John Piper And How The Church Went Woke

John Piper has been one of the most famous and influential pastors in Evangelicalism for the past few decades. Desiring God is one of the largest online ministries in the United States, and perhaps globally. Yet John Piper is also a perfect illustration of how and why the church went woke. It has long been my contention that wokeness took over the church in 2009, the year Barack Obama was elected President. John Piper provided a smoking gun for this conclusion at the time.

Piper wrote The President, the Passengers, and the Patience of God on the day of Obama’s inauguration. The article relates the USAir flight 1549, whereby a plane crash-landed safely in the Hudson River, to the inauguration of Barack Obama as America’s 45th President.

I am writing these thoughts on the evening after the inauguration of Barack Obama, the first African-American President of the United States. I cried twice today. There were two points when I was overwhelmed by the magnitude of it all. Once was when I prayed with some brothers after Obama’s speech and was overcome with the sinfulness of my own racist background. The other was in trying to express my emotion to an African-American brother about what this must mean for him.

In a massive admission of effeminacy, John Piper confesses to crying twice that day, once over racism and another over fluffing a Black Democrat. In 2008 and 2009, the political landscape in America was that to oppose Obama meant that you were a racist. This came after decades of teaching Americans, via media and public education, that racism was the ultimate sin. Under the Post-War Consensus, racism became more culturally intolerable than murder, and Adolf Hitler became the ultimate caricature of evil.

It is unsurprising that a longtime political liberal and anabaptist like John Piper would have gone woke. He peddled Critical Race Theory before most Americans knew what it was, but he peddled it after the Obama Administration.

As much as I reject Obama’s stance on abortion, I am thankful to the bottom of my soul that an African-American can be President of United States. The enormity of it all is unspeakable. This is God’s doing. The geese were God’s doing. The landing of Flight 1549 was God’s doing. And the Obama presidency is God’s doing. “He removes kings and sets up kings” (Daniel 2:21).

And I pray that President Obama has eyes to see. The “miracle on the Hudson” and the “miracle in the White House” are not unrelated. God has been merciful to us as a nation. Our racial sins deserved judgment a thousand times over. God does not owe America anything. We owe him everything. And instead of destruction, he has given us another soft landing. We are not dead at the bottom of the Hudson.

Due to his wokeness, John Piper calls Barack Obama’s election a miracle (it wasn’t) and says that America deserves judgment over racism, while obfuscating America’s worst sin in abortion.

The damage that Barack Obama did to the spiritual fabric of the United States is seldom talked about. The Barna vibe study showing belief in Jesus rising in 2025, shows that this belief began its initial plummet during Obama’s first term. It wasn’t until 2022 that the overall trend reversed, after Christians had some introspection on how the church went woke and utterly failed in its COVID-19 response in 2020.

Out of the ashes is an emergent generation of believers who reject liberalism: the Post-War Consensus, wokeness, Zionism, and feminism. And this is coinciding with a revival. John Piper, for all his decades of ministry, has actively opposed this end.