In the past decade, a new iteration of progressivism, often described as “woke,” has gained traction; its dogmatism, its power over its adherents, and the ways it seems to go beyond normal political discourse have led some critics to describe it as a kind of religion. But as Hannah Arendt wrote many decades ago about a similar analogy, using a shoe to bang on a nail doesn’t make it a hammer. Katherine Dee writes:
There was no divine or supernatural element [to wokeness], for one. . . . While figures like George Floyd, Trayvon Martin, Breonna Taylor, and—more recently, though to a much lesser extent—Jordan Neely took on a kind of mythic, folk-hero-like stature, they lacked truly religious character. People were not worshipful in the face of their stories, even if their fervor had a taste of the Pentecostal to it. In the end, George Floyd was a regular person—at most a martyr—who could just as easily have been you, me, or a neighbor, something you would never say of the pope, a saint, or Jesus Christ. There was no church and, as anyone who has been “canceled” could attest, no promise of redemption or transcendence.
But still, wokeness was touching on something deeply emotional. It was unfamiliar, at times frightening. It wasn’t “just politics.” There was, even if inarticulable, something undeniably new about it.
But if wokeness is not a religion, Dee writes, it is still something of a creed:
I would argue wokeness stands in stark contrast to what we might consider the narrating cosmology of the U.S. If there’s a faith that undergirds much of our culture, it’s the belief that our thoughts and wills can reshape our circumstances. We are a culture that believes we can “lift ourselves up by our bootstraps” in our heart of hearts. Even though the last 30-odd years have been overwrought with narratives of victimhood, this belief in being self-made, a conviction that personal effort and willpower can triumph over any and all adversity, rages on.
It is this idea, Dee concludes, that woke progressives reject most vociferously.
More about: American Religion, American society, Progressivism