Our Modern Craze for Indulgences to Expiate the Sin of Being Born and Perhaps Not Being Miserable in Every Possible Way

Martin Luther would have been all over this

The woke movement, social justice warriors, the successor ideology, whatever you want to call our new civic religion, has been examined by many observers for its notable lack of mercy, forgiveness, or expiation of sin.

This is mostly true. There’s not really a way to permanently expunge the sin of having been born with some type of privilege, and you can see this is true, because that privilege must be permanently and repeatedly apologized for.

But the next best thing to actual forgiveness is gaining the provisional status of “ally” to more marginalized persons.

If you’re an ally, you get to stand on the self-declared “right side of history,” and the benefit of this is getting a provisional waiver from being the main target of outrage mobs.

So you want to be an ally, because this is how you become recognized as a provisionally good person, or virtuous organization, who has the right to go about your business and personal affairs without interference.

Being a good and virtuous person has its perks, as it should.

If you can also buy being a Good Person, which you can now buy, the absolute best sort of allyship to buy is being a trans ally.

Being a trans ally can even publicly expiate the sin of being a literal sex criminal, let alone being born white, or a light-skinned person of color, or a straight man, or being an obviously worthless white woman.

But what if these Good Person passes are something else, entirely?

What if these top-shelf Good Person passes were in fact an investment in the advancement of a eugenicist sterilization regime targeting troubled, self-harming, developmentally delayed, or same-sex attracted youth.

What if buying your Good Person pass means paying the freight for a male sex criminal to spend his incarceration in a women’s jail, with a female cell mate that he could pick up and throw across a room?

What if your Good Person pass, for which you paid so much and told so many lies in public, is instead a certificate of complicity in grievous human rights abuses?

Well you’re not going to want that to be true, are you?

You’re not going to want to hear that.

You’re probably not going to like the person who tells you it.

You don’t want to admit that someone took you for a sucker, and they were right.

No one likes that. No one wants that to be true.

What if it is though? What if it is?

As C.S. Lewis already said, “We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.”