I am among those rejoicing in the Daniel Penny Not Guilty verdict. Yes, and I will rejoice.
At the same time, the trial exposed much injustice — no, not against Jordan Neely, who had a history of unprovoked attacks on the New York subway, including punching a 67 year old woman, breaking facial bones, in 2021. Among the injustices is that Penny went to trial and faced years in prison for selflessly defending others and that Neely was free to lurk in the subway at all. That Penny still faces an opportunistic lawsuit from Neely’s grifting and until now absent parents is also unjust.
I’ve briefly suggested some needed societal and legal reforms after the verdict over at my substack. But before we get too involved in reforming society and the courts, we need to remember that “judgment must begin at the house of God.” (1 Peter 4:17 KJ) We need to repent and reform ourselves, including us in the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), in light of how the church has gone astray in recent years in the area of supposed “social justice.”
Yes, we have made progress in ACNA. We do not have wokeness rampant in our church to the extent of 2020. But have those clergy who pushed grifting woke fraud and frauds in the church apologized for doing so? And we certainly still have scattered around ACNA the leaven of Critical Theory and derived “social justice.” Most of America is so over that toxic fraudulent garbage. Why are parts of ACNA and any number of other denominations still lagging behind?
It is shameful how much of the institutional church is slow to come to common sense when so many outside the church are getting it.
Christopher Rufo gets it. (I think he is Roman Catholic, but does not publicly discuss his faith often if at all.) He has written such an excellent essay on how the Penny/Neely case has exposed the bankruptcy of woke “social justice” that I can hardly improve on it. He captured well why the trial was such a sensation:
Penny’s trial captured public attention because it dramatically emblematized this critical cultural faultline. Most immediately, it symbolized a recurrent theme in New York City about the failures of law enforcement, and the appropriate response to criminality. But it was also a story that the Left sought to turn into a racial morality play by repeating the BLM playbook they applied to the death of George Floyd, to Trayvon Martin, to Michael Brown and countless others.
In this story, Daniel Penny (“the white man” in the loaded description of the prosecutor Dafna Yoran) was a racist white man, who cruelly hunted down and killed an innocent black man (a “Micheal Jackson impersonator”) who was peacefully riding the subway. In this telling, neither man is an individual; rather, each is a symbol of a system of racist white supremacy, organized around enacting violence on black bodies, for no reason…
In [Penny’s] case, the restorative task was to scapegoat “the white man” in the service of advancing a radical pro-crime agenda…
As with the trial of Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis following the death of George Floyd, professional activists were mobilized to protest on the street outside the trial with the intention to manipulate proceedings: witnesses reported that the shouting of the activists were audible inside the courtroom. But this time, the jury did not surrender to pressure.
Good on that courageous jury! But they are far from the only ones who have seen enough. One can only cry “wolf” or “George Floyd” so many times before people stop listening. That goes double if the false and distorted stories further predatory agendas that reward crime, punish self-defense, reward invasion, hold people hostage on the roads, attack free speech and try to cancel you from society if you dare speak up against their evil. Rufo puts it more succinctly:
The past four years have clarified what “social justice” really means and exhausted all remaining patience for granting activists the benefit of the doubt…. In reality, “social justice” was never about justice: it was about the political subversion of justice to achieve pathological and ideological ends.
More like the past eight years and more have clarified that the “social justice” crowd calls evil good and good evil.
That includes those who push wokeness in the church. Jemar Tisby has a history of presenting lies and half-truths as history and advocates racist policies such as reparations and pro-crime policies such as eliminating cash bail. (How to Fight Racism, pp. 167, 176) Yet at least two ACNA bishops have recommended his books. Tisby went on to paint Jordan Neely as a victim, of course. There are also those who have made a career out of smearing conservative Christians, Kristin Kobes Du Mez among them. She has been platformed by at least one ACNA bishop.
Megan Basham, in Shepherds for Sale, has well documented how leaders and organizations in Big Evangelicalism who push woke agendas in the church are paid very well to do so by secular Leftist foundations, including the Soros family, and sometimes by the federal government as well.
These evangelical leaders pretend not to be pushing a woke Globalist Left agenda, but that is not credible any more. World Relief can keep claiming that they are not facilitating the Invasion and the accompanying crime and are paid very well by the federal government to do so, but only the gullible believe them any more after four years of the Biden Invasion and crime spree. The After Party, funded by that sweet Big Evil foundation money, claimed they were just helping church leaders navigate political divisions during this election year. But they let their masks drop and revealed their real agenda after the election when Curtis Chang said he was “groaning with God” after his candidate Kamala Harris got defeated.
Of course, faux Christian fronts like the After Party are nothing new. In early 2020 I exposed the oh-so non-partisan and pro-life AND Campaign as a Democrat front group led by two Democrat political operatives. It wasn’t pro-life either.
And people rejecting wokeness and fleeing woke churches is nothing new. In 2021 and 2023 I wrote that woke was not all that winsome but was “losesome” and driving people away. Now it did take time for that rejection of woke to become a societal tidal wave in 2024, with the Trump election and Daniel Penny trial at the top of the tsunami. Years of the rotten fruit of applied Critical Theory were a stench in the nostrils of most normal people by then.
Even Apple, yes Apple, gets that people are so done with the woke tearing down of society and family. Have you seen their latest ad for their ear buds? Then you better sit down with some Kleenex before watching.
Apple would not have run such a warm family-oriented ad in 2020. I don’t think Chevrolet would have run this downright patriarchal ad either. Again, have Kleenex nearby.
Apple and Chevy did not run those wonderful ads out of the goodness of their hearts. They want to make money. And they know that traditional family values are back — and woke denigration of them are out.
By the way, Jesus did say, “Ye shall know them by their fruits.” Why are many in the church slower to get that than people outside the church? Why is the church slow to get that wokeness should die and is indeed dying?
But now the church is without excuse. The past four and more years have indeed exposed the fruit of Critical Theory to be rotten and poisonous. And the average Joe and Joan in the street can smell it all too well. And many have suffered from it. Those in the church who have pushed or enabled woke “social justice” need to repent and apologize. They must repent and apologize. And that goes double for clergy and other church and parachurch leaders.
And those church leaders who stiffen their necks and refuse to repent are to be church disciplined and rejected until they do.
Credibility and faithfulness before God and before His children demand no less.
