Stream founders James Robison and Jay Richards released a powerful, but easy to digest new book called Fight the Good Fight: How an Alliance of Faith and Reason Can Win the Cold War.

We are honored to be able to share with you excerpts from this exceptional collaboration.

To defeat a foe, we must first identify it. What do we call the enemy of faith and reason? It showed its face during the COVID-19 lockdowns and so-called Black Lives Matter riots — which left a huge spike in black homicides in their wake. Many old-school liberals who defend reason and freedom of speech found they’d been displaced by fanatics who care not a whit for truth or honest debate. Most refer to the fanatics’ view as “woke” ideology — and it ain’t pretty.

What is wokeness? We like philosopher Ed Feser’s compact definition: “a paranoid delusional hyper-egalitarian mindset that tends to see oppression and injustice where they do not exist or greatly to exaggerate them where they do.”

The Toxic Witch’s Brew

The “Great Awokening” is a toxic witch’s brew that mixes the worst ideas of the last century:

• Take a half cup of cultural Marxism. Everything is about conflict between some identity group and its oppressors — not just rich vs. poor, owners vs. workers, but men vs. women, black vs. white, gay vs. straight, parent vs. child, “cis” vs. “trans,” and so on, forever and ever.
• Whisk in a fistful of postmodern contempt for reason and truth. Reason in this view doesn’t help us find the truth; it’s just a tool to hide our lust for power. This relativism makes wokeness unstable. That’s why it changes constantly.
• Add another half cup of an impulse so totalitarian that its disciples want to control our words — even our pronouns — and our thoughts. Their solution? Something called “equity,” which seeks to force the same social and economic outcomes on all of us.
• Now stir briskly and heat the concoction to a raging boil.

Ladled to the Masses

That’s wokeness. There are cauldrons of the brew everywhere you look. It’s ladled out to the masses in schools, libraries, on social media, in federal agencies, corporate branding agencies and board rooms, Disney movies, children’s medicine — even many churches. It induces a zombie-like state in those who drink it and paralyzes those who breathe its fumes. It unites government agencies, private corporations, and international groups from the World Economic Forum to the United Nations.

The wokocracy is far worse than big government. It’s a giant conspiratorial blob of governments, nonprofits, and corporations — empowered by technology that the despots of the last century could scarcely have imagined. The wokocracy is coming for our country, our humanity, and for sex itself.

You read that right. For fifty years, the fight against the sexual revolution — a key plank of the leftist agenda — fell mostly to “church ladies” who warned of the evil fruits that would grow if it were left unchecked. Those rotten fruits are now poisoning our children’s minds and bodies. People from all walks of life who are committed to truth — to reality — are wondering how we got here. How did elites across the globe come to believe that chopping off kids’ healthy sex organs is good health care? And that only bigots could oppose this quackery?

Such ideas are outrageous enough to provoke many “liberals” to rethink their politics, their friends, even their worldview. In 2023, physician Kevin Bass spoke for this group on Twitter. “I am a liberal atheist (voted for Biden),” he wrote, “but the woke Left has me so disturbed about the future of children in this country that I think I am going to start taking my children to Church to help inoculate them against this.”

Jay W. Richards, Ph.D., is co-founder of The Stream. He is also the William E. Simon senior research fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society, where he focuses on protecting life, marriage and religious liberty, and a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute.

James Robison is The Stream’s Founder and Publisher. He is Founder of LIFE Outreach International and co-host of LIFE Today. He’s the author of many books, including Indivisible (with Jay Richards) and Living Amazed.

Copyright © 2024 Jay Richards & James Robison. Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.