personandidentity.com
2024-03-14
Such parents also need to be reassured that their experience is a common one, and not necessarily reflective of some great failure or oversight on their part. Most importantly, we all need to remind ourselves that this is far more of a spiritual battle than a political one, and to never underestimate the preeminent place of prayer and sacrifice for our children.
Whenever I speak to a crowd about the woke movement, an inevitable comment surfaces in the Q&A. With a sort of resigned sadness, parents will tell me about their teen or adult children who are now woke, uninterested in the faith of their childhood, and disdainful of those who passed it down to them.
Political division is not new, but it is increasingly more ferocious. A contributing factor is the nature of wokeism which relocates moral stature away from the development of character and gives perverse incentive to the adoption of a victim identity. To maintain the status of victim, the aggrieved must become an incessant accuser, unmasking the evil all around him, but rarely in himself. This leads to a society roiled in conflict and unable to self-examine.
Still, the parent/child fracture is far more painful than the demise of an old high school friendship or a rebuke from a woke cousin in Vermont. There is a patricidal tendency that is particular to totalizing ideologies. Family is a deeply stabilizing force. Cultural revolutions thrive on the instability that comes with the erosion of parental authority.