RODNEY HIDE: The Madness Didn't Land on Barren Soil

For ten years I have tried to understand the madness that has engulfed New Zealand and the rest of the Western world.

I don't mean ordinary scientific or political disagreement. I've spent my life in such debates and I understand them. You put up ideas, some are wrong, some not so wrong, you learn by your mistakes and you go again. Knowledge grows.  What I mean is something different. It's an ideology that can't be argued with.

Try it. Question whether a child can be born in the wrong body. Suggest that equality before the law means the same law for everyone. Point out that the Treaty was signed by chiefs who wanted the protection of British law, not a partnership with a Crown department. Every word you say is taken as further proof of your guilt. Your objection shows you're fragile. Your evidence shows your privilege. Your silence shows you're complicit. There is no answer that gets you off. There is only confession and re-education.

It's the zeal of the Red Guards, only waving lanyards instead of Little Red Books.

I assumed the answer would lie in the ideas. So I did what I was trained to do and went to the source. I read the critical theorists: Marcuse, Foucault, the critical race theorists from the American law schools.

It didn't help. The foundations are as mad as the surface. Marcuse argued that tolerance should be withheld from the right. Foucault reduced all truth to power. Critical race theory holds that racism is everywhere and permanent, that "colour-blindness" is itself racist, and that the cure for past discrimination is present discrimination.

Understanding critical theory explains what the activists believe. It doesn't explain why anyone else went along with it. These were fringe ideas, written in impenetrable prose, and for decades they were confined to faculty lounges. Then within barely a decade they took over our universities, our public service, our professional bodies, our corporate boardrooms and our newsrooms. Doctors must now pass cultural safety modules. A real estate agent of thirty years' standing loses her licence for declining a course in tikanga. How did it happen so fast?

The best answer I have found comes not from a political theorist but from a historian. Tom Holland's book "Dominion" argues that the modern West, including its most secular and progressive parts, still thinks in Christian terms without realising it.

Consider how strange Christianity was to the ancient world. For the Romans the weak existed to be ruled by the strong. Pity for the slave or the defeated was no virtue. Then came a faith whose God died the death of a slave on a cross. The last shall be first. Blessed are the meek. Whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me.

Over two thousand years that upside-down idea soaked so deep into Western culture that we now think it's simply common sense. It isn't. Most human societies never believed the victim deserved our sympathy or that power should answer for itself. We believe that because we are Christian, whether we go to church or not.

Here is Holland's key insight, and it's the one that finally made sense of things for me. We lost our faith. But critical theory did not land on barren soil. It landed on soil that was very fertile indeed.

The West gave up God but kept the Christian conscience. We still feel the pull of the victim. We still carry a sense of guilt that needs somewhere to go. We still want to confess and repent. Critical theory came along and offered a new home for all of it.

The trouble is what got left behind. Christianity teaches that all have sinned, so no group is pure and no group is damned. Wokeness divides humanity into oppressors and oppressed by skin colour and sex, and makes guilt something inherited, like original sin with no baptism.

Christianity offers forgiveness to anyone who repents. Wokeness offers none. You can confess your privilege every day of your life and never be cleansed. One old tweet can ruin you forever.

Christianity teaches that judgement belongs to God. Wokeness hands it to the mob.

That's why it can't be argued with. It isn't a set of ideas you debate. It's a faith. It's a Christian heresy that kept the guilt and threw away the grace.

It also explains the speed. Nobody had to be converted from scratch. The ground was already prepared. A generation raised without faith but with a Christian conscience was hungry for meaning, for righteousness, for a cause. Wokeness gave them sins to denounce, heretics to punish, and the warm glow of being on the right side. It even gave them a clergy, the diversity officers, and a catechism, the land acknowledgement.

And like frogs in slowly heating water, the rest of us didn't notice. Each step was small. A "principle" slipped into a statute. A mandatory course. A new name for a government department. No single step was ever put to the voters, and each became the floor for the next.

And it happened under its own steam and not just top down.  It happened around us in our families, workplaces and clubs and friend groups.  New Zealand author Patrick Baker describes and analyses what we have all experienced in his must read book “At The Crossroads : When the Church Trades the Cross for a Cause - A Parable.”

So what's the answer? You can't argue someone out of their faith. You can only offer a better one.

We need the cross back at the centre.

The cross taught the West to care for the weak. It's also the only thing that deals honestly with guilt. It says we are all guilty, every tribe and every colour. Then it says what no ideology ever has: the debt is paid. We are spared what we deserve, and that is mercy. We are welcomed home, and that is grace.

Wokeness can name sin endlessly but it can't forgive a single one. At the foot of the cross the ground is level. No one stands higher for their ancestry, and no one is condemned for it.

We tried to keep the Christian conscience without Christ. We got the Red Guards.

Rodney Hide is a former Minister and ACT Party leader