A Communist Manifesto for Christian Nationalists: Testing the Woke Right

by James Lindsay

As many of you know and fewer appreciate, I have been aiming to expose a phenomenon called the “Woke Right” for some time now. This whole matter is an issue of considerable and rather fierce debate.

Is “Woke” the right word for them? Are they really “Right”? Should we call them something else? Is this really even happening? Does it even matter? Is this even important?

Each of these is a worthy enough question and matter for its own debate, but regarding the question of whether “Woke” is the right term for them, I haven’t been fully convinced despite my heavy use of the term. As you’ll see momentarily, I’m now far more convinced.

So far, I have attempted in various X (née Twitter) arenas to explain why I think the term “Woke Right” fits and to identify some examples, and I’ve done a couple of podcasts explaining the phenomenon and making the case more fully. I’ve also done a number of interviews. Still, it remains an open question, are they really Woke, so I decided to do a little experiment. A throwback to an earlier James, if you will. And, as it happens…

We are so back.

To put the conclusion out front before I explain myself, I figured a good way to test the “Woke Right” for Wokeness would be to submit a little hoax essay to what I presume is their flagship publication, American Reformer. To produce this “Woke Right” hoax, I took a couple thousand words straight out of The Manifesto of the Communist Party, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (better known as the Communist Manifesto), and lightly modified it into a “Woke Right” critique of liberalism, which the so-called “Woke Right” hate. They published it: The Liberal Consensus and the New Christian Right (It’s archived here in case they take it down).

I figured there’s nothing more definitively Woke than the Communist Manifesto, so I think we can drop with the inverted commas here and get on with calling them the Woke Right after this. They published Karl Marx’s definitive Communist work, dressed up to resemble their own pompous, self-pitying drivel, when it was submitted from a completely unknown author with no internet footprint whatsoever bearing the name “Marcus Carlson” (get it? Haha).

That question answered raises the deeper second question above—which I will not address here—about if they are really on the “Right,” as they consistently claim they are. For them on this, I’ll only say, I have been using the term “Right Hand of the Left.”

So what did I do, and why did I do it? Before explaining myself, I’ll explain the mechanics of this little prank.

I started by taking the preamble and then just short of six continuous pages of text from the first chapter of The Communist Manifesto. This chapter is titled “Bourgeoisie and Proletarians” and is the part of the manifesto where Marx and Engels make the case that the bourgeoisie (middle class, owners, management, and wealthy) as a class is abusive of the proletariat (workers) as a class in just about every way you could imagine. I then rather crudely swapped out references to the bourgeoisie with something to do with either liberalism, liberals, classical liberalism, or their real and mighty bugbear that they call “the post-war liberal consensus,” which they believe oppresses them. Concurrently, I swapped out references to the proletariat with references to an object they call the “New Christian Right” as a way of referring to themselves. I then massaged some of the specifics for fit, flourish, and flow, cut a bunch and consolidated to fit the word count requirement, attached the document to an email from a made-to-order burner account, and hit “send.” A few days later, they published it on American Reformer with minimal edits.

So far as these terms of art go, meaning “post-war liberal consensus” and “New Christian Right,” I didn’t invent them. I took them from a couple articles published on American Reformer aiming to describe their own movement, what it’s about, and what it believes oppresses them. While these are technically terms to explain in another time and place, what I noticed (when re-reading The Communist Manifesto to prepare a pair of podcasts about it) is that Marx’s complaints about the bourgeoisie and vision of the proletariat match what I had read on American Reformer itself about the Woke Right with regard to the “liberal consensus” and liberalism along with their vision for a New Christian Right. It required shockingly minimal editing to make Karl Marx’s arguments transform into Woke Right arguments about American liberalism. (In fact, I have the original first step document in its raw form, if anyone wants to see it, revealing just how fast the connection is.)

So, that’s what I did. Why did I do it? And why target American Reformer?

I don’t have any particular animus against American Reformer to speak of, but so far as I know, it’s the flagship publication for what I’ve been calling the Woke Right, or at least the Protestant “Christian Nationalist” (or, “Ecumenical Integralist”) wing of the Woke Right. It makes a good target, though, because American Reformer represents not the cringe-inducing (antisemitic) fringe of the Woke Right but its more respectable, mainstream wing. Beyond that, I know rather little about it because, as I’ve said many times, I mostly find the Woke Right to be an enormously irritating distraction that I don’t actually give much time to and try to avoid thinking about entirely. Wandering into Woke Right thinking is far too easy a mistake for us to keep making, I keep telling myself, but we, as a loose coalition, keep making it. Maybe that’s because it has a ton of money behind it and because they use divisive Woke dialectical tactics to divide movements and collect supporters….

What I learned doing the Grievance Studies Affair, however, is that if you can’t tell people about an ideological problem out there in the world, you can show them instead by participating directly, if disingenuously. That is, you can hoax them and get them to publish a blatant caricature of their own beliefs in an embarrassing yet informative way. Rather famously, I, et al., got a feminist social work academic journal to accept a rewrite of a chapter of Hitler’s Mein Kampf as a pathway forward for intersectional feminism as a movement.

Moreover, I learned that if you’re going to target publications for a “hoax-ish” exposé, you should aim at the most significant one you can. That turns out to be American Reformer, which I also featured in one of my podcasts about the Woke Right. (Incidentally, I learned almost all I really needed to know about the Woke Right, their arguments, their mentality, etc., from that one article I read for the podcast, which isn’t surprising because Woke Right “philosophy” is effectively just another Grievance or Woke architecture, and these are all extremely easily produced once you know the names for various pieces and the specific accusations attached to them.)

Why did I do it? That’s a lot simpler. I suspected that the so-called Woke Right really is Woke; many people disagreed; and I wanted to test that hypothesis instead of arguing about it to very little effect. Up to now, when I have pointed it out, argued it, explained it, and discussed it, I’ve been vigorously assured I’m completely wrong and this “New Christian Right” is not Woke at all. In fact, I learned I’m the bad guy here: “attacking Christians,” “punching Right,” “punching down” (amusingly), “gatekeeping,” and “being subversive, divisive, or [insert any of many slurs].”

Well, I’ve been here before, and back then a simple test sufficed. I ran this test once in the Grievance Studies Affair to expose the Left in academia. It was easily replicated against the so-called Woke Right. The result, though limited in scope, is a positive one. The Woke Right is Woke enough to argue against liberalism in exactly the same pompous and conspiratorial way (literally) Karl Marx argued against his own class enemy. So, if by “Woke” we mean running the Woke operating system and sociopolitical architecture, the Woke Right is clearly Woke.

So, circumstances relevant to the Woke Right also compel me to ask, is this me attacking Christians or “dividing the right”? Well, no. You are free for yourself to decide if the “New Christian Right” represents Christians or Christianity, but this was little more than a simple test to see if they’re a Woke duck. They walk like a Woke duck. They talk like a Woke duck. They’re a Woke duck.

They considered a lightly modified excerpt from the Communist Manifesto to be a “powerful article” for who they are and what they think (that we can expect they will not stand behind now that they know what it is, of course). If that aligns with Christianity is something for others to decide. If spotting this worrying Woke trend as it permeates the movement to stop Woke is “dividing the right,” maybe using terms like “right” here isn’t what we need to be doing. Maybe we should just be stopping Woke, however it presents itself.

Does this mean I’m saying the Woke Right are Communists? No, not at all. Historically, Fascism was a reaction to Communism that adopted the Communist operating system but not Communism or its specific agendas. In fact, they adopted the operating system of Communism specifically to be “anti-Marxist” (according to Mussolini)—just like the Woke Right. I do not think the Woke Right are Communists—aside from some infiltrators who must certainly be taking advantage of the Woke Right movements. I think they have taken up the Woke operating system, nothing more, nothing less. I do hope we won’t now repeat obvious historical mistakes, but I’m not accusing them of being Communists. They did not accept a Communist, qua Communism, text but a modified version that flatters their sensibilities.

In fact, it’s rather the opposite, in a way. The Woke Right, or at least the nerd-macho “New Christian Right” at American Reformer, etc., positions itself as the only viable solution to Communism in the West. In fact, their niche is something like being the only outfit, broadly construed, that is capable of equipping the American Church of resisting Communism—and certainly they have positioned themselves vigorously against my work as being productive to that particular cause. Well, as is evident, they haven’t done their homework at all. Clearly, my hoax essay only passed editorial muster because, it is now abundantly clear, these particular fellows are unlikely even to have read the Communist Manifesto. If winning a war requires knowing your enemy, as Sun Tzu said, they don’t even recognize him when he shows up on their own front door.

As a final question, you might be wondering how tight this hoax is. I’ll let you judge for yourself. Here (pdf), you’ll find a document showing the whole story in four appendices: a comparative back-and-forth text, the final submitted text (American Reformer published a very lightly edited version of this), the relevant sections of the Communist Manifesto, and my initial word and concept–swap so you can see my process before the final editing. A small sample of the back-and-forth text, from beginning and end, are offered here as a taste.

Communist Manifesto:

[p. 27, preamble] A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.

Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?

Two things result from this fact:

I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power.

II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself.

American Reformer:

A rising spirit is haunting America: the spirit of a true Christian Right. Moreover, all the existing powers of the American Regime since the end of the Second World War have aligned themselves against it and its re-emergence from the shadows of American civic life, politics, and religion—the Marxist Left and its neo-Marxist “Woke” descendant, the liberal establishment, the neoconservatives, and their police and intelligence apparatuses.

There are two consequences of this unholy alliance. First, the Christian Right itself is recognized by all these forces to be a power and thus a threat. Second, it is time for this arranged order to end and for a New Christian Right to emerge and stake its rightful claim on twenty-first century American politics.

The Communist Manifesto:

[pp. 36–37, ch. 1] This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and, consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier. It compels legislative recognition of particular interests of the workers, by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself.

American Reformer:

This organization of the New Christian Right into a movement will continually be upset again by the competition between its various factions, but it is rising. We take no enemies to the Right and always redouble our efforts to our Left. In that way, we ever rise up again, stronger, firmer, mightier for all these contests. For this reason, in the end, we will win back our culture and take back our communities, and the liberals can go ahead and thank themselves.

I’ll close here and open the space for discussion. This is my explanation for this little experiment. My conclusion is that I validated my hypothesis in a significant way that will advance the debate. The Woke Right is Woke. They saw themselves in what can only be called a “Communist Manifesto for Christian Nationalists.”