By DOUG SHAVER
February 2024
I have never been woke, but I used to be a liberal. I know why wokeness appeals to some liberals, and I have read the reflections of liberals who used to be woke and no longer are. When they talk about finding inconsistencies between wokeness and liberalism, I get it. Wokeness is not consistent with the liberalism I once espoused and to which I continue to be sympathetic.
We’ve been hearing for a few years now that wokeness is a religion. John McWhorter is a prominent advocate of this notion. He says (approximately), “I don’t mean wokeness is like a religion. I mean it is a religion.” I think the distinction is trivial, if there is one. I used to be religious. I was a Christian for about a dozen years, a fundamentalist evangelical for about half that time and a far-left social-gospel Protestant for the other half.
Religion was a hard habit for me to break. Even after becoming an atheist in my mid-20s, I dabbled with some atheist-friendly religions for the next two decades. I was in my mid-40s before I realized there was no way I could make sense of any of them. It took me that long, partly because certain misfortunes in my early life had left me more emotionally vulnerable than most people are, and partly because I was just trying to keep an open mind. I kept having to run the internal dialogue: “How do you know this is wrong?” “Well, I don’t know for sure that it’s wrong.” “Well, then, why not give it a try?”
People who accuse their adversaries of being religious are not always saying that religion is a bad thing. Sometimes they just mean, “There are good religions and bad religions, and you have a bad one.” But that is not what is going on here. We're talking about an accusation, not just a characterization. People who say wokeism is a religion mean to say there is something fundamentally wrong with it. Exactly what that is depends on what they think is fundamentally wrong with religion. So then we get to the question: Is there anything wrong with religion that is unique to religion?
I don't think so. There is no fallacy employed by the defenders of any religious doctrine that is not employed by the defenders of any political idea. There is, though, a cluster of fallacies and other epistemological mistakes that trigger flashbacks in some of us former evangelical Christians. One is sin. Another is something I have called virtuous intuition.
Sin is not quite equivalent to the concept of evil. The general idea of sin is violation of divine law—disobedience, in other words. Sin consists of not doing what God has commanded, or doing what he has prohibited. This is clearly a theological concept, but it is easily secularized.
Some kind of distinction between good and bad behavior is a human universal. All societies need rules establishing some behaviors as mandatory, some as permissible, and some as prohibited. There may or may not be a consensus about the origin of those rules, but the need to enforce them will be taken for granted in any given society. This will not depend on a particular belief about the origin of that law. Whatever the law's origin, it is deemed wrong to violate it, and we feel justified in punishing violators.
But, if our moral laws do come from God, how do we know what his laws are? Ideally we could just ask him, but he doesn't talk to most of us. Some of Christianity's leaders, though, tell us about this book they have, which was written by several men to whom God did explain everything we need to know about his laws. The apologists assure us that if we'll just read that book, then we'll know what is right and what is wrong. And if that book seems inconsistent or ambiguous about some of its moral rules, then those who believe in its divine origin will gladly tell us how to resolve what they call the “apparent contradictions.”
But, what if those believers don’t agree among themselves on the correct resolution? No problem, according to the apologists. They will assure us that some people are just gifted with a special insight that informs their understanding of the divine text, and the rest of us will recognize those people when we meet them, provided only that we sincerely want to know the truth about God’s rules.They will tell us what is right and what is wrong, if we will just listen to them.
This special insight is what we might call a morality-based truth detector. Plato proposed something like it when he suggested we had some kind of sense, comparable with our physical senses, with which we perceived the Forms. Few moderns still believe in the Forms, but belief in a transcendent reality distinct from the physical world remains popular. Being distinct from the physical world, it is imperceptible to our physical senses and therefore inaccessible to scientific inquiry. In this transcendent reality are the answers to all those questions that, we are assured, science can never answer.
So, how do we get those answers? People who admit to being religious tell us we need to exercise something they call faith. The secular ideologues haven’t yet decided what to call it, but they do claim to know the answers because they have that something, whatever it is. It is a faith analogue, and it’s what I’m calling virtuous intuition. It is intuition because with it, we know things without being able to explain how we know them. It is virtuous because good people have it and bad people don’t.
The idea is not that virtuous people always know the truth. It is that they always know it when they hear it, and hearing is sufficient. They don’t need proof or other arguments. We might recall the gospel story of Thomas, who was slightly scolded by Jesus for not believing the other disciples when they told him about the resurrection. And there was Zechariah, father of John the Baptist, who was rendered temporarily mute as punishment for his skepticism about Elizabeth’s pregnancy.
For the quintessential example of faith done right, we have Abraham. Believing that God had ordered him to sacrifice his son Isaac, he apparently didn’t hesitate to comply. To us who think there was no way Abraham could have been doing the right thing, I have seen two responses by apologists. One is that nothing can be wrong if God commands it, and Abraham knew this. The other is that because of his faith, Abraham knew that God would keep Isaac alive somehow. Either way, Abraham was being tested, either for his willingness to obey God no matter what, or for his willingness to trust God no matter what. Or both. As the Sunday school song has it, “Trust and obey, for there’s no other way.”
The bottom line of virtuous intuition is: Good people believe what they’re told, and they do what they’re told, when they are told by other good people. It seems to be so among the woke, who are obviously quite convinced that they are the good people.
One consequence of all this is an intransigence that makes civil discourse impossible. Intransigence is not unique to the woke, obviously, but when civil people have to deal with intransigence, it can be useful to understand its source. Mere stubbornness is one thing. A belief that one is doing the will of God or complying with some analogous transcendent ideal is another.
For one thing, it can create a feeling of infallibility. Most of us get it that we’re capable of error and that there is virtue in a willingness to admit mistakes. But a conviction that one has been blessed with special insight into an ultimate reality can make such humility seem pernicious. I was still a religious fundamentalist when I began college, and one of my professors once asked me, “What would you do if you discovered that your religion was a mistake?” My reply was, “That’s like asking me what I would do if I discovered two plus two didn’t equal four.” I knew how arrogant that had to sound, but I didn’t think I was being arrogant. I was getting my beliefs from God, and although I could be wrong, he could not.
Within a few months, it occurred to me to ask myself a followup question, which was: Okay, so you think God is talking to you, but could you be mistaken about that? And, by the time I was able to ask the question, I knew what the answer had to be. I didn’t stop believing in God right away, but most of my doctrinal beliefs were immediately gone, and I had to let my pastor know that I would be leaving his church. His response was, as I knew it would be, an angry warning that I was going to burn in hell. Of course the threat was ineffective, because I no longer believed that God punished apostates with hellfire.
Secular cults cannot threaten their dissidents with literal hell, but the figurative hell of social or professional excommunication can be just as effective a deterrent against the questioning of secular orthodoxies. We are told sometimes that it must not really be very effective, and we’re offered as evidence people such as J.K. Rowling, or Dave Rubin, or Joe Rogan. But maybe they’re outliers. What if the threats usually do work? How do we find the evidence? We find it by meeting people, within places such as academia or mainstream news outlets, who tell us, “I know this stuff is BS, but I don’t dare speak out or else my career will be ruined.” But when we say we know these people, we cannot publicly identify them, and then we are reminded that anecdotes aren’t data, especially if they cannot be verified.
So be it. The standoff cannot continue indefinitely. Confirmation or falsification will happen eventually.
(This page last updated on February 20, 2024.)