Awake, Not Woke

A Christian Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology

Noelle Mering

• Editorial: TAN Books
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781505118445
• Categoría: Theology & Religion
• Categoría: Religion

The long-simmering crisis that grips our culture has exploded in recent years, leaving us divided and intransigent. Discourse seems futile when we are no longer a people with shared principles or even a shared understanding of reality. What seems obvious to one person is patently absurd to the next.

This collapse of meaning is not accidental. It has been plotted and documented for decades, and now presents in its current form as Woke ideology.

Awake, Not Woke unmasks this ideology by examining its history, major players, premises, and tactics, showing us that "Wokeness" at its core is an ideology of rupture. Indeed, it is an ideology with fundamentalist and even cult-like characteristics that is on a collision course with Christianity.

This is a spiritual battle, and it is not accidental. The architects of revolution have long known that the transformation of the West had to come by way of destabilizing the social, familial, and religious pieties of a citizenry.

But there is a road to restoration, and it begins with identifying and understanding the operating principles of the Woke movement. While the revolution is a counterfeit religion resulting in alienation and division, the One True Faith brings restoration. It is this restoration -- of the person, the family, and the Faith -- for which we all hunger and is the most fitting avenue toward a more harmonious and whole society

PART I

Origins

1

Ye Shall Be as Gods

“Two cities were created by two loves. The earthly city was created by self-love reaching the point of contempt for God. In the Heavenly City, by the love of God carried as far as contempt for self.”¹

When he wrote City of God, St. Augustine knew well what it was to be a citizen in the City of Man. His was a life with shadows and light, knowing an abyss of sin and through that knowledge finding the ineffable mercy of a Savior. His turning back to God, after having chained himself to sin, was finally prompted when, while sitting under a fig tree, he heard a child’s voice saying, “Take up and read.” He opened Sacred Scripture and read, “The night is far gone, the day is at hand. Let us then cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light” (Rom 13:12).

Nine months later, he was baptized. He wrote of his conversion, “All my empty dreams suddenly lost their charm and my heart began to throb with a bewildering passion for the wisdom of eternal truth.”² His life and writings have been studied, meditated upon, and written about for centuries not just because of his writing mastery but due to the enduring relevance of the deeply human and distinctly supernatural themes of sin, struggle, and redemption. These themes are not unique to him but are at stake in the life of every fallen person.

Concerning St. Augustine, sin, and struggle, woke celebrity Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber says, “When it came to his ideas around sex and gender, he basically took a dump and the church encased it in amber.”³ In her latest book, Shameless, Bolz-Weber calls for a Christian sexual revolution with regard to sex, gender, transgenderism, and feminism. According to her, the effort to deny sexual pleasure in any but the most extreme circumstances is futile, even contrary to God’s will.

This belief was crystalized (or encased in amber) for Bolz-Weber when, after leaving a husband with whom she’d found insufficient sexual satisfaction, she began having the gratifying sex she sought with an old boyfriend. She was not under a fig tree, and she heard no angelic voice, but she did have what she describes as a reawakening. “It was like an exfoliant.”⁴ Through this experience, it became clear to her that Christians needed to reconstruct the moral architecture surrounding sexuality. Bolz-Weber practices what she preaches; when her sixteen-year-old son came to her to say he was in a relationship with another boy, she responded by tossing him a pack of condoms.

Nadia Bolz-Weber might seem like an extreme example of the influence of woke culture in Christianity. But while the number of Christians who count themselves among such ranks is small, her embrace of politically correct secular agendas has provided her a platform. Shameless is a New York Times best seller, with a glowing endorsement from the late and relatively more mainstream Christian figure Rachel Held-Evans. The ceiling for her extreme presentation of woke Christianity might be low, but there are an increasing number of similarly insidious messages presented with less edgy packaging, and spasms of woke protests have been percolating around various Catholic and Protestant colleges with greater frequency.

Much of woke Christianity is framed as a reaction to the ills of traditional Christianity. There is hypocrisy, and harshness, and scandal they say, and, well, the solution just might be to become a faith defined by its reaction to, and rejection of, all of that—to become a kinder, gentler Christianity that is a friend rather than a challenge to the world.

That too many for too long have been raised with a pale and impoverished witness to the richness of Christianity is undeniable. The reality of imperfect people—whose faith is weak, understanding is limited, and love is small—bringing scandal to the faith is nothing new. In fact, that can describe most of us at different times. We can present a proud or harsh or hostile Christianity because we are proud or harsh or hostile.

Additionally, too many for too long have experienced not only a weak presentation of the faith but a perverse one. Abuse happens in every segment of society, but there is something exponentially destructive when it is coupled with a costume of Christianity.

But if we have suffered from infidelity to Christ, we won’t resolve that by a different sort of infidelity to him. More holiness, not less, is what is needed. A religion that too closely identifies happiness with the fulfillment of desire will not conceive of anything worth suffering for. A Christianity which averts its eyes to the pervasiveness of sin will not feel the need for an abundance of grace.

Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI spoke to this prior to his papacy in a radio address in 1969:

The future of the Church, once again as always, will be reshaped by saints, by men, that is, whose minds probe deeper than the slogans of the day, who see more than others see, because their lives embrace a wider reality. Unselfishness, which makes men free, is attained only through the patience of small daily acts of self-denial. By this daily passion, which alone reveals to a man in how many ways he is enslaved by his own ego, by this daily passion and by it alone, a man’s eyes are slowly opened. He sees only to the extent that he has lived and suffered. If today we are scarcely able any longer to become aware of God, that is because we find it so easy to evade ourselves, to flee from the depths of our being by means of the narcotic of some pleasure or other. Thus our own interior depths remain closed to us.⁵

We have grown blind to this great drama, oblivious to our spiritual poverty. Without knowing our need, our solutions seem merely sentimental. And therein lies the fundamental incoherence of woke Christianity: in seeking to offer the world a veneer of compassion, it robs that world of mercy. We become, as Cardinal George put it, a world that permits everything and forgives nothing—a world that is not only merciless but Christ-less.

The Struggle

Though it is tempting to confine woke ideology in terms of partisan politics, the crisis we face extends far beyond that. This is a spiritual and religious struggle with origins reaching back to a snake in a garden cajoling the first woman that “ye shall be as gods.” Behind every temptation to sin is this sales pitch: that we might, in trading our greatest good for various lesser goods, become autonomous, self-determining, powerful. Time and again we are reminded in history and in our personal pursuits that in falling for this promise, we expose it as a lie. Rather than powerful, autonomous, and self-determining, we become small, chaotic, and slaves to ego and impulse. We become weak.

This is both old and new. It is a struggle that no one can escape in this life. But something has changed in our understanding of this struggle, and this change has become pervasive and loud. We have ceased to see this struggle as one worth fighting. Increasingly, we see our good as identical to our desire. We look suspiciously at references to sin, evil, and hell. Those words are for something “out there” or from long ago, if they even mean anything at all.

More and more we conceive of God as less and less—until he becomes little more than an extension of ourselves or a therapeutic being who serves to comfort and affirm us. “He must decrease, we must increase” is our modern mantra.

Virtue is difficult enough to attain, but it becomes impossible when it is no longer seen as a goal worthy of pursuit. The struggle to do the good predates Christianity and exists in its most synthesized ancient form in the writings of Aristotle, who said that to be a rational animal and to live a fully human life is to do the good habitually. Such habits train us to delight in the self-mastery and the freedom that virtue introduces. But as long as we live, there will always be a pull to swim downstream.

St. Paul speaks of the struggle, “But I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members” (Rom 7:23). Instead, we have shifted the locus of the struggle from internal to external. Aleksander Solzhenitsyn was a man who knew the depths of evil, having endured eight years imprisoned in a labor camp for the crime of having criticized communism. Still, he famously wrote in The Gulag Archipelago, “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”

Two Cities

Though its roots and history are atheistic, woke ideology takes on the manner and characteristics of a fundamentalist religion. It has its dogmas and denunciations. It replaces the struggle against sin with struggle sessions. Its vision is messianic, its dogmas unquestionable. But rather than an eternal end, it finds and administers salvation and damnation in this world. As it co-opts the culture, it co-opts Christians, but it does so parasitically. Woke Christianity, if such a thing might be said to exist at all, will inevitably reject Christ in all but name.

A stage is set for a collision between an illusory god of self and the one true God. In principle, woke ideology establishes a modern incarnation of the City of Man, not because it is the wrong politics, but because it allows nothing but politics. It crowds out any vision of the eternal city and instead reduces the world to a decrepit mansion with mirrors and facades and the embers of an old fire.

The two cities do not have a visible demarcation line; they remain intermingled in this life. Each city—of God and of man—is constituted with doctrines, dogmas, rites, codes, and evangelistic zeal. Citizens in either can be kind or cruel, and citizenship can move from one city to the other (and back again). But while one points its citizens to eternity and the glory of God, the other seeks only the goods of this world and the glory of self.

Shy away from it as we might, death is not an if but a when. And the four last things—death, judgment, heaven, hell—that come when we open our eyes on the other side concern things not of a moment but of an eternity.

Writhing and thrashing against this hope of eternal beatitude is the same serpent let loose in this post-Eden carnival. Serpents are believed to symbolize many things, but our conception of the serpent’s basic nature has remained relatively consistent; it is androgynous—both phallic and feminine. They are cunning and voracious—all intellect and appetite. In this way, they are an icon of what C. S. Lewis called “men without chests,” creatures who know the good but have no love or affection for it, and so instead are crafty and self-indulgent.

Leon Kass, in his analysis of Genesis, says the serpent is an “embodiment of the separated and beguiling voice of autonomous human reason speaking up against innocence and obedience, coming to us as if from some attractive force outside us that whispers doubt into our ears. In making his rationalist mischief, speech is the serpent’s only weapon.”⁶

In the garden, and in each of our lives, the serpent whispers to us that we might be as gods. He does not approach us asking us to fall down and worship him initially, nor does he entice Eve to him by explicitly undermining God. Instead, he implies that God is reduced, just one of many goods, and certainly not to be preferred above all else. The serpent is cunning.

Lewis wisely gleaned the meaning and importance of men with chests. “It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.”⁷ Lewis determines that it is through trained affections that we delight in what pleases God and disdain what separates us from him. It is the chest—the heart—that provides the connective tissue between the other two organs of mind and stomach (reason and appetite), enabling us to not just know the good but to desire it. It is what the childhood story of Madeline refers to with the simple line that the children smiled at the good and frowned at the bad, not as a posture, but from a true and ordered harmony of soul that has come to see the good and desire it.

A Crisis of Meaning

It is this heart of man that cannot be satiated with what is on offer from ideology. A college professor, Ian Corbin, wrote of a hopeful, if anecdotal, encounter speaking to two graduating seniors, one man and one woman, both progressive activists, and neither white.

They shared one particular frustration, perhaps the opposite of what one would think. Both said they had felt constrained in their time at BC by certain norms of speech and thought, especially around topics like gender, relationships, race, etc. Both felt pressured to adopt certain progressive certainties that papered over the texture of an actual human life. Both of them assumed that this was due to some very strange particularities of their own lives—an idiosyncratic desire, for instance, to find a husband and raise children, a weird experience of women and men as being different from one another, in ways that might be relevant for the conduct of romantic relationships.⁸

There are true ideologues, faithful to the woke dogmas. But there is also a quiet, but likely not small, subset of people who are repeating a script, with little heart, as they are quietly pulled by design and desire to the possibility of deep meaning and the hope of some grand fulfillment of an unidentified longing. Parroting woke indignance in all the correct ways by all the old things becomes tedious and thin. Everything bores us and we grow dependent on our outrage as the only emotion that we are able to access. In a carnival of pleasures, we don’t have an architecture of meaning. These are shallow but tumultuous waters to wade through. Passions are sharp and consuming. Because we don’t know how to suffer well, we suffer loudly. We are drowning in puddles when we should be learning to swim in oceans.

In speaking about this, Viktor Frankl contrasts the lack of neurosis and suicidal thoughts among prisoners in Auschwitz with the growing phenomenon of suicidal thoughts from teens living with ease in modern Austria. “We are living in a society, either in terms of an affluent society or in terms of a welfare state…. These types of societies are out to satisfy and gratify each and every human need. Except for one need, the most basic and fundamental need … the need for meaning.”⁹ Suffering is intimately tied to meaning. Serial gratification is intimately bound up with despair.

The suppression of meaning is the deepest form of oppression and slavery that human beings can exact upon one another. In contrast, the fear of the repression of our desires by a deman...