The East Forgot God. The West Defied Him.

Woke progressivism has spread like a wildfire throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe in recent years. Since President Trump won the election in November, it has been in retreat in the US, but make no mistake—like a wounded tiger, it remains deadly. This rebellion against Biblical values has infected our universities, corporations, and even many churches.

Yet something fascinating happens when you travel to the Far East. Visit Japan, South Korea, or India, and you’ll find almost no trace of the woke ideology that has devastated Western institutions. This stark contrast demands an explanation.

Why does woke progressivism thrive in the West but not in the East? The answer lies buried in an ancient biblical narrative—one that reveals the spiritual DNA of both Western and Eastern civilizations.

The Bible introduces the Tower of Babel story with a significant geographical marker. This wasn’t random movement—it was deliberate migration. When people decide to leave their homeland, it signifies dissatisfaction with their current state and a desire for something else. This journey marks the birth of the very concept of progress. “As they migrated from the east” tells us their destination was westward. This westward movement became the foundation of a culture built on the idea of advancement—what we now broadly call Western civilization.

This wasn’t a casual relocation. These were people moving westward with a deliberate goal—to establish a human-centered culture that would rival God. Settling in Babylon, they began building a tower to reach the heavens.

According to the Sages, Nimrod spearheaded the Tower of Babel project. He was no simple tyrant but a man of deep ideological conviction and misguided idealism. Looking at a world filled with suffering and evil, Nimrod needed someone to blame. His conclusion? The Creator Himself must be responsible. Therefore, humanity needed to break free from God’s control and create an alternative system. The tower represented this rebellion—humanity’s attempt to build its way to independence from divine authority.

Abraham, the great father of Israel, lived during Nimrod’s time. Shockingly, the biblical commentator Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra suggests Abraham initially joined the tower builders. He writes: “Abraham was among the builders of the tower.” Abraham, too, was an idealist seeking to repair the world. Initially, he tried Nimrod’s approach, but quickly realized its fatal flaw. Abraham reached the opposite conclusion: the world is broken not because of God, but because people have rebelled against Him. And so Abraham’s strategy became “rebellion against the rebellion”—restoring God’s kingship as the only path to healing the world.

This historical split tells us something deeper: the roots of Western civilization lie in rebellion. But what about those people who remained in the East?

If the West sinned through rebellion, the East sinned through forgetfulness. The Bible identifies this earlier sin with the “Generation of Enosh.”

This verse marks the birth of religious ritual and ultimately idolatry. Enosh introduced the concept of “worshipping” rather than simply knowing God and speaking to Him. Why did humanity suddenly need rituals? Because people had begun to forget God’s immediate presence. Adam and Seth lived so close to Creation that they didn’t need reminders of God’s reality. But by Enosh’s time, humanity had drifted far enough that they required rituals to reconnect with what they were forgetting.

The very name “Enosh” in Hebrew derives from the Hebrew word for forgetfulness, as we see in Joseph’s words: “God has made me forget (nashani) all my hardship and my father’s house” (Genesis 41:51), and in Moses’ rebuke: “You forgot (teshi) the Rock who gave birth to you” (Deuteronomy 32:18). Human beings are hardwired with the capacity to forget—it’s in our nature.

This forgetfulness characterizes Eastern spirituality. The Far East views God as a distant and impersonal reality—a shocking concept to most Jews and Christians. We assume that when anyone speaks of God, they mean the all-powerful, all-knowing, personal Creator who thinks, wills, and speaks. But in Hinduism and many Eastern traditions, ultimate reality is an impersonal force or cosmic principle. This fundamental difference transforms every aspect of religious thought.

The East doesn’t rebel against God—they forget Him. They make Him so abstract and distant that He becomes irrelevant to daily life.

Now we can answer our initial question. Why does Woke progressivism thrive in the West? Because the West was founded on rebellion. Like the Tower of Babel builders, today’s woke ideologues reject biblical values and authority. They explicitly reject the created order—male and female, the sanctity of human life, the concept of objective truth, and the divine origin of morality. This isn’t new—it’s the same rebellion as the Tower of Babel, just with different vocabulary.

The East doesn’t need wokeness because it operates from a different spiritual paradigm altogether. Rather than rebelling against God, Eastern cultures have made the divine so distant and impersonal that active rebellion becomes unnecessary. You don’t rebel against what you’ve forgotten.

We Jews and Christians who hold fast to the Bible have a dual mission in today’s world.

In the West, we must follow Abraham’s example and rebel against the rebellion. Like Abraham among the tower builders, we must expose the fatal flaw in humanity’s attempt to create meaning and order without God. We must show the West that God isn’t the problem—human rejection of divine wisdom is.

In the East, our mission differs. There, we must reintroduce the radical concept of a personal God who speaks, acts in history, and reveals Himself through His word. We must bridge the chasm of forgetfulness that renders God irrelevant.

Jews and Christians stand together in this holy mission. We are the keepers of the flame—the testimony that God is neither a distant abstraction nor an oppressive force to be overthrown, but the loving Creator whose wisdom brings life.

Israel365 is leading this fight across both hemispheres. Through education, media, and on-the-ground activism, we’re confronting Western rebellion while illuminating Eastern forgetfulness. From university campuses in America to emerging communities of faith in Asia, we’re bringing God’s word to light.

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