The Christian Roots Of Wokism, And What It Means For American Politics

I mentioned yesterday that I'd read a long article that attempts to explain, more or less, how America got where it is today in cultural and, therefore, political terms. The article is written by a Chinese American, Sheluyang Peng. You can read about his background here:

A Church Grows in Brooklyn

People say immigrants like my parents do the jobs native-born Americans don’t want to do. Keeping the faith is one of them.

Briefly, his parents, converts in China, grew up amid the Cultural Revolution and are now missionaries to America. Peng's field of study is religious sociology.

What Peng sets out to do in his article

More Christian than the Christians

is to explain the phenomenon of "Wokism" as well as the various reactions to it. While his explanation isn't necessarily totally comprehensive, it's a good jumping off point for further reflection.

Peng begins by noting the growing cottage industry of reaction against Wokism. He then lists the typical American reactions. He begins with “fusion conservatives”--the NR style conservatives who fuse economic libertarianism with social conservatism. He identifies this trend with the Goldwater to Reagan years in particular. This fusionism was strongly anti-Communist during the Cold War, and we see its continued hold over a substantial portion of Americans both in Hillary's gaslighting Russia Hoax ploy as well as in the American war on Russia—which draws support from many of Cold War generation.

Peng notes that this crusading tendency of fusionism has also lent its support to Neocon projects around the world. He maintains that anti-Communism has been "repurposed" in the fight against Wokism, under the title "Cultural Marxism". He grants that there is, indeed, truth in this critique of Wokism but questions whether it misses something important: "How did 'cultural Marxism' succeed in a society where actual--materialist--Marxism failed to take root?" In longer form:

Taken together, anti-woke activists paint a picture of wide-eyed teens who come into college as blank slates, leave as radicalized leftists armed with the messages of obscure German intellectuals, and enforce these ideas at their newfound bureaucratic positions ...

Yet these genealogies ... fail to understand the moral attitudes that drive wokeness and drive people to wokeness. They explain the how but not the why—“this is how wokeness was synthesized and this is how it spread in academia and the workplace,” but not “why does wokeness even exist to begin with,” and “why is it appealing to certain sets of people?”

So, having set the terms of the inquiry, Peng turns to people who, like John McWhorter (Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America), who have explained Wokism in explicitly religious terms. Here Peng summarizes McWhorter's basic starting point--using the term "Elect" as a synonym (with religious connotations) for Woke. The "seven tenets" should be taken in a sociological rather than a strictly doctrinal sense:

McWhorter then lays out seven tenets of the Elect that make them religious: “The Elect have superstition,” “The Elect have clergy,” “The Elect have original sin,” “The Elect are evangelical,” “The Elect are apocalyptic,” “The Elect ban the heretic,” and “The Elect supplant older religions.” Therefore, McWhorter’s thesis goes, the religion of antiracism is just as [much] a religion as any commonly recognized religion. McWhorter writes that the Elect religion “is eerily akin to devout Christianity.” Upon closer inspection, in fact, one notices that Christianity is the only religion that fulfills all seven of McWhorter’s tenets, suggesting that wokeness is more than merely “like” Christianity.

Peng also briefly examines the somewhat similar views of Eric Kaufmann. However, he finds both critiques of Wokism lacking--in that neither critique goes far enough. They fail to follow the genealogy of Wokism to its real source:

Yet there seems to be a missing puzzle piece to these sociologies of wokeness. Both McWhorter and Kaufmann note the striking similarities between wokeness and Christianity—particularly to Protestantism. Yet neither takes Occam’s razor and states that the two are similar because there is a direct link between them.

The answer to the genesis of woke lies right in Kaufmann’s analysis: wokeness came from liberalism. The question, then, is what caused liberalism. The answer, the missing piece of the puzzle, is that liberalism is an outgrowth of Christianity, and especially the Protestant Reformation.

Peng begins this part of his argument by noting that Wokism's hold is almost exclusively over countries that are also dominated by liberalism--understood in the broad historical sense. "Liberalism is the engine that powers woke grievances" because liberalism--in both its conservative and progressive forms--is based on a transformed Christian conception of equality or equity. In other words, while the common narrative is that the Enlightenment represented a rejection of "religious values", in fact it was a secularization (and thereby a transformation) of religious conceptions. Like the idea that all human beings are equal in the sight of God. This statement of moral equality was transformed by liberalism into a project for the political and cultural transformation of human life and institutions. This Enlightenment project was enabled by the Reformation because--and this is Peng's argument, not necessarily my view--by unleashing "proto-liberal" elements of early Christianity:

It would not be until after the Protestant Reformation again decentralized the Church that the proto-liberal ideas that defined early Christianity could once more flourish. The resulting explosion of different sects across Europe led to a need for a new system of governance in which different groups would have to live with their differences, laying the foundation for liberal democracy. But in the pre-liberal meantime, some sects had ideas so blasphemous even to other Protestants that they fled across the Atlantic to avoid persecution.

I'll briefly interject here a reference to another analysis of this same historical period, that of Eric Voegelin in The New Science of Politics--a work I've repeatedly brought up. It's possible to see Peng's and Voegelin's critiques of the modern age of the West as complementary rather than opposed. I'll simply point out that, as regards Peng's idea of radical Protestants fleeing across the Atlantic, Chapter V of Voegelin's book is titled "Gnostic Revolution--The Puritan Case."

Peng makes his argument in sociological terms. Here he expresses that argument for the evolution of radical Protestantism to Wokism succinctly:

One may notice that wokeness appears to be a syncretic blend of Puritanism and Quakerism. Woke adherents value elite education and moralizing, seem obsessed with rooting out heretics, adhere to orthodoxy, and display a sense of personal salvation, traits that were all characteristic of Puritans, while also displaying the radical openness and commitment to egalitarianism that characterized the Quakers.3

Baltzell noted that “By the close of the colonial period . . . Pennsylvania was, ethnically and religiously, more like modern America than any other colony and diametrically opposite to the homogenous and hierarchical society of Massachusetts,” and that “Although America as a whole has been Puritan and Calvinist throughout most of its history, it has now moved—especially since the 1960s—far closer to the ideas of Quakerism.”

... Enlightenment rationalism also spread across the colonies, and liberalism had taken root, leading to a breakaway sect that turned to Unitarianism. ...

...

Yet just as Quaker values did not die out with Quakerism, Puritan values did not die out with Puritanism. The descendants of the Puritan elite became Boston Brahmins, who were largely Unitarian and Episco­palian, but still maintained the strict elitism that characterized their ancestors. Even when Puritans turned toward Unitarian and Transcendentalist teachings or toward more mainstream denominations, they never stopped feeling like they were an elect class destined for salvation.

Peng's historical survey of American religious sociology continues with the trend to completely secularize Christian ideas--at first under the cloak of the "Social Gospel" movement, but later in explicitly secular terms, which nevertheless retained the religious concepts that animated these movements and lent them a religious fervor:

... as faithful observance declined among mainline liberal Protestants, their intellectual descendants retained their Puritanical sense of moral superiority and the liberal desire to rid the world of the “sin” of structural inequality. As theologian James Wood writes, “Social Gospel Protestantism shifted away from almost any sense that sin was personal . . . toward primarily social and structural understandings of sin, which became the exclusive focus as religious belief rapidly declined in American society.”

In the aftermath of two devastating world wars, many Western liberal democracies suffered steep declines in Christian faith. While adherents of the Social Gospel sought to do on earth as it is in heaven, those who stopped believing in a Christian heaven still kept working to build a heaven on earth. The earthly (rather than heavenly) focus of Social Gospel teachings allowed it to reach more than just Christians to form the foundation of a post-Protestant civil religion. Today’s social justice adherents need not have a Protestant background to adopt its tenets. Like Christianity itself, social justice is a universalist faith anyone can join. For example, many Reform and secular Jews assimilated into this universalist faith as they attended the universities of the formerly Protestant elect. Those Jews put their own spin on the Social Gospel by incorporating the concept of tikkun olam, which they interpreted as a calling to “heal the world” via social justice.7

...

Anti-woke conservatives are correct when they blame academia for propagating wokeness, but not in the way they conceive of the matter. America’s earliest colleges were founded to train clergy, and American academia still retains the same purpose—with the new Christian clergy calling themselves “secular humanists.”

Readers will recognize, I think, that much of Peng's argument isn't strictly original. Nevertheless, for Christians it does lead to the question of how much their beliefs have been colored by the secularized Christianity that is so pervasive in modern American secular politics and culture. Non-believers, too, may wish to question how much of their intellectual baggage derives from unacknowledged religious beliefs. Here's how Peng puts that thought:

To most conservatives, it is anathema to hear that Christianity provided the moral foundation for wokeness, and vice versa. It may seem ridiculous at first glance: after all, some of the most fervent opposition to wokeness comes from conservative Christians who promote Christianity as its antidote. Meanwhile, woke “secular humanists” often blame Christianity for what they perceive as the world’s social ills, hoping that Christianity will cease to exist as a social force. Both sides have a motive to deny that wokeness has Christian roots, as it would force both sides to suffer the cognitive dissonance of recognizing that they, in some sense, are two sides of the same wafer.

Note that he's not equating Christian belief with Wokism. He's saying that in historical and sociological terms there are ties.

Peng goes on to discuss the conservative reaction to Wokism among Protestants--mostly Evangelical--and among Catholics--with an emphasis on Postliberal views. In doing so he sketches the divides on the Right. For example he discusses the new Nietzchean Right as well as the phenomenon of "good old-fashioned red-state conservative, but in practice is living a morally dubious lifestyle antithetical to anything that resembles ‘conservatism’ or ‘trad’ values.” In doing so, Peng breaks the Right down as Protestant, Catholic, and pagan, observing that politics is "inherently religious." This is perhaps most obvious in his discussion of Catholic postliberals:

Many postliberals have positioned them­selves away from the Catholic Church’s official hierarchy by standing against the liberalizing aggiornamento of the Second Vatican Council and reject what they see as the fence-sitting of fusionist Catho­lics. A highly publicized debate between the classically liberal, evangelical Protestant David French and the postliberal Catholic Sohrab Ahmari in 2019 revealed deep fault lines in conservative circles between the old-guard, National Review libertarian fusionists and the newer postliberal Right.11 The postliberal emphasis on Catholic social teaching includes principles that others on the right balk at, such as more interventionist economic policies and skepticism of liberal free speech.

Peng has much more to say, but I want to give him the last word by quoting from the concluding section of his article, More Christian than the Christians? because it may offer some insights for us as we watch the electioneering this year:

Indeed, the entire American culture war might be best understood as a war over the future of Christianity, even if the combatants themselves do not recognize it in these terms. The talking points of both sides seem stuck in a previous generation, with conservatives continuing to stoke fears of Marxism and progressives continuing to stoke fears of Christian theocracy. The big irony is that it is progressives who are the new theocrats enforcing a Christian-derived morality, while conservatives increasingly abandon Christian churches and lurch toward economically populist proposals, views that Reagan-era conservatives would have called (and some still call) “Marxist.”

All this is part of a broader social shift in which terms like “Christian” and “Marxist” increasingly serve as markers of tribal identity rather than metaphysical belief. ... This is not to say that such de-churched Christians are not “real” Christians or are merely using Christianity as a tool to control others, as progressives have long accused conservative Christians of doing. Rather, just as progressives abandoned Christian metaphysics while retaining versions of Christian morality, conservatives are retaining Christian metaphysics while aban­doning Christian morality. Williams notes that, among the rising number of non-churchgoing white Christians in the South, “Many are liberal or libertarian on matters of personal liberty, such as marijuana and premarital sex, but they’re still strongly conservative on issues of race, gender, and Christian nationalism.”

...

This journal’s editor, Julius Krein, notes in an essay in the New Statesman that “Today, it is progressives, rather than Bible-thumping evangelists, who are more likely to demand public adherence to a strict moral orthodoxy, pressing for new educational curricula, speech codes and civic observances,” and that the progressive mentality “emphasises moral absolutism over pragmatic policy” and seems “aimed more at personal atonement than societal transformation.” Indeed, today’s progressives are the new Bible-thumping evangelists—only with books like How to Be an Antiracist or Gender Queer instead of the Bible.

Joseph Bottum’s worst fear is quickly being realized. American progressives are nominally anti-Christian, yet are the spiritual inheritors of finger-wagging fundamentalist moralism, ...