It has become common in some circles to refer to the complex of ideas and beliefs generally labelled as ‘woke’, as a kind of religion, or at least vey like a religion (see, e.g., John McWhorter’s Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America, 2021, Portfolio/Penguin). The term ‘woke’ has become for some a pejorative label, but it commonly suggests programmatic demands for social justice and beliefs about the key role of group identities in the political process. While these ideas can be debated, it is as much the form of their expression as the ideological content that attracts the comparison to religion. It is the conviction of rightness, the sense being validated by higher moral forces (being ‘on the side of history’), and the tendency to view people as either believers or non-believers in need of correction, that invokes the comparisons.
The parallels to some variants of Christianity, particularly in the Protestant and evangelical traditions found in America, are striking. Guilt and its expiation, for those seen as ‘privileged’, is a central theme, although as in Christian ‘original sin’ there is a sense that guilt and the need for atonement is a permanent and insurmountable state for such people. The very term ‘woke’ has religious references, to being in an enlightened state after having accepted the ‘truth’. It is a state of revelation. And those who adopt this position often reserve their strongest condemnation for ‘heretics’, those who ‘should be’ part of the community because they are on ‘the left’, but who reject this belief system, or some of its key tenets. Such people are often seen not just as beyond salvation, but as having betrayed the religion and the community itself.
These parallels can of course be overdrawn. Taken literally, calling wokeness a religion implies a rather capacious conception of religion. It is religion as socically shaped behaviour, rather than as profound philosophical reflection, that is being compared here. One argument might be that precisely because institutionalised religion is in decline in ‘the West’, especially among more left-leaning populations, something that resembles it arises to take its place, to meet the same social and communal needs. Be that as it may, I want to suggest that there is another way of looking at what is going on here. Religious revivals are often responses to religious decline, to crises of faith, and I want to suggest that that may be part of the explanation for this phenomenon, although not in the sense that one might expect. The current crisis is not just one within the context of religion, but more generally an epistemological crisis of confidence in the existence of an objective reality, that we all have access to, and is the very ground that binds us together.
The relationship between traditional religion, primarily Christianity, and Enlightenment thought, is often misunderstood as a simple toppling of irrational superstition, and its replacement by rational realism. But all religions, including Christianity, involve efforts to grasp the deep rational order of the world—to make sense of it all. That is why religion often fuses its accounts of the natural material world and of the supernatural spiritual world into one unified order. In effect, the rise of secularism and science prescribed a division of labour, where ‘objective science’ would deal with the public, natural physical world, and religion would be preserved to deal with our private, internal moral worlds. It’s a chronically unstable arrangement however, because we can’t keep these worlds separate in our own persons.
However, the idea that the secular Enlightenment view of the world does without faith, is problematic. The most basic philosophical reflection shows us that on a sceptical view, none of us can be certain of more than our own private consciousness. Whether the world ‘out there’ exists, or is just a projection of our lone consciousness, is an irresolvable epistemological puzzle. Most of us, mercifully, disregard this puzzle and take for granted that we are part of a real, objective world. But this involves a small and precious ‘leap of faith’, that one must make to truly engage in that shared objective reality, in that common experiential ground. The Enlightenment world view did not so much replace superstition with reality, as strip away religious beliefs about the ordering principles of the universe, and the proper ways to demonstrate faith in those principles, leaving exposed the real core object of the problem of faith—believing in an objective, natural reality, in which we are all united.
Recent trends in academia, especially in the theoretical language of the arts, humanities and social sciences, has evinced profound scepticism, and even suspicion, about the claim that there is an objective reality. A view that all claims to knowledge, claims about such a reality, express power interests, and construct accounts of reality accordingly, imposing the will of the powerful on the less powerful, leads to a general attitude of suspicion towards truth claims. This stance is generally viewed by those who take it as being ‘critical’ and not naïve about truth claims; as seeing power where others fail to see it. But by its nature it tends to drive those who hold it inwards, seeking a ground for their own truth-claims in personal (‘lived’) experience, and in aspects of their own identity understood not as an ongoing process, but as something that is essentially given. It returns the mind into the hands of solipsism. This view of the world is corrosive, and destructive of that ‘small leap of faith’ into a shared natural reality. I believe that somehow this loss of faith, combined with other historical social forces, is a basic driver of the search for a ‘religious’ community among the ‘woke’. So perhaps understanding the condition we find ourselves in involves not just pointing out the dangerous religious enthusiasm of an ideological movement, but also reassuring others that primary belief in a shared objective reality is not a prescription for a cold, heartless, disenchanted world, or a justification for existing power relations, but instead a small and necessary act of faith that makes a common epistemological and moral order possible.
Uneasy Essays 