THE Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) — “an international community with a vision for a better world where every citizen can prosper, contribute and flourish” — attracted more than 4000 delegates to its second annual conference in London last month. Still relatively unknown, ARC is a right-of-centre organisation that emphasises urgent economic, political, and moral renewal as the West faces a moment of “decline”. Its advisory board consists of “thought leaders and change makers” from various disciplines and backgrounds, who view Christianity as a force for good.
Speakers at the London conference included the clinical psychologist Dr Jordan Peterson, on record recently as representing “a new kind of Christian”; the social critic and theologian Os Guinness; the founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries, Bishop Robert Barron; and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a recent high-profile convert to Christianity (Press, 17 November 2023).
They share a concern that the West has forgotten or rejected the Judaeo-Christian traditions that have shaped its culture, and nurtured its public virtues and ideals. Under the guise of what they call “woke ideology”, they have detected a corrosive form of liberalism that focuses exclusively on the grievances of particular groups, thereby elevating the self and minorities above all other considerations.
Despite its masquerading as a form of enlightened cultural awareness that has exposed the moral failings and cruelties of the West’s history, woke thinking, the ARC contends, is distorted and wrong. Away from its conference platform, however, other prominent voices with equally firm Christian convictions resist this conclusion.
In a recent interview, the former Prime Minister Baroness May declared that she was “woke and proud”. In her book The Abuse of Power, she refers to the Oxford English Dictionary definition of woke as being “well-informed, up to date and chiefly alert to racial discrimination and injustice”. She told her interviewer: “And on that basis, who would not want to be woke?”
Similarly, Archbishop Welby went on record as being a “woke archbishop”. If that meant speaking out on issues of social justice, he gladly embraced the epithet. Such readiness was displayed by the Bishop of Washington, the Rt Revd Mariann Edgar Budde, as she made a direct plea to President Trump to have mercy on endangered and frightened minorities in her homily at the traditional post-Inauguration service of prayer for the nation, in Washington National Cathedral (News, 24 January).
The hearts of the visibly displeased President and his entourage remained unmoved. Since then, as part of a wider strategy to remove the influence of supposedly woke ideology from the US military, President Trump has fired top generals in the Pentagon.
THE problem of woke is partly bound up with definition: the extent to which the term has become weaponised, like “politically correct” before it. After the death of George Floyd, murdered by a white police officer in 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement used “woke” widely as a rallying cry for racial justice. Since then, the word has been diluted, sometimes metamorphosing into the opposite of its original meaning, and often used facetiously or ironically by its critics. Few would take issue with the term if it meant nothing more than “giving a damn about other people”, as the Left-leaning activist Jane Fonda insisted recently.
Ms Fonda inclines to a point of view that there is no such thing as “woke”: it is a figment of the right-wing imagination, a cover for bigotry, a boo-and-hiss word that signals disapproval and hostility on the part of reactionary thinkers who resist progressive ideas about inclusivity, equality, and diversity.
Writing recently in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Dr Samuel Clowes Huneke, of George Mason University, dismissed wokeness as a chimera: “a catch-all for any policy, position or person with which conservatives disagree, often in cartoonish ways”. This was a somewhat disingenuous, if not superficial, response, representing another example of score-settling against those who think differently in the current culture wars.
In her latest book, Left is Not Woke (Polity), the distinguished moral philosopher Dr Susan Neiman, a self-professed Socialist, contends that there is nothing illusory or silly about wokeism. Her argument seeks to expose the weaknesses of woke ideology. Far from the straw man that conservatives construct so as to trash it, woke, she contends, has a recognisable grammar and a range of perceived enemies. It is tribal rather than universal, and overlooks the wider concerns of rational debate, fairness, and human flourishing.
Instances are easily found: how helpful is it in terms of community cohesion or inclusivity to read that the police should be defunded, that texts that remind the less fortunate of their plight should be prohibited, or that the English language is racist and that those who teach it are white supremacists? In its reading of the past, Dr Neiman concludes, “woke” is highly selective, and leads to a disregard for the “common human dignity that needs to be respected, and that can be found in anyone anywhere”. In conceding its justified concern for inequalities of power, she concludes that “wokeism often simply focuses on power rather than thinking about justice, which sometimes gets left by the wayside.”
CHRISTIANITY has long insisted that no one should be left by the wayside and that the poor and vulnerable, in particular, have a moral claim on our compassion. It is also true that good ends are rarely achieved in politics without passion. So far, so woke.
Giving a damn about others, however, does not exhaust the scope and meaning of the gospel of Christ or the Jewish prophetic tradition in which he stood. If justice is to become a reality, it must extend to all of God’s people. Like morality, as the late Chief Rabbi, Lord Sacks, observed, justice flourishes best “within a shared code of civility and mutuality” which recognises the complex and multi-faceted nature of social and political issues.
The tendency of woke ideology to view injustice as always something vile and overwhelming leaves no space for nuance, subtlety, or extenuating factors, and too easily fosters the fear and intimidation practised by the despot. Not every issue is a titanic struggle between ideological armies, one right, the other wrong. Sometimes, the clash is between right and right, between two strong, even irreconcilable, ideals. But it is not necessary to demonise opponents. It is better by far, as Lord Sacks always maintained, “simply, to persuade them”.
Canon Rod Garner is an Anglican priest, writer, and theologian.
