Publisher’s note: The following originally appeared in Not The Bee on July 28, 2026. Thank you to the Not The Bee and Dr. Heck for graciously allowing us to reprint this. Dear brothers and sisters, I’m sharing this op-ed because when I read it, well, it was one of those instances when clarity washed over me. While full of competent, responsible employees all know the State of California’s government is for the most part dsyfunctional, at least at the top. Many of our elected and appointed leaders are in thrall to “Woke” and that is the battle – the spirit behind wokeness. Dr. Heck brings this into focus.
By Peter Heck
Anne Hathaway is back in the headlines after her appearance in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, and with it has come the resurfacing of a speech she gave at the Human Rights Campaign’s annual dinner in 2018.
“With the exception of being a cisgender male, everything about how I was born has put me at the current center of a damaging and widely accepted myth. That myth is that gayness orbits around straightness, transgender orbits around cisgender, and that all races orbit around whiteness.
“And it is a myth that keeps money and power in the hands of a few instead of being invested in the lives of the free.
“I appreciate this community so much because it’s where I learned to object to this myth. I appreciate this community because together, we are not just going to question this myth – we are going to destroy it.”
The remarkable thing about Hathaway’s speech is that it’s more than just standard progressive pandering. It’s unmistakably religious.
I don’t mean that Hathaway’s speech was religious because she quoted Scripture or invoked the name of God. I mean that it offered a comprehensive explanation of reality itself, answering the kinds of questions every religion has always attempted to answer:
- What is true?
- What is fundamentally wrong with the world?
- Who bears the blame?
- What must humanity do to be made right?
- Who belongs to the redeemed community?
- What mission should define our lives?
She concluded with the kind of triumphant declaration one would expect to hear at a tent revival meeting:
“Together we are not just going to question this myth; we are going to destroy it.”
Strip away the political labels for a moment and consider the structure of the story she’s telling.
Christianity teaches that the world is profoundly broken because of sin, that human beings need repentance, that there is a false way of seeing reality and a truth that sets people free.
We teach that God is forming a redeemed people with a mission, and that history is moving toward an ultimate restoration.
Hathaway’s moral vision contains nearly every one of those same elements, just with differing content. In her telling:
- The world’s fundamental problem is no longer sin but systems.
- Repentance is no longer turning from rebellion against God but confessing one’s privilege.
- Conversion becomes an awakening to social justice.
- The Kingdom of God gives way to a new social order.
- Evangelism is replaced by activism, heresy by bigotry, saints by allies, and excommunication by cancellation.
Worldly man, desperate to be his own god, is capable only of mimicking what he rebels against, creating an impotent counterfeit to God’s grand architecture.
Christians and progressive activists aren’t merely disagreeing over public policy or preferred outcomes. They’re operating from entirely different stories about reality, each claiming to diagnose humanity’s deepest problem while prescribing a radically different cure.
Hathaway’s speech assumes that the world’s central problem is the way society has organized itself around the wrong identities.
According to her theology, injustice persists because race, sexuality, and gender have been wrongly elevated to positions of privilege, and the path toward redemption is to dismantle those old structures and replace them with new ones.
It’s understandable why this path is appealing, because what Christianity offers is a far more unsettling diagnosis. Scripture insists that the deepest problem isn’t whiteness, straightness, cisgender identity, maleness, capitalism, colonialism, or patriarchy.
The problem is the human heart.
That claim levels every distinction we spend so much time obsessing over. The proud activist and the proud businessman, the Hollywood actress and the factory worker, the conservative and the progressive, the rich and the poor, the black and the white, all stand on exactly the same ground before God.
Jeremiah says every human heart is “deceitful above all things,” and Jesus teaches that evil proceeds from within. Paul concludes that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Christianity refuses to locate evil primarily out there because it insists the disease first resides in here.
That difference matters because every worldview’s diagnosis determines its cure.
If privilege is humanity’s great problem, then redemption comes through dismantling privilege. If oppressive systems are the source of evil, then salvation comes through political transformation. But if sin is the disease, then no amount of social restructuring can heal the human heart. Laws can restrain evil, institutions can encourage virtue, and cultures can either flourish or decay, but none of them can accomplish what Christianity says every person ultimately needs: reconciliation with God through Christ alone.
This is why I think it’s a mistake simply to laugh at speeches like Hathaway’s. Beneath the celebrity clichés and predictable applause lies something much more significant than another Hollywood political statement. What we’re witnessing is an attempt to answer life’s biggest questions without reference to God while borrowing many of the categories Christianity introduced to the Western world in the first place.
Anne Hathaway says she has learned to reject “the myth.” Christians reject myths too.
But the oldest and most destructive myth wasn’t born in Hollywood or Washington, D.C., nor was it that society had centered the wrong races, the wrong genders, or the wrong sexual identities. The oldest myth was whispered in a garden when the serpent promised Eve, “You will be like God.”
Every age retells that story in its own vocabulary.
Every culture invents its own version of salvation.
Every generation identifies a new villain and promises a new path to redemption.
The genius of Christianity is that it refuses to let us place the blame exclusively on someone else. Before it speaks about what’s wrong with society, it speaks about what’s wrong with me.
Before it calls me to reform the world, it calls me to repent. And before it offers me a cause to join, it offers me a Savior to trust.
That’s why Christianity will always sound strange to every age — including our own. It insists that the greatest revolution doesn’t begin in the halls of power or on the stage of an awards banquet.
It begins in the human heart.
If you have a prayer request or testimony or church bake sale or whatever you’d like to share on Praying For Rain, drop me a line, call me, block my exit at the next meeting were both at and harangue me. I want to hear from you – don@waterwrights.net God bless.
