Religion Without Mercy
4th November 2024
common criticism of modern progressive activism – the movement that has come to be called woke – is that it is religious. What is meant by this is that progressives have an all-encompassing worldview which purports to have explanatory power, and direct application, across all domains of life, from politics to art to personal relationships. At the risk of over-simplification, the keystone of this belief system is that social and political relations should be understood primarily in terms of power dynamics, and that there is a powerful class of oppressive and controlling persons, the proverbial straight white Christian men, who must be resisted by the rest, a ragtag rebel coalition of oppressed minorities and their allies.
Not everyone accepts the characterisation of wokeism as akin to religious belief, for various reasons. It seems to me a useful if not perfect way of understanding how left-wing politics has developed in the last decade or so. But regardless of how persuasive we find that framing, there is one important respect in which wokeism, for want of a better word, is quite unlike religion, or at least quite unlike Christianity, which remains the background religious noise in the countries where identity politics is most strongly embedded.
The vital difference is that progressive morality has no consistently defined content, and no clear pathway to reconciliation and restoration. US vice-presidential candidate JD Vance noted this in his recent interview with the podcaster Joe Rogan. He put it this way: “What most world religions have, but the woke stuff doesn’t have, is forgiveness….it has the excommunication part, but it doesn’t have the redemption part.”