What is wokeness or the woke church? The following are recommended starting-points that have been helpful to me.
Writing in 2018, which seems ages ago, Thabiti Anyabwile of Anacostia River Church in DC, seems to speak about wokeness as mostly having to do with a kind of Afrocentrism imported from the 1980s, and preceded by a long thread extending to Ethiopianism of the 1880s to 1920s. I know absolutely nothing about this historical connection. When he writes this (see Woke is …), wokeness could perhaps be defined so acutely. I don’t imagine many others today find wokeness to be singularly about race. I certainly don’t. Nor am I sure if Pastor Anyabwile himself still believes wokeness is only about race. (Nor am I certain if this thesis is a part of his apology for past comments).
It sounds a bit too simplistic to view wokeness as being a single-issue matter on a difficult topic like race. Wokeness, in its broader view, is a form of identity politics that extends well beyond a single issue. This insistence is communicated well by Jonathan Leeman, editorial director of 9Marks, in Identity Politics and the Death of Christian Unity. You can see his video here.
This larger attachment of identity politics to wokeness is explained by Douglas Wilson, John Piper and the Fire in the Attic, reflecting on unrelated comments in John Piper’s book, God is the Gospel.
Even more than a form of identity politics, it seems to me that wokeness has become a kind of secular religion with an ethic, worship, and a conversion of sorts (hence, wokeness). I have been helped by PCA pastor James Wood to understand wokeness in this way. You can see his article written for The Theopolis Institute, Wokeness as Post-Protestant Neopaganism, that has been read and appreciated by many Christians. He also wrote a slightly more academic article for The Witherspoon Institute titled, Reforming our Successor Civil Religion.
Both Wood and Baylor professor, George Yancey, writing in, Wokeness and Legalism, believe that wokeness is a kind of pagan religion. Yancey says,
“Seeing this movement as a religious one helps us to avoid mistaking it as a purely rational endeavor, which it is not. Furthermore, understanding this movement as a type of religion helps us decide if this is where we want to find answers to our questions of meaning.”
This seems to be echoed by Mark Bauerlein at First Things; listen to his podcast, The Religion of Identity Politics. As I think about the impact of identity politics and the life of the church, I have been helped by Thinking about how this impacts the church. I have been helped by Chris Gordon in, Reaping the Woke Church We Have Sown. More importantly, I have found valuable the White Horse Inn podcast, Christianity vs. Woke Ideology, and Warren Smith’s interview over at World Magazine, A Conversation With Rod Dreher.
These are just sources along the way of trying to do what you are trying to do: parse what wokeness means. These sources of information should help to break through the clutter.
As I trace the path, wokeness stems from a kind of identity politics that has, in a short period of time, become a secular religion not unlike that described by J. Gresham Machen’s brilliant little book from 1923, Christianity and Liberalism (which should be read by every Christian).
