Issue 18 - America's Ascendant Religion and What it Means for Christianity
America’s Ascendant Religion
The term “woke” is thrown around a lot these days. Critics claim that Wokeness is an undefined catch-all term used by elements of the political right to slander legitimate concerns about racism or social justice. However, atheist professor Wilfred Reilly and Christian apologist Neil Shenvi both provide succinct and useful definitions.
“A “woke” person is someone who believes the following:
(1) The institutions of American society are currently and intentionally set up to oppress [minorities and others];
(2) Virtually all gaps in performance between large groups prove that his oppression exists;
(3) The solution to this is equity — which means proportional representation regardless of performance or qualifications.”
“1) society is divided into oppressed/oppressor groups along lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, etc via 2) hegemonic power. But privileged people are blind so 3) we need to defer to the lived experience of the marginalized to 4) dismantle unjust systems.”
I think you could also appeal to Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of obscenity: “I know it when I see it.” Examples you may have encountered include beliefs like “Trans women are women” (that is, biological men who believe they are women really are women); Queers for Palestine arguing that “no trans woman will be free until Palestine is free”; policy think tanks arguing that objectivity and rigor are harmful research practices rooted in racism, ableism, and classism; or the Smithsonian Institute claiming that hard work, scientific method, and delayed gratification are cornerstones of whiteness.
Over the last decade a number of writers have likened Wokeness to a religion (sometimes using similar terminology that captures subsets of Woke beliefs, such as “intersectionality”). For example, in 2017 Baylor Professor Elizabeth Corey argued that intersectionality was a religion, while in the same year, cultural writer Andrew Sullivan posited the same thesis. In both cases, the primary argument related not so much to the content of the religion (which is more clearly an ideology than what we typically think of as religion) but the function it served in providing meaning to adherents, and especially the fervor with which they believed it. Many of the people making these claims come from the political left rather than a religious right: the aforementioned Andrew Sullivan is both gay-identifying and a vocal Democrat. Members of a 2018 panel on Intersectionality as Religion referred to themselves as “three liberal atheists.” Liberal Columbia professor John McWhorter (who is African American) wrote extensively in his book “Woke Racism” about how the current iteration of anti-racism (a core branch of Wokeness) operates as a religion (one that he argues is antithetical to the flourishing of Black Americans).
In a 2024 essay, Neil Shenvi and Christian professor Pat Sawyer explain exactly why Wokeness as religion is plausible, echoing similar language to Dr. Corey:
“We believe that contemporary critical theory [Wokeness] has such an iron grip on so many people because it fulfills a spiritual need. Human beings are not simply consumers of commercial goods or interchangeable cogs in an industrial machine. We crave meaning and purpose. Here, we have to remember that contemporary critical theory is not merely propositional. In addition to its central ideas, it comes packaged with heroes and villains, prophets, sacred texts, and visions of a gloriously liberated future.”
You may be wondering why the distinction matters. Whether we call a set of beliefs an ideology, a worldview, or a religion may seem like a purely academic exercise. One of the reasons it matters is that leaving Wokeness categorized as purely ideological allows for this set of beliefs about the nature of existence, man’s purpose, and corresponding right and wrong, to sidestep US laws and norms about separation of church and state.
For example, many public schools will teach that trans women really are women. This is a metaphysical belief about the very nature of humanity, with as much significance as the Christian belief that all people are created in the Imago Dei. To combat bullying, schools could simply teach students “a small percentage of your peers may choose to dress or act in ways typically associated with the opposite sex. You do not have to acknowledge that they really are of the opposite sex - but we will not tolerate any bullying of such individuals.” Instead, under the guise of anti-bullying they teach elementary school kids that gender is on a spectrum, and train teachers that biological sex is just a social construct. This is religious education.
However, the idea of Wokeness as religion goes further than just “false metaphysical beliefs other people believe and may try to push on my kids.”
Religion as Civic Identity
As historian Tom Holland noted in “Dominion,” his history of the Christian West, the idea of religion as a set of personal beliefs distinct from one’s culture is a relatively recent innovation. In most times and places in human history, culture and religion have been inextricably intertwined.
In a 2019 essay (cited below) writer and philosopher Scott Alexander summarized the intersection of religion and culture as follows:
“[Religion] is about a symbiosis between a society and an ideology. On the most basic level, it’s the answer to a series of questions. What is our group? Why are we better than the outgroup? Why is our social system legitimate? [emphasis original] For most of history, all religion was civil religion – if not of a state, then of a nation. Shinto for the Japanese, Judaism for the Israelites, Olympianism for the Greeks, Hinduism for the Indians. This was almost tautological; religion (along with language and government) was what defined group boundaries; divided the gradients of geography and genetics into separate peoples. A shared understanding of the world and shared rituals kept societies together.”
He and others thus take the “Woke is a religion” argument a step further and argue that Wokeness has become the de facto civic religion of the United States - a key part of our cultural identity that distinguishes us from others. Scott makes, I think, the most compelling case in his 2019 essay that describes how Pride events echo other cultures’ religious festivals, and have superseded Fourth of July parades as the primary “religious festival” in the US (disclaimer: some NSFW pictures of pride parades within, in addition to some ignorant and superficial takes on Christ’s teachings). The 2015-version of Christian commentator David French also made the argument that the Obergefell Supreme Court decision, which legalized same-sex marriage, served to enshrine LGBTQ affirmation as the American civic religion.
John McWhorter piles on, noting:
“America’s sense of what it is to be intellectual, moral, or artistic, what it is to educate a child, what it is to foster justice, what it is to express oneself properly, and what it is to be a nation is being refounded upon a religion [Wokeness].” (Woke Racism, p.58)
This may sound far-fetched to you. After all, the White House still recognizes Easter and Christmas, Congress still has prayer breakfasts, and every President to-date has paid some type of lip-service to Christianity. This is all true: the influence of Christianity in our nation is still such that no politician has yet jettisoned it completely. However, ask yourself which other religion might find its flag hanging front and center on the White House? The federal buildings, embassies, and corporations flying rainbow flags during Pride month - do they fly other flags during Easter or Ramandan?
Despite the continued influence of Christian tradition, only one set of beliefs is enforced by corporate America and the US federal government. You will not get fired for saying that Jesus is not the son of God. You may get fired for refusing to refer to a girl as “he/him.[1]” New Title IX regulations issued by the Biden administration mandated that students must be referred to by their preferred pronouns and given access to locker rooms and bathrooms that match their gender identity (though mercifully the Supreme Court struck this down). The USDA recently threatened to take away funding for school lunches from schools that do not provide such accommodations to transgender students. While people can argue about exactly how much ground Wokeness has gained towards dethroning Christianity in the United States, it is, if nothing else, clearly a widespread competing belief system.
Crucially, wokeness as a competing civic religion doesn’t simply mean “many - or even most - Americans strongly believe this” but “these beliefs form a core element of how our society defines itself as distinct from other societies, and who is in, and who is out.” That this is true for at least a major and influential subset of our country is evidenced by how resistance to the ideology is treated.
For example, listen to how President Biden described state laws that protect women’s private spaces and sports, or prevent minors from irreparably harming themselves with medical interventions:
“...today, across our country, MAGA extremists are advancing hundreds of hateful and extreme state laws that target transgender kids and their families…Let me be clear: These attacks are un-American and must end [emphasis mine].”
According to the highest-ranking official in America, if you oppose men in women’s bathrooms, men taking athletic honors from women, or minors taking hormones and undergoing unnecessary surgery, you are a hateful extremist, and furthermore, un-American.
If you’re still not convinced, I would encourage you to Google the state laws that the President referenced. Mainstream media outlets such as CNN, ABC, NBC, will all describe them as “anti-LGBTQ” or “anti-trans.” Even if you think that men should be allowed in women’s locker rooms or on women’s sports teams, you should concede that it’s still reasonable to believe that they shouldn’t. That most legacy media outlets paint dissenters as prejudiced against the LGBTQ community rather than acknowledging that dissenters want to protect women (or in some cases LGBTQ youth themselves) is another sign of what beliefs are “in” and which ones are “out.”
While England is not the United States, I think it’s uncontroversial to say that our cultures are very similar and our cultural elites share many values. Here’s a lengthy but illuminating excerpt from a recent essay about the current state of England [emphasis mine]:
“The Anglo-Saxon England of one thousand years ago…was replete with iconography. Men and women alike encountered imagery of the saints, of the faith, of Christ as a matter of routine in their lives. Today the images remain, and today they are encountered daily, but they are of something else entirely. We walked through an Underground station whose long dirty white corridors were decorated with easily hundreds of images of London’s “queer” population. Each icon — let us use the word, for this was the intent — contained a headshot of some sort, with explanatory text below. One of them struck me and exemplified the rest: a man named Fotis, whose pronouns are Ve / Vir. Elsewhere in a train station, we encountered an image of two African women in passionate embrace: its caption reminded the passer-by that “loving who you choose” is what makes Britain Britain...All this is tutelage, of course. The images of Fotis the Ve / Vir and the like pervade the public square in London for instructional purposes. They teach the English their new narrative, their new understanding of self, and their new permitted ambit of thought and belief.”
To be clear, the argument is not necessarily that Christianity has been vanquished in the West and everyone is now Woke. The point is that powerful and influential elements of our society believe that the values underlying Wokeness define who we are as a people, are actively propagating that belief, and view Christian morality as a threat to it. And they get away with it, in part, because their worldview is not “religion.”
The Incompatible Religions
The reason this matters so much is that Christianity and Wokeness are fundamentally incompatible. Wokeness considers core Christian beliefs oppressive, including things like the belief in two sexes (oppressive to transgender people), marriage as between a man and a woman (oppressive to homosexuals) or opposition to abortion (oppressive to women). Moreover, Wokeness is committed to doing something about those oppressive beliefs. As Drs. Shenvi and Sawyer note in Critical Dilemma, their book-length treatment of Critical Theories and the implications of those theories for the church:
“A second key component of all critical social theories is their commitment to action. They do not merely attempt to explain society but also attempt to change it for the better. As such, they are overtly and necessarily activist in their orientation.” (page 68).
In describing how Wokeness functions as a worldview, and specifically one that contradicts Christianity, they write [emphasis mine]:
“[According to this worldview] our primary problem is not sin, but oppression…the solution is not redemption, but activism. We don’t need salvation from outside; we instead need to free ourselves through liberatory politics…Our primary moral duty is to dismantle the systems and structures that perpetuate oppression. The end goal (and “right side”) of history is the attainment of social justice, a state in which power is fully shared between groups. ” (page 283)
However, what makes this worldview particularly dangerous is not only that full equality is impossible to achieve, but that progress towards that goal must always be discounted.
As John McWhorter put it in Woke Racism:
“The [Woke] are apocalyptic - things will always be “better” in some undefined way - in the future, but things must always be horrible now, no matter how much progress is made…With progress, the [Woke] lose their sense of purpose. What they are after is not money or power but sheer purpose, in the basic sense of feeling like you matter and your life has a meaningful agenda.” (page 35)
This is why you hear people talking about “the New Jim Crow” and the omnipresence of racism even though, while racism undeniably still exists, things are infinitely better than they were during the actual Jim Crow era. It’s why gay rights was treated as the new civil rights - until gay people achieved basically everything they asked for and suddenly men competing in women’s sports and using women’s bathrooms became the new civil rights movement. Or maybe the new front is civil rights for throuples. When eschatological fulfillment of your religion depends on your righteous actions to convince or marginalize non-believers, and when eschatological fulfillment always remains just out of reach, you have laid the groundwork for self-destructive totalitarianism.
Wokeness is thus a two-fold threat to Christians and our beliefs.
First, there is the direct threat that Woke beliefs will nullify Christian orthodoxy because they come with a veneer of Christianity (opposing “oppression”, fighting for “equality”) but smuggle in unChristian beliefs, and lack the saving gospel. Dr. Shenvi noted a pattern I’ve witnessed myself, whereby some people adopting Woke definitions of justice eventually begin to question “traditional Christian understandings of gender and sexuality, the exclusivity of Christ, and the nature of the Gospel” (Critical Dilemma, Page 30). Legitimate desires for Biblical justice can be co-opted by what is ultimately a competing religion, which eventually undermines or eliminates core Christian beliefs.
The second threat is that a society that comes to define itself by Woke beliefs could begin to erode religious freedom, and eventually begin persecuting, or at least excluding Christians in meaningful ways. I’m not saying this is likely, but I think it’s plausible enough that we should take it seriously and begin acting accordingly.
Notably these two threats are mutually-reinforcing. The more people who hold the mantle of Christian without actually believing core tenets, the more it becomes reasonable to sanction orthodox beliefs without running afoul of religious protection laws. And the trends in America do not favor Christians with orthodox beliefs. According to the American Worldview Inventory:
Although 68 percent of Americans consider themselves to be Christians, only 6 percent have a Biblical worldview (that’s 6 percent of the 68 percent - so only about 4 percent of Americans overall).
Fewer than half of those 68 percent claim the fundamental Christian belief that (a) they will go to Heaven when they die (b) because they have confessed their sins and accepted Jesus as savior.
The unfortunate truth is that most Christians in America are Christian in name only, or at minimum, hold very un-Biblical beliefs putting them at odds with orthodox believers. And this is, I think, an even bigger liability than living as a small but clearly-defined religious minority. When most people claim to be Christian, but don’t subscribe to key Christian beliefs and moral norms, it becomes easy to dismiss (or even punish) those who do retain those beliefs. ‘Most Christians aren’t opposed to abortion or Drag Queen Story Hour. You’re only opposed because you’re patriarchal bigots.’
This possibility is not purely hypothetical. A school board in Arizona voted to quit taking student teachers from a local Christian college because of the college’s stance on LGBTQ issues. While the ban was removed after a legal complaint was filed, the reasoning given by one member of the board is likely to become more common [emphasis mine]:
“For me, this is not a concern about Christianity. There are plenty of Christian denominations who are LGBTQ friendly so I want to make it clear that for me my pause is not that they’re Christians so much as this particular institution’s strong anti-LGBTQ stance … ”
Already, efforts are being made to distinguish between what I call “socially-acceptable Christians” and those whose (correct) beliefs about gender, marriage, and the ramifications of life at conception put them out of the mainstream - perhaps dangerously so. A Politico reporter recently stirred controversy when she said that what distinguishes Christians from “Christian Nationalists” is that Christian Nationalists believe that our rights derive from God (which apparently makes the writers of our Declaration of Independence Christian Nationalists). She noted that this appeal to divine law isn’t always a bad thing so long as it’s used to motivate appropriate things like social justice and civil rights, but not when it’s used for inappropriate things like opposing abortion or gay marriage. And there continue to be headwinds for orthodox believers. Carl Trueman recently noted how the Catholic Church has long served as a bulwark of protection for certain orthodox beliefs, and how their liberalization on LGBTQ issues is going to put Christians who retain such orthodox beliefs in an even more precarious position if it continues.
It is not hyperbole to say that certain Christians could come to be seen as the Christian analog to the Taliban - it’s already happening on daytime television. Now, one off-the-cuff remark from an actress doesn’t mean this view is mainstream. But here is a professor at Duke Divinity school tweeting that Evangelical Christianity is the greatest threat to human existence and must be laid to waste. Here’s a sitting US Congresswoman referring to the “He Gets Us” Super Bowl campaign as “making fascism look benign” (which is ironic because it made facism look so benign that many Christians maligned the ads for being too focused on social justice at the expense of the Gospel).
So What Now?
My goal in writing this is not to stoke fear. But I want people to understand our current cultural moment since correct action ultimately relies on correct understanding. I see people online who essentially argue “Western society has always been at odds with Christianity and people are only crying ‘negative world’ because they can’t handle not being coddled by a pro-Christian society.” But things have clearly changed for the worse in our lifetime. The rampant consumerism and hedonism inherent to our post-War society were always a threat to Christians’ souls, but nobody would fire you for telling a coworker you disagreed with their materialist lifestyle over lunch. Congresspeople did not call you fascist, and Presidents did not denounce you as un-American, for opposing these vices. Here’s pastor Tim Keller speaking in 2021 (with a hat tip to Michael Young):
“By the way, things are getting bad for evangelicals. It’s very possible. I am not in denial about the fact that ten years from now [2031], if you have evangelical convictions about sex and gender, you may not be able to work for a major university or for the government or for a big corporation.”[2]
Are you ready for that possibility? Are you raising your kids with that expectation in mind?
I think it’s helpful to mentally prepare ourselves for the possibility of true suffering: not just the inevitable suffering of life, but suffering for the faith, something that has been extremely rare in America and which goes against our entire cultural ethos of comfort-seeking. I think it’s helpful to mentally prepare ourselves for leaving our job, or moving to another state (or country!) to continue exercising our faith with a clean conscience. And I think it’s helpful to begin thinking about what lines we are unwilling to cross so that we won’t be caught off guard when asked to cross them.
In future essays I hope to spend more time exploring where we go from here, but for now I want to discuss what I think are six key courses of action we should take in response to our current cultural moment.
(1) Pray. There is no situation in which this should not be top of the list. But it’s easy to forget that fact when we live in material comfort, in the absence of persecution. The souls of our children and our neighbors have always depended on God’s supernatural intervention for salvation. We have always depended on God for our material provision and safety. As these things all become more precarious we are reminded to fervently seek God in prayer. No matter how bleak things get, we can always, at minimum, pray as Jehoshaphat prayed in 2 Chronicles: “We are powerless against this great horde that is coming against us. We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you.”
(2) Fortify our faith and the faith of our kids. Again, fortifying our faith and the faith of our kids should always be a top priority. But we, and particularly our children, will face cultural headwinds that prior generations or Americans did not, and may face persecution that is unprecedented in American history. This requires a level of certainty in God’s reality and God’s goodness to stand firm in the faith that has not been required in the West for some time.
In engineering there is a principle that you should design things with a safety tolerance that goes beyond what you expect the structure or system to bear. Is it likely that we or our children will go to prison or face death for Christian beliefs in this country? Perhaps not. But if we treat our spiritual formation with that bar in mind, then our faith will much more easily sustain if society merely ends up merely excluding us from certain professions, or denying us certain conveniences.
(3) Develop community. A community of like-minded people, focused on the same goals, is critical for fortifying our collective faith and the faith of our children. And community is also critical for weathering hardship. Strong communities also allow for the development of what anti-Communist dissidents referred to as a “parallel polis.” That is, when institutions of art, education, information, and economics are held by forces opposed to Christianity, then instead of seeking to reclaim those institutions, Christians would be better served developing parallel versions of those institutions to serve the Christian community. Christian writer Rod Dreher’s “The Benedict Option,” which introduced me to the concept of the parallel polis, provides a (much misunderstood) vision of what this could look like. This vision doesn’t call for Christian withdrawal from society, but being deliberate about maintaining space for Christian belief and practice within current social structures.
(4) Defend religious liberty. God can make the church flourish in any context. And it’s true that persecution can serve as a catalyst for the faith. But for all the flaws of “cultural Christianity” ask yourself if you really believe there are fewer Christians per capita in Alabama or Oklahoma than Pakistan or North Korea, or if you think raising your children in Pakistan or North Korea would best cultivate their faith. In Exodus, God’s stated reason for freeing the Israelites from Egypt was to have freedom to worship Him (see e.g., Exodus 7:16, 8:1, 9:13). Likewise, many of the first American colonists came not searching for some generic “freedom” to do whatever they wanted, but freedom to worship God as they saw fit. Freedom and liberty have historically been what defined America (and later, the entire post-War West) but Christians understand that freedom is freedom for not freedom from.
Christians who emphasize defending religious liberty are sometimes maligned for having an un-Christian obsession with power and self-preservation. But if we have an eternal perspective, and if we believe that God’s word generally spreads faster and bears more fruit when it’s legally permissible, then we should place a premium on defending religious liberty.
(5) “Live not by lies”. Anti-Communist dissidents Alexandr Solzhenitsyn[3] and Vaclav Havel described how false ideologies gain their power from people unquestionably accepting lies in order to avoid personal sanction or punishment, and how the greatest power we have in opposing these systems is to simply stop knowingly advancing lies. We don’t have to pretend that trans women are really women. We don’t have to pretend that polycules are as good for human flourishing as two-parent households. We don’t have to pretend that objective science is just a cover for white supremacy. By standing in the truth, we not only undermine the power of Wokeness, but also serve to shine light into darkness, hopefully drawing towards God those who are desperate for the truth.
(6) Love Woke people. Jesus’ command to love and pray for our enemies presupposes that we have enemies. I think we should be willing to admit that purveyors of Wokeness are our enemies. They are also image-bearers of God whose sins Jesus paid for on the cross. Unlike many things that we hold dear, they will last forever - either separated from God, or celebrating with us in his presence. We should live our lives, and pray to God, in a way that proves we truly want the latter for them. As Paul wrote, “we do not wage war as the world does…We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself against the knowledge of God.” (2 Corinthians 10:3-5). As I’ve heard stated by multiple apologists, we demolish arguments not people. In our opposition to this false and evil ideology, we must be careful that we always adhere to God’s commands of speech and conduct, in a way that demonstrates love for our enemies.
If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading to the end. If you are still unconvinced, or if you disagree with any of my prescriptions, I’d love to hear from you. Correctly understanding our present moment, and discerning how best to live as Christ followers in this moment, takes up a lot of my mental bandwidth, and I’d love to hear others’ perspectives.
[1] It is true that the terminated teacher eventually received justice - four years later. As others have noted, “the process is the punishment.” The threat of years of legal battles is enough to make people think twice about opposing the current secular orthodoxy, and the fact that he was fired unanimously by the school board still serves to demonstrate the sway that that orthodoxy has on people in positions of influence.
[2] Lest I be guilty of taking Dr. Keller out of context, in the linked clip he was saying that Christians’ potential exclusion from the workplace was real, but was also self-inflicted by essentially fighting the culture war too hard, and not because of unprovoked animosity from the surrounding culture. I strongly disagree with that assessment. But whether or not Christians face social exclusion due to the inherent incompatibility of Christian morals with the current culture, or because a subset of Christians provoked the surrounding culture, the fact of the matter is that we will have to maintain our faith and convictions under that threat of exclusion either way.
[3]Solzhenitsyn coined (or at least, popularized) the expression “live not by lies” in the title of his famous essay. The phrase was recently revived by Rod Dreher’s book of the same name, where I first learned about it. Dreher’s book was one of the big motivators for me to start considering how to prepare for life in a post-Christian America.