The Cult of Wokeness

In the course of a book review at First Things theology professor James Keating gives a helpful summation of why "Woke culture" seems so odious to so many:

The concern for the less privileged encouraged by identity politics is praiseworthy, as is the moral revulsion at the horrors of the American past. Indeed, to agonize over the fact that transgressions forever outpace justice is about as pure an expression of Christianized Western civilization as one can find.

In their very effort to distance themselves from their American and Christian inheritance, our social justice warriors are giving that inheritance new expression, albeit shorn of its most appealing elements.

Nonetheless, there are aspects of woke politics that must be denounced. The ease and even joy with which too many condemn, slander, and seek to destroy those who have done or said something deemed racist, sexist, or homophobic is disgraceful.

The lack of mercy shown even to those whose “thought crimes” are unintentional or the result of not knowing the new rules bespeaks unbridled aggression rather than biblical charity. There is nothing inclusive or tolerant about such behavior. Far from building a diverse community, such scapegoating makes community impossible.

Condemning whole groups of wicked oppressors is not only evil but futile. Human beings are too entangled in sin for scapegoating to do anything other than produce the need for more victims.

Redressing the tremendous transgression of American enslavement and post-emancipation degradation of African Americans by scapegoating another set of Americans on the basis of their race is not progress but a reinvigoration of the worst aspects of our past, a new Jim Crow of those who are pure and those who are dirty and defiled.

The book he's reviewing is titled America Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time by Josh Mitchell, a professor of politics at Georgetown University. Mitchell writes that we're in the midst of a fourth religious "awakening" in our history, but unlike earlier such awakenings, this one is "without God and without forgiveness."

There is indeed original sin in this religion, which taints some but not all, and there's plenty of punishment, intolerance and scapegoating based on race and gender.

About Mitchell's depiction of original sin Keating writes:

No longer guided by the Christian insight that the universality of sin means its resolution must be a divine act, identity politics apportions guilt and innocence according to a person’s race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation, each weighed according to intersectional theory. Guilt and innocence no longer attach to one’s freely chosen actions over the course of a life but are imputed on the basis of one’s inherited and immutable characteristics, skin color above all.

The idea of original sin abides but is tragically twisted. It is still something one is born with, but it is no longer universal.

And about scapegoating there's this:

Scapegoating gains support from those who hope to escape its fury. Stroll down the hallway of any academic department and you’ll see door after door festooned with “safe space” stickers, rainbow decals, Black Lives Matter signs, the latest flier from the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion office.

Each one is an attempt at what Shelby Steele calls “disassociation.” I may be white, even male, even married to a white woman, with white kids, but I am not the one you are looking for. He is over there.

These rather obvious attempts at what Mitchell calls “innocence-signaling” must be backed up by a readiness to denounce fellow whites for their thought-crimes. Mere sentiment will not suffice: “Silence is violence.”

This explains why efforts at diversity and inclusion at colleges and corporations so often amount to little more than certain whites turning states’ evidence against other whites.

Contemporary woke culture has the character of a highly intolerant, unforgiving, unloving, grace-less, works-based, narcissistic, secular religion. It preaches hate not only for the sin but also for the sinner. It seeks to destroy people rather than redeem them. It's a merciless religion of rigidly narrow dogma in which there's no room for freedom, for questioning, for doctrinal deviation - only closed-minded conformity.

So far from promoting unity and harmony, it nurtures resentments and breeds bitterness, exacerbating our divisions rather than drawing us together.

It is, in fact, a cult in which atonement is possible, if at all, only through a penance of self-abasement in which the penitent must obsequiously and publicly beg forgiveness for the sin of saying or doing something that transgresses the constantly evolving standards of acceptable thought, speech and action. The range of what's "offensive" grows ever-broader so that it becomes increasingly easy to fall inadvertently into sin and come under the judgment of the twitter inquisitors.

Keating concludes his review of Mitchell's book with this: "A thoroughly Christian vision of a post-racial American future, Mitchell insists, must inform all efforts to heal our racial wounds. If this happens, America just might have yet another, and much better, awakening."

Let's hope.