Rise of a New Faith: Wokeism Rises to the Challenge

Few of the Woke think that theirs is a religion. That shows only how little they understand the concept of religion. What else should we call a quest for truth, justice, and meaning?

The American Spirit Essays #18

(continued from The Challenge of Modernity)

Deep Thought

Modern life, and in particular elite modern life, poses steep challenges to any faith—including Wokeism.  The spiritual needs of America’s elite range from the unarticulated to the denied.  Wokeism must cater to its faithful without ever conceding that it’s either a faith or catering. 

The Woke thinkers who found ways to meet that challenge thought deeply.  They studied and tested.  Wokeism is not a casual experiment.  Nor is it a mere handful of political ideas and slogans.  It’s an all-embracing lifestyle every bit as complete as Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism.  That much of it is still taking shape does little to alter its comprehensive nature or the threat it poses to all faith traditions that came before it. 

Of direct interest to the future of America, however, the comprehensive nature of Wokeism negates the American formulation.  The generalized Christian ethics at the core of America’s founding spirit were sufficiently universal to enable most pre-existing faiths to embrace them while relinquishing only minimal elements of their own traditions.  Woke ethics, derived in many cases from a utopian perspective, are simply incompatible.  Ethical Wokeism inverts many elements of America’s ethical foundations.

To Americans, it’s self-evident “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

To the Woke, humans are born into conditions of inherent inequality.  History and society bestow upon them distinctively unequal rights, responsibilities, privileges, and expectations.  While some are entitled to elevation and compensation commensurate with ancestral inequities, others are born to pay the price of that compensation in retribution for ancestral privilege.  Life may be a right to those already born, but liberty is a chimera and deeply contingent.  Happiness is a distraction from the cause of justice. 

It hardly ends there.  Woke views of biology, sex, race, gender, justice, the supernatural, the start of life, and the place of humanity within nature set the Woke apart from adherents of other faiths.  To the Woke who scream that theirs is not a religion, Wokeism is “merely” a search for truth, a quest for justice, a desire to restructure society along the lines of equity and enlightened thinking, and a set of guidelines to conform behavior accordingly.  Such denials suggest that the American elites to whom Wokeism appeals are so divorced from the concept of a faith tradition that they no longer know what the word “religion” means.  What is any faith tradition if not a search for truth, a quest for justice, and a desire to conform both individual behavior and communal structures accordingly?