So You Don't Think Woke Progressivism is a Religion?
So You Don't Think Woke Progressivism is a Religion?
Let's head on down to the ol' tent revival!
You may not have been aware of it, but a religious revival has been sweeping America for the past few years. However, rather than the old-time religion of Christian piety, it’s a new religion with new idols and a new direction. Yet, not entirely new - it’s the latest phase in an evolving revolutionary belief system that has consciously set itself against every aspect of traditional American culture and society. Whereas earlier progressivism made an effort to appear to integrate itself into earlier American paradigms even as it was acting to overturn them, the current religion of Woke Progressivism has completely excised itself from any pretension of respect for previous Americanism.
Some on the Right balk at the terminology of referring to woke progressivism as a “religion.” After all, hasn’t the modern Left been characterised by a rejection of religion? By an increasingly overt atheism that not only denies traditional religion, but actively subverts and mocks? Yet, unlike European modes of leftism that have remained more within the boundaries of orthodox Marxism-Leninism, official atheism has never been able to gain more than a toehold in the United States. The American temperament is a religious one and therefore requires some object of piety towards which it is directed.
For the Left, this new object of piety was channeled into cultural Marxism, a form of New Leftism that has successfully managed to take over nearly every institution - government, corporate, cultural - in this country. It did so by providing a more comprehensive program, one that was as much cultural subversion and replacement as it was “traditional” economic leftism, than older forms of socialism. This new leftism, which in its full floruit is the woke progressivism we see today, provides a totalising replacement ideology that seeks to sweep away everything that came before it.
But is this new belief system a religion? I believe that it definitely can be thought of as one, since it displays all the typical sociological patterns found in religions as they have been found throughout history, plus a few that are typical of cult groups as they’re observed today.
To begin, woke progressivism has a precisely defined and systematically enforced body of doctrines which are to be believed, not rationalised. The fluidity of gender, the naturalness of homosexuality, the evil of whiteness - all of these and much more are to be received by simple faith. But these aren’t randomly chosen. They have overarching doctrinal bases that fit within the larger progressive ideological agenda. Put together, these constitute an interlocking body of progressive doctrine that provides a comprehensive ideology to its followers.
Yet at the same time, woke progressivism does have a means of receiving new revelation and new interpretation via its own body of canonical authorities who then pass on this doctrine to the larger body of the woke “church.” This is done primarily through means of the narrative-shaping performed by major media outlets working in conjunction with elements within government, NGOs, and academia (the complex of which is what neoreactionaries often refer to as “the Cathedral”). Indeed, that process has been at work for decades - e.g. it is how the Afrocentrism of the 1980s went from being an odd, laughable academic quirk to being received doctrine which naysaying can cause you to lose your job. Have you ever noticed how when some new element of the progressive narrative hits, whether it’s a fundamental element of ideology or simply how to think about some current news event, that progressives seem to adopt it all at once?
There’s a reason for that. Once a change or addition is decided, the doctrine is swiftly promulgated to all of the local parishes and becomes a received and accepted part of the faith.
To reinforce this, woke progressivism also has its own catechal system used to proselytise and then indoctrinate converts. Much of this is done through the public schools. Schools even in deep Red states barely have a square foot of wall space that isn’t plastered with a trans flag or a BLM poster or some other woke progressive platitude. And it isn’t accidental that these schools are packed full of young, indoctrinated wokesters fresh out of seminary college.
Again, all of this is purposeful. Colleges, as institutions, were captured decades ago and are specifically used to pass on the woke mind virus to impressionable young college students who will then be passing it on to your children. The same normie parents who would never send their kids to a local church’s vacation Bible school because “they’re tryin’ to convert my kids to their religion!” have no problem sending them to public schools where teachers try to convince them to mutilate their genitalia.
Of course, in any kind of information control system such as described above, there is always a mechanism for suppressing dissent and excommunicating those who won’t stay with the program. You weren’t sufficiently deferential to Shaniqua when she was giving that DIE presentation? You’re up for a trip to HR and the unemployment office. Except we also banned you from social media. And your bank. And from GoFundMe. And we convinced most of your friends and family that you’re a racist and they shouldn’t have anything to do with you if they know what’s good for them.
Indeed, socially isolating people from those who won’t get with the program is a stock in trade for cults, as celebrated Twitter intellectual Zero HP Lovecraft has noted. And if you’re any kind of a public personality at all, the pressure which woke progressivism places upon you to conform to Current Year woke doctrine via its power over culture propagation is tremendous.
The comparisons can go on and on (though thankfully, I’ll keep it fairly brief). Like traditional religions, woke progressivism has its own initiatory rites. In Christianity, you have baptism, in Islam you recite the shahada. In woke progressivism you announce to your peers that you were born the wrong gender or you denounce yourself for the sin of normalising white supremacy or whatever. Traditional religions have their priesthoods and saints. Woke progressivism has its diversity lecturers, environmental activists, and “civil rights” heroes. Traditional religions have feast days and high holy seasons. Woke progressivism has Juneteenth, Earth Day, and Pride and Black History months.
Woke progressivism has its own martyrs, those who have courageously died to advance the cause.
From Emmett Till to George Floyd to Joseph Rosenbaum and Gaige Grosskreutz, the heroes of the faith are many. Woke progressivism has its own eschatological system - its beliefs about the end of the world and things associated. If we don’t follow the radical environmentalist agenda of massive worldwide population reduction and ending modern energy production, the world will end in a prophesied disaster of fire and flood due to global warming. Woke progressivism even has its own provision for holy war. After all, isn’t that what we essentially see in Ukraine, as woke Western governments send money, weapons, and “volunteers” to fight the invading Russian hordes…who also happen to be from a country that the Regime has been hounding for a decade due to its non-woke attitudes towards things like homosexuality and environmentalism?
In every way woke progressivism is as thoroughgoing of a religion as any the world has seen. Really, this makes sense and explains why American woke progressivism has seen such an outpouring of success in recent years. Religion - whether true or false - is a valuable piece of social technology. I understand that we who believe may not like to think of it in those terms, but nevertheless it is. Every religion has some means of utilising its power and influence to encourage socially beneficial, and discourage socially detrimental, behaviours. The traits of religion given above, in and of themselves, are important means by which social groups structure and police themselves.
What we’re seeing with woke progressivism’s assaults on traditional American society is merely the efforts by a minority, but elite supported, religion to dominate society at large, even though it is not the religion held by the majority of the population. Yet, it is doing so in a way that structurally is not foreign to the American psyche, and thus doesn’t provoke the immune response in many that attempting to enforce a more European/Asiatic style of openly atheistic communism would. Of course, the end result for the victims of progressivism in power will be the same. But in the American paradigm, woke progressive religion is the means by which successful infiltration has and will continue to take place, especially when it guts traditional Christianity and wears its form as a skinsuit. So yes, when people on the Right raise the alarm that woke progressivism is not just your garden variety socialism but is a much more insidious mind virus designed to cordycept the American religious impulse, you should listen to them.
Wokeism definitely meets the legal definition of religious belief as protected by RFRA and the U.S. Constitution. This implies to me that anywhere Christianity isn't appropriate, such as direct endorsement by a public school teacher, Wokeism is likewise inappropriate. https://radicalamerican.substack.com/p/religious-belief
The parallels between a religious movement and the Great Awokening are indeed clear. I've even gotten progs to admit that directly. Nevertheless there are some important, and revealing, distinctions.
The first, which you draw attention to, is the doctrinal fluidity - new dogma can be invented and disseminated almost overnight. Most other religions are not nearly as adaptable.
The second, and I think the most important, is that wokeism is self-sterilizing and individually maladaptive. The woke don't have kids - that puts a cap on the long-term viability of the project. Further, woke does nothing to encourage virtue in its adherents; to the contrary, it encourages them to adopt self-destructive habits. The resulting individual degeneration is often striking and appalling. Virtually all traditional religions both encourage family formation, and prod believers to try and live up to their best possible selves by aspiring to an ideal represented by the founding figure.