Jeffrey Case

Minot

“God rest ye merry, gentlemen

Let nothing you dismay

Remember, Christ, our Saviour

Was born on Christmas day

To save us all from Satan’s power

When we were gone astray.”

Traditional. Songwriters: Robert Janes, Robert Halford. For non-commercial use only.

“Feliz Navidad, Feliz Navidad,

Feliz Navidad, I wanna to wish

You a merry Christmas,

From the bottom of my heart.”

Randy Edelman, Jose Feliciano. Songwriter: Jose Feliciano. For non-commercial use only.

Yes, those are lyrics, and quite appropriate I might add, of two of the songs sung during the Minot City Council meeting on December 18, 2023, by some young Minot students. Imagine that; inclusive tolerance for Christian and Christmas music at a local government meeting on government property. That suggests to me another reason why we do not need the Human Relations Committee (HCR). Minot is an open and tolerant and welcoming community.

We also heard from three people who spoke personally about difficulties they were experiencing: two women with physical disabilities and a transgender. These citizens were able to address the City Council personally, in their own words, face-to-face, in real time, illustrating a climate of acceptance in a welcoming atmosphere. The HRC serves as a middle step or process, created by a government, having the potential to separate the citizens from, and reduce access to, the actual governing body, and having the capability of interjecting its own bias and hidden agendas.

After the vote [to] “acknowledge the work of the ad hoc committee but choose to delete Chapter 2, Article V, Division 4 (Human Relations Committee) of the Minot Code of Ordinances” passed, a member of the Council referred to other members of the Council as cowards who changed their vote from a previous meeting. I do not believe they were cowards. I believe, after months of work, study, and soul searching, they came to believe this was neither the time nor the place for such a structure. They were correct in their judgment. The individuals who voted against the passage of this alternative, I believe, had their own hidden ideological agenda. That brings me to the subject of “WOKE” and WOKE Ideology.

In Awake, Not Woke: A Christian Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology, Noelle Mering says, “The term woke refers to the state of being alert and attuned to the layers of pervasive oppression in society.

While it originated specifically with regard to racism, it has since broadened to include all areas of social oppression commonly considered to be along the lines of gender, race, and sexuality.

Specific acts of injustice are used to serve the larger goal of furthering the ideology that sees all of human interaction as a power contest.

Growth for the woke movement is measured by fracturing. Indeed, it is an ideology with fundamentalist and even cult-like characteristics that is on a collision course with Christianity.

It is not only destructive, but incoherent. It is a war of words against the Word.

It is a revolution which elevates will over reason, the group over the person, and human power over higher authority. What is rejected – reason, the person, and authority – are the three characteristics of the Logos Himself. The Logos is the mind of God, communicated in the person of Jesus Christ, who is the author of, and authority over, all. Whether explicitly or not, he is the ultimate target of the woke revolt.

While woke ideology appears as a benevolent fight for justice, it is far from that. It lures us in with an appeal to our better natures, then replaces intelligible principles with distorted ones, resulting in incoherence and chaos.

Woke ideology has crept and dripped like a poison into corners and cells of an unsuspecting body of people. It corrupts Christianity by turning it into a religion without justice, without mercy, and ultimately without Christ.

We have grown blind to our spiritual poverty. Without knowing our need, our solutions seem merely sentimental. And therein lies the fundamental incoherence of woke Christianity: in seeking to offer the world a veneer of compassion, it robs that world of mercy.

The first of the three ruling woke dogmas is the primacy of the group over the person; second is an emphasis on will at the expense of reason or nature; and third is the elevation of human power in rejection of higher authority.” Source: Awake, Not Woke: A Christian Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology by Noelle Mering

Council members may see themselves in some of these lines. One Council member may have seen this interaction as a power contest which she believes she lost.

The real agenda on the part of a small minority of Council members was to shove woke ideology down the throats of the citizens of Minot. The stated objectives in the proposed Minot HRC Charter are extremely vague and abstract and could be construed to cover any type of issue imaginable in the future, and as I believe Mering says, will replace “intelligible principles with distorted ones, resulting in incoherence and chaos.” This gives new meaning to the concept of expediency of abstraction. We will have none of that woke Marxist ideology in Minot. This was not a power contest, rather a battle between good and evil. Truth and good prevailed.