Religion Is Not the Antidote to “Wokeness”
We can't fight dogmatism with more dogmatism.
Contributor Johan Pregmo has a new piece in Queer Majority: “Men, Ancient Rome, and the ‘Blank Slate.’”
When the linguist and social critic John McWhorter wrote, in a now-famous 2015 essay, that “anti-racism” was “our flawed new religion”, he struck a resounding chord. Indeed, McWhorter’s diagnosis of the far left’s radical identitarianism — which he expounded on in book form in Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America (2021) — has resonated so deeply throughout our culture that it has since gone mainstream. Outside of the leftmost decile of society, it is now commonplace to hear critical social justice or “wokeness” pejoratively compared to a religion from figures across the political spectrum, including religious conservatives themselves. But something doesn’t add up.
The conservative writer Andrew Sullivan calls far-left social justice “a religion whose followers show the same zeal as any born-again Evangelical,” and yet he extols on a near-weekly basis the virtues of faith while bemoaning the decline of religion. Chris Rufo, the architect behind the wave of Republican anti-trans legislation sweeping the US, describes wokeness as a “theocracy” that is “religious in many ways” and requires a “faith-based understanding.” And yet Rufo writes that “we really need to revive [American] religions and religious expressions, if we want to have a [...] different vision of politics than the woke.” In his 2021 book, Woke Inc. Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has a chapter titled “Actually, Wokeness Is Literally a Religion”, and yet on the campaign trail, Ramaswamy has made renewing religious. faith one of the pillars of his stump speech. From right wingers like Ron DeSantis, to independents like Michael Shellenberger, to liberals like Bari Weiss, to post-liberals like James M. Patterson, we are told that wokeism is bad in no small part because it resembles religion. And yet, the antidote these critics offer to the excesses of this “flawed new religion” is… religion.
The problem should not be difficult to spot: the attributes that make wokeness objectionable as a governing ideology or raft of cultural norms — the attributes that lead many to consider it a kind of religion — are present across the traditional religious landscape.
It’s easy to see why McWhorter’s analysis has had such legs. The parallels between critical social justice and religion are striking. It’s a totalizing, life-orienting ideology complete with mythology, saints, (original) sin, confession, and revivalism. It provides believers with community and a sense of meaning, purpose, and direction. It acts as a spiritual fount from which they can draw guidance for every area of their lives. It lacks the long history, formal structure, and legal recognition of an established religion, but for its adherents, it serves most of the functions that believers turn to religion for.
The fact that critical social justice rose in near-perfect synchronicity with the decline of theism and traditional religion has not been lost on observers. Over the past 15 years, Americans’ belief in god dropped more than 10 points, and church membership by more than 15 points. 30 percent now say they have no religious affiliation. During this same span, we have seen the rise of social justice movements on the hard left. There are various hypotheses for where this new religion came from. Some argue it stems from Marxism and the Frankfurt school. Others say it’s the latest “great awakening” in the American Protestant tradition. Still others see it as an altogether more organic coalescence of ambient religious energy grasping for form in an age of hyper-polarization and digital disconnectedness. What everyone outside the far left can agree on, however, is that “wokeness” arose, if not out of modern society’s much-bewailed “crisis of meaning”, then at least alongside it.
At a glance, there is a superficial logic about noticing the correlation between the rise of critical social justice and the decline of religion, and then putting two and two together to surmise that a return to old-time religion will solve our postmodern woes. Some of the people arguing this case are themselves deeply devout, such as most of the anti-woke right as well as more moderate critics like my friend Sheluyang Peng. Others are completely secular, like Jonathan Haidt. Some even go as far as making a “secular case for Christianity”, as Tim DeRoche did in The Free Press, and as we saw more recently with Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s viral political conversion to Christianity. The two factions in this coalition have very different motivations. One opposes critical social justice as a harmful or even dangerous rival faith they wish to see supplanted by their own. The other sees it as a societal malady growing out of a meaning-void that traditional religion can pragmatically fill. What both miss, however, is that when we scratch beneath the surface of this prescription, we find an irreconcilable incoherence. What’s wrong with “wokeness” is precisely what’s wrong with religion in general.
Critics are right to notice how religious “wokeness” is. The implication of drawing the connection between the two is that the more religious a movement or ideology becomes, the more unreasonable and pernicious it therefore is. It’s worth running through the specific characteristics of critical social justice that have so many excoriating it as a religion: groupthink, conformism, illiberalism, intolerance of differences, attempts to impose their worldview on others with state power, dogmatism, anti-intellectualism, belief without evidence, proselytization, moral certainty, a sense of higher purpose, and an ethos that earthly sacrifices are required for a greater spiritual good. These are the hallmarks of religion. They are not present in every subset of every religion in equal measure, but taken together, they form a common thread woven through any intelligible conception of religion, whether theistic or political.
One can argue that critical social justice is a false religion, or a harmful one, but if its falsity or harmfulness stems from its proximity to these religious hallmarks, then what’s false or harmful isn’t social justice, but religiosity itself. Dogmatic belief without evidence in the doctrines of Christianity or Judaism might seem more agreeable than dogmatic belief without evidence in the doctrines of critical theory and the “white cisheteropatriarchy”, but when we abandon evidence and rationality, the results are by no means benign.
I remember the before-times. I lived through the moral panics of the 1990s and the cloying evangelical theocracy of the George W. Bush years. I saw the rampant, religiously inspired homophobia, the “faith-based” initiatives to stifle life-saving scientific research, the “God and country” cancel culture against dissenting voices, and the efforts to indoctrinate children with creationist pseudoscience. I remember when Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell blamed the September 11th attacks on divine retribution for secularism and LGBT people. I remember the messianic moral certitude that led George W. Bush to proclaim, “God told me to end the tyranny in Iraq.” And we should all remember the religiously stacked Supreme Court that struck a nationwide blow against abortion rights in 2022. Critical social justice arose, in part, as an outgrowth of the backlash that religion’s excesses deservedly created. We kid ourselves to suppose that swapping one for the other would be anything more than a lateral move at best.
The point here isn’t to argue anyone out of their faith, but simply to point out the inherent contradiction of diagnosing a problem only to prescribe more of the same. John McWhorter has always been of one mind about this “flawed new religion”: he opposes it in exact proportion to its resemblance to a religion, because he also opposes religion. His many epigones, on the other hand, have run with his analysis seemingly without having thought the matter fully through. We cannot fight fire with fire, illiberalism with illiberalism, or unreason with more unreason. We’re not going to dogma our way out of the morass we’re mired in. That’s what got us into this mess to begin with. We need to reinvigorate liberal values. We need to address the crisis of meaning. We need to depoliticize significant swaths of American life. And most of all, we need George Carlin’s third commandment, “Thou shalt keep thy religion to thyself!”
See also: “Meaning Junkies”
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Oh, man. You make such a great point here. I felt the same way reading McWhorter's book. The whole argument rests on religion = bad, which is never explained but simply assumed.
I wonder if the story ultimately points to the concept of ideology. All the criteria you mention as the essence of religion also define ideology, perhaps even better than religion. Ideology, as I understand it, is a modern phenomena in which a set of ostensibly self-evident premises are adhered to in a way that is incorrigible to evidence, experience, reason, etc. in the pursuit and retention of political power. All other cultural forms (including religion) are ultimately turned in service to ideology.
I feel a strong case can be made that much, if not most, of truly traditional religion is not about purity or dogma and isn't "cultish." The Southern Baptists were politically diverse moderates until the conservative takeover of the 1980s. American religion in the early 1900s was a big tent, politically diverse, moderate Presbyterianism until Fundamentalism emerged in the 1920s. The Church of England is a good example of a religious institution that kept jettisoning any religious group that started obsessing over purity. The history of global Catholicism is one of syncretism and absorption of local customs, saints, etc. In the Middle Ages, the "doctor of the church" Thomas Aquinas was inspired by Muslim Avicenna and Jewish Maimonides. Greek, Roman, Egyptian religion had little to do with purity or dogma. Greeks simply paired up Greek gods to Egyptian gods and called it good.
Fundamentalist Islam can perhaps be understood in a similar way--a modern ideology that co-opts religious beliefs and practices with the ultimate purpose of political power. Chinese Communist Party -- same story without religion. What practical good does it do to claim that the CCP is a religion? But ideology explains everything.
Ideology explains behavior on the left, without resorting to religion. And it explains why some on the right who consider themselves atheist or non-religious promote religion, because it's religion in service to ideology. Religion may provide resources to move the ball forward on political goals, and if so, it's all for the best. That's literally Ayaan Hirsi Ali's argument.
I wonder how much of this is a desire to have an easier enemy to fight. When right-wing religious fervor was king in the Bush years, it was easy and fun to be a secular liberal who stuck it to The Man.
With wokeness, it's a lot harder to be a liberal and criticize it without feeling a little like a traitor. Or at least like an uncool dad from an 80s movie going "Yeah champ, uh... are you sure this is the thing you wanna be doing?"