The Secular Religion of the “Woke” and Its Inquisition against Right-Wing Heresy

Material added on February 23, 2023

In 1633, the Italian astronomer and physicist Galileo Galilei was brought to trial for heresy before the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Galileo’s crime was he believed the Earth revolved around the Sun, not the other way around. Religious opposition to this idea was inspired by biblical passages implying the fixed nature of the Earth. He was threatened with torture if he did not recant. For the rest of his life, he remained under house arrest. Today, we see similar efforts by “woke” progressives to force so-called “conservatives” to renounce their beliefs. In fact, wokeness has become a modern secular religion, intent on stamping out right-wing heresies.

What Offends the “Woke”

The nature of sin has been redefined by the woke. What offends them is the fact that every human being does not receive equal rewards from society. Those who are described as woke get that title from being awake to social injustice, which they see as caused by unequal social results. Their central theology is based on the ideas of Critical Theory.

Critical Theory is a construct of Marxist ideas produced by a number of sociologists in the 1930s at the University of Frankfurt, Germany. They called themselves the Frankfurt School. What distinguished them from other Marxists was their emphasis on action against society’s elites to bring about social justice. Below is a video of James Lindsay explaining Critical Theory, emphasizing its Marxist nature. Lindsay is an American mathematician, author and cultural critic. One of his notable contributions was a co-authorship with Helen Pluckrose of the nonfiction book Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody. 

If you listen carefully to Lindsay (the going gets heavy at times), you will see how the methods of Critical Theory could be compatible with the classically liberal ideas from the Age of Enlightenment. However, the way Critical Theory has been used by The Frankfurt School and by other leftist theorists to the present day has been profoundly destructive of classically liberal ideas. The Marxist assumption is that evil can always be found deep-rooted in society and a way must be found to expunge it. The Marxist version of Critical Theory (the one always used today) presumes the powerful always foist their assumptions about social reality onto everyone else. The powerful, i.e. society’s elites, always form these assumptions to benefit themselves, to the cost of everyone else. It is these assumptions the Critical Theory must tear apart and point the way to destroy them. These builtin Marxist assumptions of Critical Theory are the fundamental basis of Woke theology.

Is Wokeness Almost Over?

In recent months, a large number of pundits on the Right have begun to predict that Wokeness is fast becoming a spent force. Although the midterm elections of 2021 failed to be the red tsunami expected to drown the Left, they nevertheless offered some setbacks to the progressive woke. In particular, culture issues have been alienating many working class whites, many hispanics, and some blacks. These culture issues include parental control of public education, Democratic hostility toward law enforcement (“defund the police” and refusal of Democratic district attorneys to prosecute many crimes), and progressive claims that the U.S. is not an “exceptional country.” Adding insult to injury, the quintessentially woke 1619 project insisted the U.S. Revolution was fought to preserve slavery, not to create a classically liberal democracy.

In the essay Is Wokeness Almost Over?, the pundit Scott McConnell, a founding editor of The American Conservative, gives another reason to believe that wokeness has almost run its course: the fundamental institutions of the United States which protect and support human freedoms. Mr. McConnell writes,

The United States has free elections, a First Amendment, and political norms which remain more or less intact, and wokeness is an ideological movement which has managed to humiliate its victims and get them fired from their jobs, not to kill them. But it is not a stretch to see in it parallels to the totalitarian movements of the past century: the preening self-righteousness of its enforcers; their seeking of forced confessions, depicted as apologies from their victims; the attempted politicization of every aspect of social life, including language; the insistence that the traditional mores of their own country are utterly debased. Never in American history has so much energy been devoted to getting people fired for expressing an opinion.

Scott McConnell in Is Wokeness Almost Over?

By alienating so many of the non-woke, the progressive woke will encourage their adversaries to use the ballot box to end their influence. Yet, is this a much too complacent view on the durability of wokeness?

The Secular Religion of the Woke and Its Bastion in the Democratic Party

I have always been amazed over how strongly the progressive woke could cling to their beliefs confronted by so much contradictory empirical evidence. To destroy social injustice, they dream of using government power to control society, particularly the country’s economy. Built into this dream is the assumption government has both the competence and capability to solve or at least ameliorate most social and economic problems. I have empirically rebutted this fundamental faith most recently in the post How Much Human Freedom Can We Find in the World? The explanation for why the empirical data contradicts the woke faith can be found in the post How Is the Weather Like a Country’s Economy?

I have come to believe the reason the woke could fundamentally believe such an obviously false proposition is it is basically a religious faith for them. For them the proposition is a metaphysical certainty. Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy dealing with the first principles of things, especially those things which exist beyond our direct experience. Metaphysics is the first business of religion. The word “transcendental” is the preferred synonym for “metaphysical.” With the woke accepting that the government can be the answer to all human problems, wokeness can only be described as a secular religion. Government is the god on Earth.

Because many of the woke have been viscerally antagonistic toward religion, particularly the Christian faith, they might well laugh at the idea theirs is a secular religion. Despite that, they are very religious indeed, whether they believe it or not. The fact their basic theology is Marxist Critical Theory has already been noted. They believe in a dualistic struggle between the oppressed and oppressors, with the oppressors being society’s elites. (The woke seem to completely ignore the fact that so many of America’s elites have joined their side! Their religious faith tells them the elites are the creators of sin.) Any disparities in individual attainments in society are de facto proof of hierarchical oppression. To end oppression and save the world from sin, the hierarchy of elitists and the social institutions that support them must be totally torn down. Through the government, the woke must redistribute power and wealth from the oppressors to the oppressed.

These are beliefs of faith that can exercise an iron control over the minds of the true believers. This iron control is created by their struggle to understand and eliminate human injustice toward our fellow man. That struggle stretches back for as long as there has been philosophical and theological thought. Because it is a metaphysical perspective, it will not be vanquished by purely political means, no matter how fallacious its view of reality.

It is manifestly ridiculous to believe all Democrats belong to the woke — not even all Democratic politicians! Nevertheless, the woke are currently very much in control of the Democratic Party. This has led the Biden Administration, its supporters in Congress, and progressive-dominated state and local governments to a number of policies destructive of the nation.

One is the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act. It is in reality an act to limit CO₂ emissions, increase tax revenues, and to subsidize health care. Ultimately its influence will be profoundly inflationary. The woke would love it just for the additional control over society it gives to the federal government. Just as an instrument of Joe Biden’s idiotic Climate Plan, it threatens not just the economy but plant life (and therefore all life) as well. Progressives would dearly love to drastically cut CO₂ atmospheric concentrations well below the current 420 ppm atmospheric concentrations seen today. Yet,  biologists have shown plant life begins to suffer greatly once CO₂ levels fall below 500 ppm, the situation we suffer today. Should the CO₂ levels ever fall below 150 ppm, massive die-offs of plant life could be expected. As a NoTricksZone post by Pierre Gosselin put it:  “Do we really want to live on the brink of extinction?” Better to subsidize the burning of fossil fuels to replenish our atmospheric CO₂!

Yet, another destructive program is the progressive policy to open the U.S. borders to any immigrant who wishes to enter the U.S. Until recently, our awareness of growing illegal immigration was focused on our southern border with Mexico. Yet, now illegal crossings over our northern border with Canada are also exploding. Part of the progressive motivation for allowing unlimited immigration is multiculturalism. According to multiculturalism, the values of all cultures are of equal merit. Therefore, adding citizens from other cultures only contributes to our society. Problems of compatibility without cultural assimilation are ignored.

Progressive Democrats have a peculiar view of economics, which is compatible with woke religious faith. This compatibility occurs because it emphasizes the role of government in managing the economy and in picking its winners and losers. Unfortunately, these progressive beliefs are incompatible with the time-tested classical laws of economics, which Democrats frequently try to violate.

One last piece of evidence the Democratic Party is dominated by the woke church must be mentioned. Like the medieval Roman Catholic Church and its Holy Office of Inquisition, the woke are obsessed with rooting out heresy. The result has been “cancel culture.” (See also here.) The woke view cancel culture as a means of holding heretical miscreants accountable for their offensive ideas about society. It is their version of burning people at the stake. As a way of supporting the woke in this effort, the Biden Administration tried to set up a “Disinformation Governance Board” under the Department of Homeland Security. According to testimony by DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to Congress, the board was necessary to counter misinformation and disinformation in the public square. Its formation was announced on April 27, 2022. The public outcry against it was so strong, its operation was “paused” after just three weeks. By August 24, 2022, DHS formally dissolved the board.

How to Decrease the Influence of the Woke

How can those of us who are not woke eliminate their noxious hold on public policy? Since their beliefs are religious in nature, we cannot merely cite facts contrary to their most firmly held beliefs. Nevertheless, we cannot imitate them and create our own cancel culture. We cannot form our own Holy Office of Inquisition. If we wish to protect our constitutionally protected rights of freedom of speech and freedom to thought, those reactions are forbidden to us.

Perhaps a hint of how to counter the woke is provided by the Protestant Reformation and the Scientific Revolution in the 16th-century. During that period, the medieval Catholic Church acted in many ways similar to today’s woke.

One of the most seminal figures of the Reformation was Martin Luther (10 November 1483 – 18 February 1546), who was a German Priest and theologian. In particular, he was opposed to the Catholic Church’s sale of indulgences for the remission of sins. More importantly for our purposes, his theology challenged the authority of the Pope. He taught that the Bible is the only source of divinely revealed knowledge. The office of the Pope could not be a source of such knowledge.

Protestantism arose in reaction to the perceived corruption of the Catholic Church. Much like today, it also arose in a period of social turmoil with feudal social arrangements in decline. With the Catholic Church losing the trust of many, a revolt against it that gave spiritual autonomy to individuals was inevitable. The Protestants could read revealed truth in the Bible for themselves. They did not have to depend on the Church for the perception of divine truth. The prior invention of the Gutenberg printing press sometime between 1440 and 1450 allowed for a universal supply of cheap bibles.

Almost simultaneously with the protestant reformation, the scientific revolution also shook Europeans’ views of the world. Its effect on the Church provides us with further clues on how to handle the woke. Most often, its beginning is considered to be the 1543 publication of De revolutionizes orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) by Nicolaus Copernicus.

This work by Copernicus presented observational evidence that the Earth orbited the Sun, i.e. the heliocentric model of the solar system. We have already seen how belief in the heliocentric model led to the life sentence of house arrest for Galileo. In fact, the relationship between the Church and science has been an uneasy one. One can point to many cases where the Catholic Church has been a patron of the sciences. However, in cases like Galileo’s when the scientific ideas seemed to conflict with the Church’s interpretations of scripture, the medieval Church did not hesitate to stamp out the heresy. The Church has always taught that faith and science must ultimately be compatible. The modern Catechism of the Catholic Church (1985) states in one place

“Though faith is above reason, there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason. Since the same God who reveals mysteries and infuses faith has bestowed the light of reason on the human mind, God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever contradict truth. … “

However, as the case of Galileo showed, in a seeming conflict of faith with science, the first to be questioned during the Middle Ages was science. The primary suspect was not the Church’s interpretations of faith. It was not until the triumph of physics with Sir Isaac Newton’s publication of Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica  in 1687 that Copernicus and Galileo were vindicated.

How does all this history guide us in responding to the woke? First of all, because we are confronting a woke religion, a large amount of time could be required. This would be needed to persuade its adherents to allow others to hold differing opinions. Perhaps, eventually, we might even be able to convert them. It took approximately one-and-a-half centuries for both protestants and scientists to win a cease-fire from the Roman Catholic Church. Secondly, to allow such a persuasion, those of us who who believe in the values of the Age of Enlightenment (aka the Age of Reason) must constantly evangelize our own religion. This will not be a quick fight.

To evangelize among the heathen woke, more is needed than simple appeals to empirical data coupled to reasoned argument. That has already been shown to be insufficient. In addition, the non-woke must seize the moral high ground. Besides winning their minds, we must also win their hearts.

One potent way of doing this is to constantly remind everyone of the true woke objective. They do not merely want to reform America in the manner of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal or Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. Instead, they ultimately want to destroy the American way of life. Reminding everyone of this is made much easier by the woke themselves. They are constantly reminding everyone they are doing everything they can to “fundamentally transform” the American way of life. [See also the City Journal article Wokeness, the Highest Stage of Managerialism by Malcolm Kyeyune.]

Moreover, the woke want to jettison the ideals of the Enlightenment for the control of fascism. It is impossible to believe they can get the bulk of the American People to accept the loss of individual freedoms that would entail.

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