I was Born Again until nearly the end of graduate school, a sincere Evangelical who went to church on Sunday and Wednesday with my family and to Thursday Bible study on my own. I dialed for converts during the “I Found It” evangelism campaign, served as a counselor at Camp Good News, and graduated from Wheaton College, Billy Graham’s alma mater. I know what it is to be an earnest believer among believers.
I also know what it is to experience those same dynamics from the outside. Since my fall from grace, I’ve written a book, Trusting Doubt, and several hundred articles exposing harms from Evangelicalism—not just the content of beliefs but also how they spread and shape the psychology of individuals and behavior of communities, doing damage in particular to women, children, and religious minorities.
It occurred to me recently that my time in Evangelicalism and subsequent journey out have a lot to do with why I find myself reactive to the spread of Woke culture among colleagues, political soulmates, and friends. Christianity takes many forms, with Evangelicalism being one of the more single-minded, dogmatic, groupish and enthusiastic among them. The Woke—meaning progressives who have “awoken” to the idea that oppression is the key concept explaining the structure of society, the flow of history, and virtually all of humanity’s woes—share these qualities.
To a former Evangelical, something feels too familiar—or better said, a bunch of somethings feel too familiar.
Righteous and infidels—There are two kinds of people in the world: Saved and damned or Woke and bigots, and anyone who isn’t with you 100% is morally suspect*. Through the lens of dichotomizing ideologies, each of us is seen—first and foremost—not as a complicated individual, but as a member of a group, with moral weight attached to our status as an insider or outsider. (*exceptions made for potential converts)
Insider jargon—Like many other groups, the saved and the Woke signal insider status by using special language. An Evangelical immediately recognizes a fellow tribe-member when he or she hears phrases like Praise the Lord, born again, backsliding, stumbling block, give a testimony, a harvest of souls, or It’s not a religion; it’s a relationship. The Woke signal their wokeness with words like intersectionality, cultural appropriation, trigger warning, microaggression, privilege, fragility, problematic, or decolonization. The language of the Woke may have more meaningful real-world referents than that of Evangelicals, but in both cases, jargon isn’t merely a tool for efficient or precise communication as it is in many professions—it is a sign of belonging and moral virtue.
Born that way—Although theoretically anyone is welcome in either group, the social hierarchies in both Evangelical culture and Woke culture are defined largely by accidents of birth. The Bible lists privileged blood lines—the Chosen People—and teaches that men (more so than women) were made in the image of God. In Woke culture, hierarchy is determined by membership in traditionally oppressed tribes, again based largely on blood lines and chromosomes. Note that this is not about individual experience of oppression or privilege, hardship or ease. Rather, generic average oppression scores get assigned to each tribe and then to each person based on intersecting tribal identities. Thus, a queer female East Indian Harvard grad with a Ph.D. and E.D. position is considered more oppressed than the unemployed third son of a white Appalachian coal miner.
Original sin—In both systems, one consequence of birth is inherited guilt. People are guilty of the sins of their fathers. In the case of Evangelicalism, we all are born sinful, deserving of eternal torture because of Eve’s folly—eating from the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden. In Woke culture, white and male people are born with blood guilt, a product of how dominant white and male people have treated other people over the ages and in modern times, (which—it must be said—often has been unspeakably horrible). Again, though, individual guilt isn’t about individual behaviors. A person born with original sin or blood guilt can behave badly and make things worse, but they cannot erase the inborn stain. (Note that this contradicts core tenets of liberal, humanist, and traditional progressive thought.)
Orthodoxies—The Bible is the inerrant Word of God. Jesus died for your sins. Hell awaits sinners. Salvation comes through accepting Jesus as your savior. If you are an Evangelical, doctrines like these must not be questioned. Trust and obey for there’s no other way. Anyone who questions core dogmas commits heresy, and anyone who preaches against them should be de-platformed or silenced. The Woke also have tenets of faith that must not be questioned. Most if not all ills flow from racism or sexism. Only males can be sexist; only white people can be racist. Gender is culturally constructed and independent of sex. Immigration is an economic boon for everyone. Elevating the most oppressed person will solve problems all the way up. Did my challenging that list make you think you might be reading an article by a conservative? If so, that’s exactly what I’m trying to illustrate.
Denial as proof—In Evangelicalism, thinking you don’t need to accept Jesus as your savior is proof that you do. Your denial simply reveals the depth of your sin and hardness of heart. In Woke culture, any pushback is perceived as a sign of white fragility or worse, a sign that one is a racist, sexist, homophobe, Islamophobe, xenophobe, or transphobe. You say that you voted for Barack Obama and your kids are biracial so your problem with BLM isn’t racism? LOL, that’s just what a racist would say. In both cultures, the most charitable interpretation that an insider can offer a skeptic is something along these lines, You seem like a decent, kind person. I’m sure that you just don’t understand. Since Evangelical and Woke dogmas don’t allow for honest, ethical disagreement, the only alternative hypothesis is that the skeptic must be an evildoer or bigot.
Black and white thinking—If you are not for us, you’re against us. In the Evangelical worldview we are all caught up in a spiritual war between the forces of God and Satan, which is playing out on the celestial plane. Who is on the Lord’s side? one hymn asks, because anyone else is on the other. Even mainline Christians—and especially Catholics—may be seen by Evangelicals as part of the enemy force. For many of the Woke, the equivalent of mainline Christians are old school social liberals, like women who wear pink pussy hats. Working toward colorblindness, for example, is not just considered a suboptimal way of addressing racism (which is a position that people can make arguments for). Rather, it is itself a symptom of racism. And there’s no such thing as a moderate conservative. Both Evangelicals and the Woke argue that tolerance is bad. One shouldn’t tolerate evil or fascism, they say, and most people would agree. The problem is that so many outsiders are considered either evil sinners or racist fascists. In this view, pragmatism and compromise are signs of moral taint.
Shaming and shunning—The Woke don’t tar, feather and banish sinners. Neither—mercifully—do Christian puritans anymore. But public shaming and trial by ordeal are used by both clans to keep people in line. Some Christian leaders pressure members into ritual public confession. After all, as theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “Nothing can be more cruel than the leniency which abandons others to their sin.” Shaming and shunning have ancient roots as tools of social control, and they elevate the status of the person or group doing the shaming. Maoist struggle sessions (forced public confessions) and Soviet self-criticism are examples of extreme shaming in social-critical movements seeking to upend traditional power structures. So, it should be no surprise that some of the Woke show little hesitation when call-out opportunities present themselves—nor that some remain unrelentingly righteous even when those call-outs leave a life or a family in ruins.
Selective science denial—Disinterest in inconvenient truths—or worse, denial of inconvenient truths, is generally a sign that ideology is at play. Most of us on the left can rattle off a list of truths that Evangelicals find inconvenient. The Bible is full of contradictions. Teens are going to keep having sex. Species evolve. The Earth is four and a half billion years old. Climate change is caused by humans (which suggests that God doesn’t have his hand on the wheel). Prayer works, at best, at the margins of statistical significance. But evidence and facts can be just as inconvenient for the Woke. Gender dimorphism affects how we think, not just how we look. Personal responsibility has real world benefits, even for people who have the odds stacked against them. Lived experience is simply anecdotal evidence. Skin color is often a poor proxy for privilege. Organic foods won’t feed 11 billion.
Evangelism—As infectious ideologies, Evangelicalism and Woke culture rely on both paid evangelists and enthusiastic converts to spread the word. Cru (formerly Campus Crusade for Christ) and related organizations spend tens of millions annually seeking converts on college campuses. But many outreach activities are led by earnest student believers. Critical Oppression Theory on campus has its epicenter in gender and race studies but has become a mainstay in schools of public health and law as well as the liberal arts. Once this becomes the dominant lens for human interactions, students police themselves—and each other. Nobody wants to be the ignoramus who deadnames a transgender peer or microaggresses against a foreign student by asking about their culture.
Hypocrisy—Christianity bills itself as a religion centered in humility, but countervailing dogmas promote the opposite. It is hard to imagine a set of beliefs more arrogant than the following: The universe was designed for humans. We uniquely are made in the image of God. All other creatures are ours to consume. Among thousands of religions, I happened to be born into the one that’s correct. The creator of the universe wants a personal relationship with me. Where Evangelicalism traffics in hubris cloaked as humility, Woke culture traffics in discrimination cloaked as inclusion. The far left demands that hiring practices, organizational hierarchies, social affinity groups, political strategizing, and funding flow give primacy to race and gender. Some of the Woke measure people by these checkboxes to a degree matched in the West only by groups like MRAs (Men’s Rights Activists) and white supremacists. The intent is to rectify old wrongs and current inequities–to literally solve discrimination with discrimination. One result is disinterest in suffering that doesn’t derive from traditional structural oppression of one tribe by another.
Gloating about the fate of the wicked—One of humanity’s uglier traits is that we like it when our enemies suffer. Some of the great Christian leaders and great justice warriors of history have inspired people to rise higher (think Desmond Tutu, Eli Wiesel, Vaclav Havel, Nelson Mandela). But neither Evangelicalism nor Woke culture consistently inspires members to transcend tribal vindictiveness because neither, at heart, calls members into our shared humanity. Some Christian leaders have actually proclaimed that the suffering of the damned in hell heightens the joy of the saved in heaven. Some of the Woke curse those they see as fascists to burn in the very same Christian hell, metaphorically if not literally. They dream of restorative justice for criminal offenses but lifelong, ruinous retribution for political sinners: Those hateful Trump voters deserve whatever destitution or illness may come their way. Unemployed young men in rural middle America are turning to Heroin? Too bad. Nobody did anything about the crack epidemic. Oil town’s on fire? Burn baby burn.
I know how compelling those frustrated, vengeful thoughts can be, because I’ve had them. But I think that progressives can do better.
Ideology has an awe-inspiring power to forge identity and community, direct energy, channel rage and determination, love and hate. It has been one of the most transformative forces in human history. But too often ideology in the hands of a social movement simply rebrands and redirects old self-centering impulses while justifying the sense that this particular fight is uniquely holy.
Even so, social movements and religions—including those that are misguided—usually emerge from an impulse that is deeply good, the desire to foster wellbeing in world that is more kind and just, one that brings us closer to humanity’s multi-millennial dream of broad enduring peace and bounty. This, too, is something that the Righteous and the Woke have in common. Both genuinely aspire to societal justice—small s, small j—meaning not the brand but the real deal. Given that they often see themselves at opposite ends of the spectrum, perhaps that is grounds for a little hope.
—————–
Note: In this article I didn’t address why, despite these discouraging social and ideological dynamics, I continue to lean left. In the frustration raised by excesses of Woke culture it is easy to lose sight of more substantive issues. Here is some of my list: The best evidence available tells us climate change is human-caused and urgent. Market failures are real. Trickle-down economics has produced greater inequality, which has been growing for decades. Inequality is a factor in social instability. Social democracy (the combination of capitalist enterprise with a strong social safety net) appears to have produced greater average wellbeing than other economic systems. Investments in diplomacy reduce war. Reproductive empowerment is fundamental to individual political and economic participation. The Religious Right more so than classical liberals control social policy on the Right. Government, when functioning properly, is the way we do things that we can’t very well do alone.
I would like to thank Dan Fincke for his input on this article, and Marian Wiggins for her generous editorial time.
Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington. She is the author ofTrusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light and Deas and Other Imaginings, and the founder of www.WisdomCommons.org. Her articles about religion, reproductive health, and the role of women in society have been featured at sites including The Huffington Post, Salon, The Independent, Free Inquiry, The Humanist, AlterNet, Raw Story, Grist, Jezebel, and the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. Subscribe at ValerieTarico.com.
AwayPoint 
Reblogged this on Truly Open Minds and Hearts and commented:
Valerie Tarico lays it all out here. — MHP
LikeLike
At least SJWs have some truth in their worldview. As a matter of fact, evangelicals and other religious fundies are wholly responsible for much of, if not most of, the oppression suffered by women, minorities, and children throughout history.
LikeLike
Why not Evagalists and the Wokes just live a simple life without complicating every thing…….your type are the cause of misery for self and others who have the misfortune of coming into contact with you.
Sin and discrimination is what your type is feeding on… you are welcome to rot in this cess pit.
Let the simple folk be… they are by and large normal people…..happier than your lot.
There are billions of people who are content with their lot/life …… they are happier than your lot
LikeLike
“ Prayer works, at best, at the margins of statistical significance. ”. Why hedge your bet with that assertion? Prayer is really at best, a type of meditation, with no magical properties to affect reality. Aside from this small point, this essay is spot on. Well done
LikeLike
The problem with atheists is that they paint believers with one brush. Not everyone associates themselves with organized religion and it’s true that a lot of it got corrupted over the years. BUT, the essence of any religion is one in the same, it has not changed and survived the test of time.
LikeLike
Is this meant to be ironic, because your first sentence paints a group of people with one brush while simultaneously criticizing such behavior.
LikeLike
Somebody is painting atheists with one brush.
LikeLike
Thanks you for your thoughts. Your have a way of getting to the heart of the matter in an eloquent way.
LikeLike
It seems to me, Valerie, that almost all of your critique of evangelicalism and social justice activism could be said equally of every worldview/philosophy of life. I have found that communists, atheists, anarchists, libertarians, animal rights activists, BLM, #MeToo, etc. are all equally dogmatic and equally likely to demean their detractors (as your article does, I think). Perhaps it isn’t ideally educational or charitable to say, “Unlike most worldviews, these two worldviews really bug me because their proponents have strong opinions and because they disrespect their detractors.” Perhaps a logical presentation of the best data available, for one specific issue at a time–capitalism, institutional racism, democracy, etc.–would turn down the outrage of our culture a couple decibels.
LikeLike
What is your center? What positive attitude do you espouse? What is your function in life? Are you content to be a critic of others or do you consider yourself to be a part of something greater than yourself. I really would like to know because I see that you are quite the thinker!
LikeLike
I have for some years now been thinking that the primness of the Woke echoes more and more the tight lipped Presbyterians of my Scottish childhood town. Burn’s poem “Address to the Unco Guid” refers…”Oh ye wha are sae guid yersel, so pious and so holy” …and
“What maks the mighty differ;
Discount what scant occasion gave,
That purity ye pride in;
And (what’s aft mair than a’ the lave),
Your better art o’ hidin.”
In 100 years students will be studying this idealogical phenomon with the same curiosity as we study Victorian mores.
LikeLike
I think better comparisons can be made between the woke left and the alt-right. Both are obsessed with identity politics. Richard Spencer frequently uses terms like “white identity”, and many alt-right groups have the word Identity in the names of their organizations, eg. Identity Evropa.
LikeLike
This is a bit comical, but I am a former feminist/postmodernist turned evangelical! We seem to have switched places to some degree. I have many of the same woes with the far left, and consider myself a libertarian, or a classical liberal. I also acknowledge much of the harmful history in the evangelical church, even as I love my own. I appreciated your critical thought of both.
I came to feel emotionally manipulated by the left, and found that complete compliance is expected. If you move one degree to the right, you become the opposition.. It’s truly an exhausting game, and one that leads to conformity… it sacrifices the very individualism they claim to value.
But, I wanted to challenge something you mentioned about evangelical Christianity. You said that you were a “believer among believers”. You used your church involvement on Sundays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, your Alma Matter, and experience as a camp counselor to defend where you were in the evangelical world. I have no doubt you were enmeshed into that world! But, that is incredibly different from being entangled in a personal relationship with Jesus. You didn’t mention any of that in your history as an evangelical.
I have been burned by the church, have been angry for my excluded friends, and have wrestled with my womanhood and what that means in light of scripture… oh, what a process!
But, as I understand the gravity of my own sin, and the weight of what Christ has done on my behalf, no amount of criticism I have for the church can lead me to leave it. It seems you were face to face with church culture, but maybe not face to face with the living God. At the end of the day, our purpose is to be reconciled to God, not reconciled to the church (though hopefully that can be a bi-product). I am terribly sorry that this is all very assuming! But I would love to talk with you and hear more about what your relationship with God looked like outside of your relationship with the church, and also invite you to my church in Birmingham, AL, if you’re ever in the neighborhood :)
thank you for your thoughts in this article!
(I apologize if this comment has posted already.. having technical difficulties with wordpress!)
LikeLike
Thank you for your gracious comment, Lucy, and for your candor. My personal relationship with Jesus was very important to me both during my years of church involvement and even as I moved away from the church toward a more idiosyncratic sense of worship. So, it wasn’t church hypocrisy that stopped fitting for me. It was that I gradually came to understand God and goodness in a different way that seemed less shaped in our own image and, as I learned more about humanity’s multi-millennial spiritual quest,, including the roots of the Bible and Christianity, that ceased to fit theism or eventually deism.
I love your kindness and invitation.
Warmly,
Valerie
LikeLike
If you don’t mind me jumping in, I had some thoughts. It’s interesting that, although irritated, I never felt exactly manipulated by the left nor felt that what went for the left was particularly ‘far left’. Many activists on the left often felt rather ‘conservative’ or ‘reactionary’ to me, in the psychological sense… more conventional and normative than radical.
I’ve never found the American left to be all that threatening, at least not in my lifetime. The American left has been mostly disorganized and weak, since FBI COINTELPRO destroyed the truly radical leftist movements that once existed. The bickering and divisive left we now see is the remnants and aftermath of that earlier time.
The failing now is that the left is often barely to the left at all. For example, Bernie Sanders gets portrayed as a radical left-winger, but when you look at his actual views they are smack dab in the middle of public opinion. That would oddly mean that the vast majority of Americans are radical left-wingers with even leading Democratic politicians typically being to the right of that.
On the other hand, my viewpoint is biased by having been raised in a liberal church. But it also was a church that came out of the evangelical tradition. There was a strong emphasis on having a personal relationship with or personal experience of God/Christ. The church I grew up in was doing same sex marriages during my childhood in the ’80s and probably long before I was born. I’m fine with a certain kind of political correctness, as it was common in that religious tradition such as referring to the divine in various gendered or non-gendered terms.
I’m curious if you’re familiar with the writings of Thomas Paine. In The Age of Reason, he strongly criticized Christianity as organized religion, even as he admired the teachings of Jesus. He did so as a deist. His position was once more common, as he wasn’t the only American founder who was deist. Thomas Jefferson famously cut up the Bible to remove the claims of miracles he considered false.
Anyway, I suspect Paine was influenced by his father’s Quakerism. That tradition emphasizes the personal relationship aspect over the demands of organized religion.
LikeLike
The left was never allowed to grow in the USA long before the FBI COINTELPRO operations had occurred. You had the Palmer Raids, the Socialist Party of Oklahoma being taken down in the 1920 and 30s, communists being hounded by the police when they were organizing the workers in the early 20th century, no multiple diverse political parties were allowed to grow in the USA, etc.
LikeLiked by 1 person
@Gunther – I basically agree. But COINTELPRO was the killing strike. There was still some active radicalism of that time, if not as radical as it had been earlier in the century. We now think of the South as conservative, but it once was a hot bed for labor organizing. This was not only for Appalachian mining communities but also blacks in the Deep South. There was even cross-racial labor organizing in the Deep South, even in one case where the KKK provided security. Imagine that! Radical cross-racial labor organizing with Klansmen protected by the Klan.
It’s true that left-wing movements in the late 1800s to early 1900s was like nothing seen since. Back then, there were mass movements sometimes involving hundreds of thousands of participants. They had mass strikes, they marched on state capitals, they camped out on the White House lawn, and they even fought back with guns when anyone tried to take their rights away. The political left was already on the wane by the time the ’60s came around. But even then, there was radicalism. Many on the left realized that it was desperate times and so they sought out solidarity for protection — together we stand, divided we hang. What people today forget is that why groups like the Black Panthers were so feared wasn’t merely because they were blacks with guns but because they reached out to ally with other groups: feminists, Native Americans, and poor whites.
Here is something I wrote about that era:
I was reading a book about the activism and organizing of poor and working class whites during the 60s: Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power by Amy Sonnie and James Tracy. It is about how these white groups formed alliances with black groups in common cause, both groups dealing with poverty and oppression. The book is eye-opening. This isn’t any history you were ever taught or even likely to have come across. As far as I know, this is the first book written about it. In one instance, the Klan provided protection to a black group during a strike that blacks and whites were organizing together. That is hard to imagine, but it happened (Kindle Locations 149-154):
“We organized a meeting of Movement organizers, including members of the Republic of New Afrika (RNA), for the Patriots delegation. At the time, the New Orleans chapters of the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF) and the RNA were working together supporting a strike by pulp mill workers in Laurel, Mississippi, not far outside New Orleans. Virginia Collins , the local RNA leader and one of the organization’s founders, told the Patriots about the white and Black workers who had been enemies before the strike but were now working together. She shared that the local Klan actually provided security for the SCEF and RNA organizers when they came to hold meetings, and that sometimes they met in the Black Baptist church, sometimes in the white Baptist church.”
One group was the Young Patriots. They were lower class white Southerners who had moved North. They all lived in a neighborhood in Chicago where poverty and unemployment was rampant. These were the poorest of the poor whites. So, just like poor blacks, they organized. But they never got the attention from the MSM. Even the middle class white activists largely ignored them. Poor Southern whites were supposed to be the bad guys, but some blacks were able to empathize. It took the Black Panthers to acknowledge these struggling whites (Kindle Locations 262-266):
“The Young Patriots’ own chairman, William Fesperman, even let some heartfelt gratitude show in between jibes about the “pig power structure” when he explained how the Patriots came to be at the conference: “Our struggle is beyond comprehension to me sometimes and I felt for a long time [that poor whites] was forgotten … that nobody saw us. Until we met the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party and they met us and we said let’s put that theory into practice.” Summing up why they had all come to Oakland, he added, “We want to stand by our brothers, our brothers, dig?””
LikeLike
I guess it’s too early in the morning. I wrote that, “Radical cross-racial labor organizing with Klansmen protected by the Klan.” I meant to say that the Klansmen were protecting black labor organizers. The world is a lot more complex than gets portrayed in mainstream narratives.
The world we now exist in was created through mass and often violent oppression combined with propaganda campaigns. We are able to sit around complaining about political correctness and wokeness because any left-wing movement as a serious threat was systematically destroyed generations ago.
LikeLike
Thank you for the book. I will be ordering it at my local library since they have a zip book program where the federal government provides funding for the libraries so people can read books without having to pay for it themselves.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Hi, Lucy. I am extremely late to this chat — don’t even know if you’ll see this response but I am an ex-evangelical Christian, and I’d like to respond to this comment you made: “… that [being a regular churchgoer] is incredibly different from being entangled in a personal relationship with Jesus.”
The entire evangelical theological system is based on the idea of a personal relationship with Jesus and personal salvation. Being raised Southern Baptist, I didn’t miss that memo. I can point to moments in the past where my relationship with Jesus was (if you’d asked me at the time) quite real and vibrant.
In fact, my exit out of church and (eventually) out of Christianity began when that relationship turned sour and went very, very wrong. Then I had to re-examine my entire concept of Jesus/God and, well, the rest is a very long story.
What I am trying to say is that there are a LOT of former Christians out there who were at one time quite committed to their personal relationships with Jesus. In fact, walking away can feel like a very painful divorce.
I honor you for asking about Valerie’s experience in a respectful way, but I also encourage you to visit websites run by former Christians — especially former evangelicals — and read about the variety of reasons that people leave the fold. I say this with all love and respect: If you want to meaningfully engage with former believers, slogans like “it’s a relationship, not a religion” just won’t work. :-\ Like everyone else, we want to be approached as individuals, our stories heard.
Peace.
LikeLike
What I find missing from these debates about religion and human behaviour is a discussion about the origins of religion in antiquity, in early humankind. It’s an important perspective given humankinds relatively short time on earth. As has been pointed out by others, the fundemental fact is that all life forms eventually die one way or another and that while alive there is a need to consume other lifeforms in order to remain alive. Religion began with the observation that life is cyclical – birth, life, death, rebirth. All the myths boil down to this. In terms of humanity, psychology is a key factor that is often neglected. Religion was born from fear of death and a notion that death is caused by outside influences. This neccesitates sacrificing to these influences to curry life prolonging favour. Early humans projected like crazy, which suggests a lingering aspect to human nature. Study the origins of magic to find clues to the origin of religion. From these early beginnings, the human mind has come to a point where individual and group numanistic experiences, proves the existence of a higher power, whether it be a god or the self. This is the mystical nature of humanity that most depend on for psychological survival. I speak of antiquity but that is only in human terms. In terms of the universe as we know it today, humanity just came about a fraction of a second ago. We have a lot of evolving to do.
LikeLike
I found your article last night after writing this article. All the best in your work and bringing sanity and balance to the political sphere. https://medium.com/@eliotmay_68700/think-before-you-shoot-sane-advice-reflecting-on-the-political-landscape-75c7353d0d9a
LikeLike
Some related thoughts: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/04/25/wokeness-isnt-cultural-socialism-or-religious-zealotry-it-sure-is-an-orthodoxy/
LikeLike
short, to the point, and no bullshit. well done
LikeLike
…I’m only semi literate, that’s why I find it hard to conceptualize how a cosmic Jewish zombie can make you symbolically eat his flesh and then telepathically tell him that you accept him as your master, so that he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree. Maybe you can help us with that? Do tell.
LikeLiked by 1 person
As a former Evangelical Christian and young person who was caught up in the “woke liberal movement” this article deeply speaks to me. I studied Sociology in college and was all aboard the woke social justice train for a while, but then, through listening to others voices and stories (mainly podcasts and friends) I realized how repressive the extreme left is. I also moved to the San Francisco area and saw some ideas being taken way too far. I was backing off my social justice soap box and learning to hold my ideals a little more loosely, recognizing I was young and probably didn’t know everything (but that I also did have some fire and theres some real injustice we need to talk about). As I came to realize this I would explain to people, “Well I used to be a totally sold out Christian then came to realize I was wrong and lied to about A LOT, so now I hold my beliefs (social, political, spiritual) a little more loosely). This article REALLY echoes what I’ve experienced on my own. THANK YOU.
LikeLike
WordPress.com
Username or Email
Password
Remember Me
Lost your password?
Are you Matthew Wiley?
You are being asked to login because edwardtulane82@gmail.com is used by an account you are not logged into now.
By logging in you’ll post the following comment to The Righteous and the Woke – Why Evangelicals and Social Justice Warriors Trigger Me in the Same Way:
Hi Valerie, I’m a little late to the party here as I only just now ran across this article today, but just wanted to thank you for writing it and sharing it. :)
I’m an ex evangelical Christian like yourself, and while I am still open to spirituality and open to there being some kind of transcendant or metaphysical reality behind things in large part because of my own personal experiences, even so I am averse to much of religion, or more specifically fundamentalist religion, because of my own negative experiences with evangelicalism.
My experience with evangelicalism is a long story so I will just say that it wasn’t completely negative and I learned some important lessons from it, but it was definitely hellish at times and much of it was a ‘dark night of the soul’, if you want to call it that.
Anyways, I’ve always been a registered Democrat and leaned a little left even when I was an evangelical, and I dabbled in ‘woke’ culture a little bit after leaving the church, but quickly realized what you did, that it had very much the same mentality behind it, the same old bullshit I had gotten out of.
To be fair I have also seen this kind of thing in my observations of and experiences with militant atheism and far right ideology, as that kind of dogmatic zealous mentality can exist as much in those worlds as in militant theism and far left ideology.
Part of it is the irrational or twisted doctrines that get thrown around in these religious or political ideologies, but a bigger part I think is that same dogmatic and zealous mentality, that same lack of humility and lack of willingness to try to dialogue and find some common ground, that people can fall into.
Im my experience not all theists or atheists, nor all liberals or conservatives, are this way, in fact most aren’t as far as I can tell, and are more or less decent and reasonable people, but there are enough who are like that, and they are loud and influential enough, that it makes life more difficult for all of us who are just trying to live our lives and find a path that makes sense to both head and heart.
Of course I have to keep in mind that it really isn’t the people who are trapped in that mentality, but rather the mentality itself, which is almost like a disease that can infect people.
It’s tempting to harshly judge people like that, but I know I really shouldn’t when I been infected with that kind of mentality myself at different times in my life.
I guess what I am looking for is a balance between healthy skepticism and open-mindedness, between caution and curiosity, and want to try to weigh different sides on different issues as best I can and find a more nuanced and balanced view, and I imagine that I’m not alone in this.
Well anyways, just wanted to comment here, and thank you again, and while I may not have agreed with you on everything here I did resonate with much of it and it definitely spoke to me and put into words much of what I have been thinking for awhile now.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Pingback: SJW, Horseshoe Theory dan the Woke Culture – AMF life
Reblogged this on Dead Wild Roses.
LikeLike
Thank you so much for articulating the dread I’ve been feeling. As an art teacher who has always believed in each of my students creative potential and seen each as an individual rather than through a monolithic racial lens, the past few weeks has caused deep anxiety. White fragility? How does one even contest such an accusation?
Also raised with a strict evangelical upbringing, I was attracted to art and literature for the freedom and complexity of thought it offered. It felt like waking up. I wanted to become a teacher so I could lead others to their own discoveries.
In the past few weeks, my entire liberal social circle (as I am quite liberal too) is posting on social media “I see you white people. If you don’t re-post this post, you are the problem.” Or feeling as if I wasn’t allowed to even cry when I observed injustice that brought me to tears. “White woman’s tears.” OK. Even when I agree, I tend to push back against this “you must, or else” bullying.
I’ve not see such militancy since my teen years steeped in evangelism. If you don’t dutifully repeat the collectively-approved mantras from the social justice toolbox, you’re racist. If you post a picture of a flower that bloomed in your backyard, you’re not doing what you’re told. “I will unfriend anyone who posts lifestyle images during this time!” If you’re worn out by the thought police and opt for a short period of silence, you’re racist because you’re not speaking up. This is out of control.
I believe deeply in social justice and equity. Yet, if this evangelical-adjacent method of attempting to achieve these goals is where we are headed? I don’t know.
LikeLike
Maybe I missed it and you addressed it…but there is no forgiveness in Woke.There is no loving your nieghbor or enemies, there is no turning the other cheek, there is no redemption
LikeLike
Pingback: Ideology, Religion, and Respect – Reason.com
Pingback: Ideology, Religion, and Respect – Reason.com | Political Bomb Show
Amen! 😎
I have had similar experiences with both groups. You wrote what I have experienced and felt when interacting with the woke culture.
LikeLike
John McWhorter showed this to us in late August 2020… All I can say is wow! I’m a white male midwesterner with a similar journey – thanks for this and please keep it up!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Excellent analysis. Thank god other people are saying it, too. As a (far) leftist, I have been ringing alarm bells about the insufferable sanctimony, ignorance, and just plain wrongheadedness of woke culture for years. I’ve lost friendships over it. Like you, I’ve also compared cancel culture to Maoist struggle sessions and Soviet criticism tribunals. But wokesters are, in addition to being narcissistic and robotic, ignorant of history, so they’ve never even heard of struggle sessions.
I might add that I’ve put my ass on the line for civil liberties and human rights all my life, and paid a steep price, both personally and professionally, for it. So it especially burns me up when one of these self-appointed guardians of culture lectures me on racism, sexism, bigotry, social justice, when they haven’t stuck their necks out for a principle even once in their lives. But they sure are good at bitching about pronouns.
LikeLike
Pingback: Against Illiberalism Chapter 11: “Language as an Ideological Tool” | Looking at Artifacts and Ideas