My first reaction to learning that our second “Catholic president” (both words need scare quotes for multiple, overlapping reasons), Joe Biden, had proclaimed Easter Sunday “Transgender Day of Visibility” was simple: Why do they need a visibility day? I can spot one a mile away.

Nope, I won’t apologize for that. Mocking the priests of Baal and blaspheming their false religion isn’t just good fun, but a high moral duty. I love it when things work out like that.

The Spot on the Ultrasound That Indicates Brain Cancer

It’s not just a slap in the face that Biden delivered with this proclamation. As Christians we’re told to expect that. Instead it’s something vastly more momentous: It’s that tiny spot on the ultrasound which tells your radiologist that your brain is now riddled with cancer. That your DNA has been hijacked by a parasitical organism that is fooling your immune system, and might leave you insane as you die.

And that is precisely what the woke cult is: a cancerous mutation of Christianity, which steals just enough genetic markers from the Gospel to trick many of us into accepting it. Then it will try to kill its host.

Charlie Kirk, who’s shockingly wise and insightful for a political activist, observes:

Democrats say Trump supporters are “a cult” when they themselves:

Celebrate genital mutilation on Christianity’s holiest day.

Ban religious-themed artwork on Easter eggs at the White House.

Pass child kidnapping laws for parents who don’t believe their child was born in the…

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) March 30, 2024

How to Pervert the Gospel

Historian Tom Holland’s brilliant book Dominion explains how Christianity inverted the value system of every fallen culture that came before it. Jesus’s passion taught us not to revile victims and celebrate their scapegoating and destruction, but instead to worship the Spotless Lamb who was slain — and therefore to see future victims as potential images of Him. The Christian West is the first culture in history to decide that slavery is wicked and to voluntarily abolish it. To declare that marriage is sacred and requires women’s free consent. To set up vast institutions to care for the handicapped and the paralyzed.

So what do you do if (just for instance) you’re a deathless preternatural spirit of evil who hates this new religion because you hate the One who revealed it? How do you meet your quota of souls corrupted, perverted, and damned to spend eternity with you as you are getting punished?

Nazism Is Not Enough

Yes, you might try simply negating this embrace of the weak and the vulnerable. Revive Spartan militarism and eugenics, why don’t you? That can work out in the short term, but it turned out that the “Thousand Year Reich” built on a blank rejection of 1900 years of Christian influence lasted for only 12 years.

The open nihilism of the Darwinist materialists (“No Lives Matter”) never won over the masses. The “New Atheist” boom of the early 2000s has degenerated into bitter factional squabbles and dull, repetitive rants. Even Marxism, for all its atheist chest-thumping, is little more than a “scientific” lab coat wrapped around some late Medieval “end-times” street corner prophet — demanding the New Jerusalem right here and right now, beginning with savage “class war” against our wealthier neighbors and “the Jews.” And of course the New Jerusalem never arrives, just mass famines and gulags — which eventually get noticed.

Nope, in your role as Prince of Darkness you’ve already learned that you have no power to create anything. To cite scriptures which only we Catholics regard as canonical (The Lord of the Rings), you can’t make any real, living elves. All you can do is pervert them and turn them into orcs. Since you can’t beat Christianity, you must join it — and mutate it into a monster.

Build Your Own Antichrist at Home

You must manufacture fake victims, present them as pure and innocent, and paint those who don’t buy into this charade as vicious persecutors, like the mobs who called for Barabbas and the Roman soldiers who crucified Jesus. Make adhering to these fake victims the price of feeling “redeemed” and renewed, and get ready to actually persecute any Christians bold enough to try to expose your deceptions.

The key to tricking the Christian immune system into welcoming such a cancer? You just have to know its PIN code. Jesus’s suffering was genuinely redemptive for three key reasons, according to Christian theology:

• He was God incarnate;
• He was innocent; and
• He willingly substituted Himself to suffer and die in our place.

If you want people to stop worshiping Him, and in fact to persecute His Church in the name of the very Christian values that are wedged down too deep in the culture for you (or your servants, like Hitler) to ever dislodge, you need to be “tricksy” (as Gollum would say).

The Ersatz Christs Our Masters Trot Out as Idols

You must convince people that what really mattered about Jesus was none of the three things above. Fix their attention instead on inessential details and superficial resemblances which push their emotional buttons.

Pretend that people are innocent who aren’t. (See Matthew Shepard, canonized as a victim of anti-gay “hate,” who in fact died during a drug deal gone bad at the hands of his sometime gay sex partner.)

Pimp out victims of bad luck or their own terrible judgment as victims of “the racist system.” (See George Floyd, who died resisting arrest while he was hopped up on a fatal dose of fentanyl.)

Inflate rubber blow-up gods and fetishize those who weren’t really victims at all. (See baby-voiced pro-choice activist Christine Blasey Ford, who never met Brett Kavanaugh and used Mark Judge’s memoir as her perjury “story bible.”)

The Woke Cargo Cult

Seduce these Christians you hate and intend to damn to make a cargo cult out of suffering itself, to pretend that anyone who’s apparently weak or arguably marginalized at the moment is always in the right — and that asking any questions is equivalent to slapping Jesus in the face.

Take the Church’s inversion of the wicked human impulse to scapegoat the innocent, and convince Christians that every human instinct and drive is corrupt — so everything from private property to national borders to natural marriage must be smashed or turned on its head. The more perverse and unnatural something feels, the holier it must really be.

Your revulsion at drag queens dressed as Baphomet grooming children? It’s a “phobia” that must be purged. The wretchedness and squalor of that culture is exactly like Jesus’s desolation on the Cross.

And pretty soon you’ve got millions of Christians marking Easter by venerating surgically mutilated eunuchs. Well played, Screwtape. Well played.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His upcoming book is No Second Amendment, No First.