disruption of a church service would never have been permitted under the old common law; at the very least, it is a trespass. In addition to the common law of any state, a number of federal statutes, such as the FACE Act and the KKK Act, criminalize targeted harassment of religious groups. 

So, the illegality of the protest is clear under black-letter law at both the state and federal levels. Or is it? Rights on paper don’t mean a whole lot if there isn’t someone willing to enforce them. On a podcast with Don Lemon, a day after the protest, Minnesota’s Attorney General Keith Ellison breezily dismissed any legal claims that might be made against the protest. It is difficult to overstate the legal absurdity and dishonesty of Ellison’s position, but that’s missing the real point. Ellison won’t enforce the law because, politically, he can get away with not enforcing the law. 

The practical effect is this: If Cities Church is going to get any justice at all, it will get justice from the Trump DOJ. Justice for Cities Church seems likely. But it’s hard to be sanguine about how a Democrat-controlled DOJ would proceed.

In the short term, the Cities Church incident will prompt a lot of good and rigorous thinking about church security, emergency response plans, legal strategies, etc., all of which are necessary and salutary. But the deeper question is how American Christianity will contend with the increasingly direct hostility of the Woke Religion and its willingness to sweep aside ancient constitutional protections. 

This is not a fight that most Christians picked, or ever wanted, but it is coming. This reality will have far-reaching implications that we are just beginning to consider.