Rod Dreher came to my home in Normandy this summer in part to talk about the writing of his coming book. We talked intensely long into the morning. My own awakening to the dangers of the coming ‘Woke’ took place in about 2005. I was working at one of our more radical red brick universities and I glimpsed the forces that were evolving in opposition to traditional orthodox Christianity, free speech and free thought.
University culture was about 5-10 years ahead of life outside the academy. I had adopted the reasonably cool, inclusive and then slightly chic, liberal pro-LGBT social agenda. I thought this new approach was justified as a way of building a drawbridge across the moat of Christian history. A history which had, on one reading, disadvantaged the sexually heterodox; a moat that would allow for a radically new approach to a new sexualised anthropology that my colleagues and students had not only adopted but made a primary virtue. A bridge across a moat that I mistakenly thought might help them become Christian. I had forgotten that it is a mistake to meet the devil half way. But then I didn’t know what I was dealing with at the time.
