I’ve argued here before that the Woke creed of Anti-Racism, “Equity,” and “Toxic Whiteness” is little more than a cargo cult. Like those South Sea Islanders who saw American sailors and airmen during World War II as higher beings, god-like dispensers of holy “Cargo,” post-Christians have only a primitive understanding of the meaning and purpose of the knick-knacks they hoard and fetishize. Some of those islanders built makeshift airports — from runways to control towers — in hopes of luring back the airplanes that dispensed Cargo.

Just so, our modern educated savages clumsily take bits and pieces of the Christian worldview to cobble together moral codes, in hopes of restoring Meaning and Purpose to their empty, trivial lives. But they have no more idea of how to build consistent, coherent ethics than the natives who worshipped the late Prince Philip would know how to operate DFW Airport.

Give Back Those Christian Ethics. You Haven’t Paid for Them.

For the original Cargo Cultists, we ought to feel only empathy. Their reaction was perfectly human, and shows both ingenuity and a spirit of enterprise. We in the high-tech West make equally futile gestures trying to contact extraterrestrials. At least the South Sea Islanders had solid evidence that US airmen existed!

But Ivy-educated children of America’s elites have no such excuse. They’re more like Cargo Cultists who came to the US, took over functioning airports, burned down their buildings, and replaced them with huts made from palm-fronds. They would deserve an armed response.

Using the Civil Rights Movement Like a Booty Call

The Christian worldview from which these people have shoplifted such concepts as human equality, rejection of racism, and compassion for the vulnerable didn’t fly away in 1945 when Japan surrendered. It’s still here. In fact, most of the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement were churchmen, and (with some exceptions) most churches signed on to the struggle.

But as soon as the left had used the Christian faith to get “equality” enshrined into law as a value, it kicked the Church to the curb. It redefined the term, cut it off from the only possible justification it had — the biblical worldview — then used the word as a bludgeon to persecute Christianity, and even common sanity.

It’s not enough to assert (as the Church always has) that black is equal to white, and women are morally equal to men. We must insist that men and women are interchangeable, in fact mere “social constructions.” A polyamorous drag queen is “equally” fit to teach our young children as a faithfully married Christian, or celibate nun. We must give hulking, bearded boys the “equal” chance to knock out teenage girls on the rugby field. If physically male rapists wish to transfer to women’s prisons, denying them that is “equal” to forcing black American Christians to drink from different water fountains. How much expensive education is needed to make people this contemptibly, willfully stupid?

Too Primitive for the Prince Philip Movement

But maybe I’m being too harsh. Perhaps the Woke have really sunk to a level of ignorance that would appall the good people of the Prince Philip Movement. Those islanders don’t mistake men for women or fetuses for spare-parts containers full of human Lego pieces. What reduced these highly educated Americans to a Stone Age level of fanatical superstition, and cannibalizing unborn children for parts?

In a word, Darwin. I’d like to invite all my readers to follow me, and read the thousands of pages that led me to that conclusion. For the past three years, since solid arguments won me over to the truth of Intelligent Design, I’ve devoured scientific books and papers on the discipline. Most of them came from the Discovery Institute, which I’ve come to see as one of the most important institutions in the West. That’s because it attacks the very taproot from which most of our contemporary madness flows, as if a vast, radioactive river poured out of Chernobyl all through Europe.

I won’t try to recap the sound scientific arguments you’ll find in Stephen Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt. In it, the Cambridge-educated philosopher of science shows how blind evolution cannot possibly account for the countless, complex mutations required to create the world’s millions of species. Random chance can’t build elaborate working proteins, not in trillions of years. Nor does the fossil record offer us clues, since it’s missing most of the “missing links” Darwin calmly predicted. Go read it.

Materialist Scientists Take it on Faith

Read also Meyer’s brilliant new book, The Return of the God Hypothesis. There he explains, accessibly, the efforts of physicists like Stephen Hawking to evade the obvious implications of the Big Bang, and explain away the fine-tuning of the universe for life via … an imaginary “Multiverse” for which we can never (in principle) find any evidence. You’ll just have to take atheism on faith.

Or read The Mystery of Life’s Origin, a multidisciplinary classic by eminent scientists that has stood the test of decades. Discovery has reissued it in an updated form, with appendices by scientists working today. This solidly scholarly book reveals that “Origin of Life” scientists have no lab coats. In the past 60 years — since scientists first tried creating life in a warm pond — there has been exactly zero progress in showing that “abiotic” chemistry could ever have spontaneously sparked life on earth. Every experiment either fails, or must be rigged by an Intelligent Designer — a scientist. The only source we’ve ever found in the universe of specified, functional order (like the words of a poem, or proteins in an enzyme) lay in rational minds, not blind chemical interactions. So the most scientific hypothesis for the presence of those qualities in nature is … an Intelligent Designer, who pre-existed all life. 

Read Michael Behe on how evolution doesn’t build new genes, but simply degrades them. Try mutating from amoeba to activists that way. Read James Tour on how “origin of life” science increasingly seems like the efforts of alchemists to turn lead into gold. I could go on for thousands of words, with more such recommendations. You’ll find everything you need at Evolutionnews.com.

But back to our Ivy-schooled primitives, building terminals for Delta out of coconuts and mud. Meanwhile claiming that they’re elites who ought to govern our country, censor opinion, and end the careers of their critics by casting a “Racism” charge like a voodoo spell. What made people who did so well on the SATs so clueless, bigoted, and vicious?

Darwin Addles the Mind

Here’s where Darwinism comes in. It insists that the existence of the universe itself is a meaningless cosmic accident. No purpose or mind lies behind it. Likewise the emergence of life, which Darwinists believe by some secular miracle leapt fully-armored from the mud like Athena from Zeus’s head. Mere chance somehow engineered not just the baroque complexities of the humblest bacterium, but the vast, elaborate rococo of higher mammals, then primates. Natural selection can explain the survival of the fittest, but not their arrival. But somehow this combination of infinitesimally unlikely genetic mutations, and ruthless natural selection red in tooth and claw produced … human beings with brains perceptive and reliable enough to generate Modern Science.

Even though this Science tells us that we’re meaningless epiphenomena of random cosmic burps and vicious competition, somehow we also have dignity and rights, including the right to Equity. (Insert stolen premises from the biblical worldview here.) But the science that teaches us about that dignity and those rights, theology, should curl up and die once we’ve taken what we wanted, the gold fillings out of its teeth. The Woke folk will decide what “Equality,” “Equity” and “Justice” mean. And they’ll do so with all the arbitrary, random, irrational whimsy that the universe showed in mutating us into existence. They’ll enforce their capricious verdicts with all the ruthlessness of Natural Selection, throwing their failed competitors onto the fossil heap of history.

Does it all make sense to you now? It’s as if you’d convinced yourself that the 97% of DNA that chimps apparently share with humans entitled them to pilot our passenger aircraft … just 3% less often than we do. And then you sat back in Business Class and prayed to the Universe as a chimp tried to land in an airport built out of palm fronds. By Yale grads with degrees in Queer Theory.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream, and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. He is co-author with Jason Jones of “God, Guns, & the Government.”