What Type of Religion Is Wokeness?

“As we might expect, the Woke, often well educated and articulate, have generated their own convoluted and comprehensive ‘theology’ replete with saints and sinners, priests and heretics, and even their own kind of Heaven and Hell.”

In a few short years something amazing has occurred. Since the death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer, a whole systematic set of ideas has swept through society and, most dramatically, through virtually all institutions—both public and private. This phenomenon did not appear out of nowhere but represents a kind of blossoming of ideas and systems already in place. The broad generic term for those most caught up in this movement is Woke.

Wokeness is a revelation that the world is not right and must be radically changed. This involves widespread displays (both personal and institutional) of awareness of social and racial inequities. These displays often take quite specific forms—indeed, orthodoxical forms. Wokeness is a comprehensive and beguiling view of how the world is and how the world should be. Wokeness seems to be more than a new political ideology; indeed, it seems more like a new religion.

Actually, Wokeness is not like a religion. According to Columbia University linguistics professor John McWhorter, it is a religion. In his 2021 book Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America, McWhorter makes a compelling case that Wokeness manifests all of the traits we commonly associate with religion, and a particularly fundamentalist one at that. The Woke—or what McWhorter calls “the Elect”—have “superstition”; “a clergy”; they “bar other religions”; they are “apocalyptic”; “evangelical”; and apparently, “they’re coming for your children.”

Over the centuries, the United States has spawned many kinds of religions, cults, and sects, but few have so dramatically captured the public’s attention the way Wokeness has these last few years. This begs the question: How could such a radically new “religion” arise and dominate in a largely secular modern society?