Mike Bird:

In my mind, acknowledging the reality of racism, discrimination, and injustice – whether historical, cultural, institutional – and determining to change it, does not require adherence to a Marxist narrative, or becoming Woke. Rather, it is the outworking of the liberal political tradition rooted in a Christian worldview where everyone should have the same rights, freedoms, and opportunities. Where, to quote George Washington quoting Scripture, “Everyone will sit under their own fig tree and no-one will make them afraid.”

Churches and Christian leaders who are concerned with racism, police brutality, affordable healthcare, protecting refugees, acting on poverty, ending sex trafficking, urging sustainable environmental policy, ensuring LGBTI people have the right to work, as well as defending the unborn, promoting end-of-life care as an alternative to euthanasia, safeguarding religious freedom, opposing the gambling and pornographic industries, they are not whoring or compromised. They are simply doing what Christians have been doing for 2000 years which is loving their neighbour, remembering the poor, being the Good Samaritan, imitating Jesus, hating evil, loving good, and establishing justice in the gate of the city.

If you want to talk about evangelical whoring, it applies just as easily to churches who have tethered themselves to white supremacy, who have fattened their hearts in the days of slaughter, who messianize politicians and Caearize Jesus, who crave war like a baby craves its mother’s milk, who engage in a form of civil religion that combines the worst of racial prejudices with myths of national infallibility. That evangelical is the false prophet who leads others to bow down and worship the beast with feet made of Darwinian economics, legs comprised of corporations and colonies, a stomach of moral indifference to the suffering of others, arms made of confederacy and misogyny, and a head made of the military-industrial complex.

So don’t buy into the lie that acknowledging a history of racial injustice and prioritizing the pursuit of racial justice is wokeness. Don’t buy into the lie that all social justice is driven by Marxist ideology. It is not! It is what the prophets commanded, what Jesus expects of his followers, what the church has accepted as normal, and what constitutional democracies with a Christian heritage should aspire to, not in spite of, but precisely because of their Christian heritage.

Strachan’s talks here