Comparing Wokeness to Christianity is an insult to the Church

[C C]

https://quillette.com/blog/2023/02/20/co...he-church/

EXCERPTS: Picture, if you will, a world where a priesthood pronounces the hopeless failure of humanity, and demands sacrifice in order to expunge the evils of the past. These priests tell people that because of the state into which they are born there is no hope of washing away their evil. It is inbuilt, inherent, inescapable. The only thing to be done is obey the priests’ edicts while destroying one’s worldly possessions and vanities in an endless effort to expiate the sins of the past.

The picture above could perhaps describe the Old Testament law and priesthood. Some would also say that this is the call of the Christian faith, a founding impulse of my own Canadian nation, and one that continues to reverberate through the thoughts and feelings of present-day Canadians.

Others would say that the picture above could just as easily describe the new religion of “Wokeness.” The new priests of Woke call people to their great temples of political correctness. They hunt ruthlessly for heretics, with the same zeal as the Inquisition of Roman Catholic Spain.

[...] In a recent Twitter post noting these similarities, Quillette editor Jonathan Kay wrote:

"Christianity teaches that we’re all contaminated by original sin, which can only be (partially) expiated by confession & penitence. That’s (literally) exactly what Wokeism teaches to white [people]. Same self-lacerating cultural reflex but with a different catechism."

On the surface, this is a damning indictment of the Christian faith. And Kay continues on to draw conclusions about the natural religious impulses of Canadians being subsumed into the new Woke religion. He identifies “millions of white Canadians, stumbling around glassy-eyed, looking for some purity cult to peacock their piety.” In a way he is not wrong, for there are indeed several similarities...

[...] But there are also some key differences, which actually speak to the failure of the Woke religion, and indeed the failure of any religious impulse that depends on the work of humans to restore their relationship with their particular god. In this regard, the things that Kay missed go to the very core of the Christian message: Grace, Faith, and Redemption. It is these three key elements that Wokeness, and indeed many other ersatz religious impulses, fundamentally fail to provide... (MORE - missing details)

[Magical Realist]

Every utopian worldview risks becoming totalitarian in the end. It is the same ole game of forcing masses of people to conform to an ideology and a morality in order to reap the benefits of the society they are members of. Outsiders and non-conformists are ostracized and dehumanized by the authorities in charge. The privilege of membership is paid for by a loss in one's personal identity and individuality and freedom.

[Syne]

The difference is that traditional Christianity teaches that no one can become perfect and there can be no utopia on earth.

[Magical Realist]

If "woke" means being conscious of systemic oppression and discrimination, then I woke up a long time ago. I found myself a member of a minority of people who were and still are oppressed by a heteronormative culture. Being different forced upon me values and beliefs that do not conform to the common and average worldview of the majority. The system is rigged. And it's rigged against minorities. My very existence is a violation of the rules.

[Syne]

You don't make rules and norms for the exceptions. So it's just reality you dislike.

[confused2]

You don't make rules and norms for the exceptions. So it's just reality you dislike.

'Rules' are generally 'reasonable'* - that is to say you can reverse engineer the rule to extract the reason(s) for it - they aren't just 'shit happens'.

*rules inspired by religion fall outside my definition of 'reasonable'

[Syne]

Just because you don't understand that further consequences of rules and norms, or lack thereof, isn't a deficit of theirs.

[confused2]

Just because you don't understand that further consequences of rules and norms, or lack thereof, isn't a deficit of theirs.

Quelle surprise.

[Syne]

Why not give a specific example, instead of making vague, blanket statements?

[C C]

If "woke" means being conscious of systemic oppression and discrimination, then I woke up a long time ago. I found myself a member of a minority of people who were and still are oppressed by a heteronormative culture. Being different forced upon me values and beliefs that do not conform to the common and average worldview of the majority. The system is rigged. And it's rigged against minorities. My very existence is a violation of the rules.

There's the arguably "innocent" meaning narrowly applying to African-American causes, dating all the way back to the 1930s. And then its appropriation in this century for a broader spectrum of issues and marginalized groups.

But eventually arrogated yet again, to refer specifically to "fundamentalist left" and opportunistic (capitalist) distinctions abiding in the general movement. For all intents and purposes, the latter pejorative uses of the term are what has won out, so that even social activists formerly using it probably disdain applying the label to themselves now.

The opportunistic woke sub-category concerns progressive capitalists (both political and business operatives) who exploit left narratives for their own public image and marketing sales, office-holder campaigns, and career enhancements -- even manipulating/controlling the directions of the agendas eventually.

The "fundamentalist left" woke sub-category concerns just that: the original, enduring socioeconomic ripple going back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, whose basic MO is utilizing an altruism facade to incrementally advance collectivism. The right counterpart of such might roughly be akin to Elmer Gantry type religious evangelism and bogus missionary work, that (in their case) monetarily profit from a humanitarian front. The fundamental left's lingering need of "good/evil" dichotomy and revamped versions of sin, thought censorship and speech controlling, and other authoritarian attributes evoke those comparisons to religious extremism on the right. (That applicable segment of the intellectual class still not truly divorced from the tendencies of its [extremist] Christian forebears -- i.e., who are "para-religious"[1] -- but filling those subconscious and archaic motivations with secular ideological content rather than supernatural canon.)

- - - footnote - - -

[1] Historical roots for the "para-religious" adjective. The less formalized collectivism existing before Marx (as arguably exemplified by Shaw) versus collectivism after Marx's influence (exemplified by continental Social Democrats back then):

George Bernard Shaw: I am a Socialist and a Democrat myself, the hero of a hundred platforms, one of the leaders of the most notable Socialist organizations in England. I am as conspicuous in English Socialism as Bebel is in German Socialism; but do you suppose that the German Social-Democrats tolerate me? Not a bit of it.

[...] All they want to know is; Am I orthodox? Am I correct in my revolutionary views? Am I reverent to the revolutionary authorities? Because I am a genuine free-thinker they look at me as a policeman looks at a midnight prowler or as a Berlin bourgeois looks at a suspicious foreigner. They ask "Do you believe that Marx was omniscient and infallible; that Engels was his prophet; that Bebel and Singer are his inspired apostles; and that Das Kapital is the Bible?"

[...] I read Das Kapital in the year 1882 or thereabouts [...] its general attempt to disguise a masterpiece of propagandist journalism and prophetic invective as a drily scientific treatise of the sort that used to impose on people in 1860, when any book that pretended to be scientific was accepted as a Bible. In those days Darwin and Helmholtz were the real fathers of the Church; and nobody would listen to religion, poetry or rhetoric; so that even Socialism had to call itself "scientific," and predict the date of the revolution, as if it were a comet, by calculations founded on "historic laws."

To my amazement these reasonable remarks were received as hideous blasphemies; none of the party papers were allowed to print any word of mine ... I found myself an outcast from German Social-Democracy at the moment...

[...] Thus you may see that when a German, by becoming a Social-Democrat, throws off all the bonds of convention, and stands free from all allegiance to established religion, law, order, patriotism, and learning, he promptly uses his freedom to put on a headier set of chains... (return to a religious-like, extremist mindset, but secular.) --The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring https://www.marxists.org/reference/archi...wagner.htm