Three Dogmas of Wokeism: The Path to Authoritarianism

Author:

Noelle Mering

Article ID:

JAF24612

Updated: 

Jan 14, 2025

Published:

Jan 14, 2025

This article first appeared in the Christian Research Journal, volume 46, number 1/2  (2023).

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The term ‘woke’ refers to the state of being alert and attuned to the layers of pervasive oppression in society.1 While it originated specifically regarding racism, it has since broadened to include other areas of what is considered social oppression, including gender and sexuality. Specific incidents of injustice are used to reinforce the larger goal of a Leftist ideology — actually, a revolutionary religion with its own dogmas — that seeks to train citizens to see all systems, institutions, interactions, and relationships as defined by power. New horizons of grievances must be continually sought, for outrage is both the sustenance and currency of the movement, and the fuel that feeds revolution.

Amidst the general upheaval of the past few years, a quiet, but no less consequential, turmoil has been the rapid wokening of American Christians. While many who “get woke” follow the path of exodus forged by the nones,2 others choose to remain Christians and seek to bring new energy to the religious Left by advocating woke activism as the authentic outgrowth of their faith. Jesus, they say, would have marched in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement in reaction to racial injustice, or embraced feminist ideology to right the harms done to women, or denounced as judgmentalism traditional sexual norms. Because of the reality of injustice and suffering and the centrality of love to the gospel message, many Christians find themselves swayed by this movement that has claimed the mantel of compassion. This claim is regularly reinforced through media and popular culture in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.

Muddying and exacerbating the discussion is the fact that our political disagreements are often shallow sloganeering devoid of necessary distinctions. Such slogans as “Love is love,” “Love wins,” and “Believe all women” convey a sense of moral clarity but lack any moral complexity. Political questions become canonical and matters of principle eminently disposable. Confusing such things is part and parcel of this movement that seeks to destabilize the foundations of Western culture so that an engineered utopia might arise.

Because the woke movement on principle rejects the value of debate and free speech,3 many Christians, wary of missteps, understandably disengage. This is itself part of the triumph of the woke. The more landmines that are laid for dissenting voices, the more prone we become to parroting right-speak and letting the more militant among us control the conversation. But to acquiesce or remain silent is to not meet the times we are in and the damage being done. Targeting faith and family is intrinsic to woke ideology4 precisely because of the way both uphold the dignity of the person and serve as a bulwark against political tribalism.

A well-formed Christian conscience and a well-ordered family are preventative; they prompt us to see more clearly our sins and faults and invite us to look with greater mercy on others. It is often through the family that many come to know who they are as beloved sons and daughters, first of their parents and then of God. Loving and present parents communicate gently, but powerfully, that the moral law is integral to a loving God and is a roadmap to our happiness, rather than a series of oppressive prohibitions.

Destabilizing family life effectively undermines society in ways both spiritual and personal. Who God is becomes obscured as well as who, what, and why a person is. As family life collapses so does the sense of belonging and purpose that prepares one to walk confidently into adulthood. With family life increasingly destabilized, the innate hunger to belong is more acute than ever, rendering political tribalism more ferocious.

It is imperative to grasp what is at the core of the radical movement. The operating principles of woke ideology rest on three fundamental distortions: 1) primacy of the group over the person; 2) an emphasis on will at the expense of reason or nature; and 3) the elevation of human power in rejection of higher authority. These three ruling dogmas form a sort of unholy trinity of the woke movement, and each is directly and indirectly corrosive to the faith and the family.

First Dogma: Group over Person

Persons are meant to be in groups. In a healthy community, the good of the person is incorporated into the good of the group. In an unhealthy framework, the good of the person is often subjugated to the perceived good of the group.

The human family is the first introduction into belonging that a person experiences. This balance between group and person is immediate and intuitive. The baby longs for his mother and bonds with his father. Father and mother are given an intense drive to nurture, care for, love, protect, and provide. The good of the individual is integral to the good of the whole.

The dramatic changes in the integrity of family life, reflected in an acute increase in fatherlessness, illegitimacy, infidelity, and divorce, are not merely in correlation to the rise in identity politics. Instead, as Mary Eberstadt argues, the loss of our primal identity within the family has created generations of people who are wounded, stunted, and in search of what was withheld from them.5 In other words, the revolutionaries are, of course, right. In losing the family, we tend to lose our very selves and are left to grasp desperately at any identity we are offered.

To understand this better, consider how a person is defined by Christianity versus by the woke movement. While the orthodox Christian understanding of personal identity is informed by all sorts of attributes and circumstances, at his core, each person is made in the image of God and made for Him. In addition to being distinctly human by our capacity to reason, we achieve our purpose, and are most fully ourselves, in relationship with Love Himself.

In contrast, for the woke, we are not to understand ourselves in proximity to the goodness of God, but in proximity to society’s evils. Whereas membership in a family is personal, membership in the political tribe is abstract. Each person belongs by virtue of being an instantiation of a collectivized identity. But while sharing in group membership is necessary, it is not sufficient. What is demanded is to share the ideology, as well. It is the ideology, not the individual, that must flourish.

For example, if oppression is at the very core of womanhood (as the woke say), then woman’s perfection exists in fighting her oppression and striving for power. A pro-life woman, then, is denying something central to her womanhood. This sheds light on the pervasive way in which women’s issues, women’s rights, women’s health, and women’s marches are glaringly integrated with pro-abortion messaging.

A conservative man of color will have his Blackness questioned. This was echoed by the main author of the New York Times’ 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, who said, “There is a difference between being politically black and being racially black.”6 Someone who is racially Black can be dismissed, ignored, or vilified by the movement if his politics contradict the movement. In lacking the correct political consciousness, such a person is said to be repressing the core of his identity and cannot have an authentic voice.

The shift from the Civil Rights arguments of old and today’s woke movement is stark. A common and unifying Civil Rights protest statement to the dehumanizing policies and polemics of racism was the simple declaration, “I am a man.” The meaning was not as the very modern ear might hear it: I am a man as opposed to a woman, but rather I am a human being, bestowed with universal human dignity that comes with a common humanity.

Contrast this with the anti-racism ideology of Ibram X. Kendi that the only response to past discrimination is present discrimination.7 The claim to a brotherhood and sisterhood based on our common humanity is replaced with a dictatorship of the proletariat. Each person must be viewed first and foremost in terms of a political identity. Becoming woke is having a consciousness that has made this fundamental transition to centering oppression as the core human experience.

Vladimir Lenin argued that the oppressed cannot of their own accord sufficiently understand the depths of their oppression and, therefore, need an intellectual class continually reminding them to be angry and feel hated.8 Herbert Marcuse was cunning at leading and radicalizing youth by selling them on their despair in the 1960s. Saul Alinsky, another influential radical, emphasized the importance of revealing to the oppressed their misery. In his book Rules for Radicals (1971), he speaks to the necessity of “rubbing raw the sores of discontent” to galvanize people for radical social change. Alinsky knew revolution would not come without a militant and uncompromising commitment to fueling fury and division in the populace.9

While empowerment and diversity are the stated goals of the woke movement, uniformity of thought and ideological power are the actual goals. This totalizing ideology becomes so psychologically coercive that political loyalties can come to replace personal ones in brutal and inhuman ways. Children trained by the Soviet Youth Movement, for example, learned to reject their old bourgeois familial piety in favor of a fervid Party loyalty. Informing on one’s own parent became an act of the highest honor. The temptation to allow politics to rupture relationships is temptation for all of us, but the Christian faith is a corrective for that temptation, whereas ideology exploits and exacerbates that temptation by nature.

Consequences of the First Dogma

One effect of this redefinition of personhood is that we begin to find our moral stature in our victimhood. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt comments, “The key idea is that the new moral culture of victimhood fosters ‘moral dependence’ and an atrophying of the ability to handle small interpersonal matters on one’s own. While it weakens individuals, it creates a society of constant and intense oral conflict as people compete for status as victims or as defenders of victims.”10

Raising the moral status of victimhood increases the incentive to publicize grievances and renders individuals less capable of triumphing over them. It further disempowers by claiming it is systemic forces alone that are the cause of success and failure, thereby stripping responsibility and meaning from our daily efforts. It is an outlook of despair creating endless motivation to uncover and accuse culprits outside oneself.

Second Dogma: Will over Reason

While in the first dogma the person must be liberated from external oppression, in the second the person must be liberated from his very body and the internalized repression of self, due to the taboos of an arbitrary moral law. This dogma emphasizes personal will at the expense of reason or nature, maintaining that our purpose for existence is expression: to acknowledge, reveal, and live out our authentic selves based on our personal desires, especially our sexual desires. In this framework, societal taboos that limit our true selves are an irrational means of repression. The more unconventional the sexual desire, the more potential a person has for liberation. The identification and expression of such desires require considerable defiance of social norms and so give rise to a more glorious liberation of self in their expression.

Queer culture is an effective apostolate of this transformation — from repression to liberation — for just this reason. This explains the popularity of phrases such as “Fly your freak flag” and why “Pride” parades tend to be a competition of the most outlandish presentation of self. The individual is more authentic insofar as he is more boldly transgressive.

Foundational to any totalitarian system is the rejection of a stable human nature. We are socially constructed, so they say, and therefore can be reconstructed. Transgressing moral norms, then, becomes a revolutionary act, albeit one that is sometimes met with internal resistance. Male revolutionaries in the 1960s testify to having been ashamed that they were not easily able to overcome their inclinations toward heterosexuality. Surely, they thought, it was a result of bourgeois repression that they were disinclined to have sex with other men. Acts of self-restraint signified a failure of ideological purity.11

A contemporary manifestation of this occurs in the shaming of heterosexual men who are unwilling to sleep with transgender “women” upon discovering that they are biologically male. The ideology holds that the trans person, despite having male biology, is truly a woman if he so identifies. The straight man who rejects a transgender person as a candidate for intimacy based on that biology must then be bigoted.

Consequences of the Second Dogma

The fetishizing of transgression explains the escalation we’re seeing now. This is the insatiable nature of sin. What is transgressive today becomes boring tomorrow, and so the trajectory, if left on its course, ends in increasingly sinister places, including increasing violence and targeting of children. Our stubborn bodies, which carry the implacable logic of law and nature, are something from which we must be freed. Should a man’s spoken identity as a woman come into conflict with his bodily reality, it is the body that must be rejected in favor of the ideology. Should a woman’s sexual freedom result in an unwanted pregnancy, again it is the body (hers and her child’s) that must be rejected.

Targeting children is a byproduct of the second dogma in another way. Traditionally, it is a bedrock of society that childhood innocence is to be preserved. In the world of critical theory, innocence is dominance and therefore a threat. Children must be disabused of their innocence of the panoply of adult sexual behaviors, according to the woke, for two reasons: first, sheltering children from alternative adult sexuality discourages children who might be inclined toward such things from acting on their desires for fear of being shamed or seeming weird. Second, preserving their innocence perpetuates the idea that traditional sexual behavior between one man and one woman in marriage is the norm, and therefore the preferred and dominant way of being. Childhood discomfort with men dressed as women, for example, is a socially imposed, bigoted instinct, which trans activists strive to reprogram.

Third Dogma: Power Over Authority

Innocence is a threat to the ideology because it points to a measure, to an objective good by which our desires might be evaluated. Innocence also points us to authority. The woke ideological effort to collapse our concept of authority into power, when paired with the real targeted collapse of morality and virtue in society, is an effective one. In fatherhood, we see this acutely. For many, it is difficult to understand the father as a natural icon of authority when, for decades, fatherhood has been undermined from without and within.

But even with poor personal examples of authority figures, most people sense what ought to have been. Most can reason if pressed about what good fatherhood ought to be, and by implication what authority more generally ought to be. A good father imposes discipline — not for the sake of control over those in his charge, but for the sake of their freedom — knowing that boundaries and discipline come before self-mastery. A good father empowers his children to gain independence and take on responsibility. In contrast, a tyrannical father uses discipline to manipulate and control, keeping his children incompetent, afraid, and overly dependent.

The revolutionaries from Marx to Marcuse wrote about the need to depose the father by undermining his moral authority through sexual licentiousness. In cutting off the head, the whole is destabilized. Most of our societal pathologies can be traced back to either poor fathers or absent ones. The popular diagnosis is that such pathologies require even further shedding of masculinity. But such a diagnosis prescribes the cause of the disease as the cure. A society with rampant fatherlessness and abuse is in want of manliness, not in excess of it. St. Thomas Aquinas defined effeminacy as an unwillingness to pursue what is arduous out of disordered attachments to one’s pleasure. The emasculated man is defined by an unwillingness to suffer. And here we see the intimate connection between the corruption of authority and the corruption of innocence. A society without truly virtuous masculinity will not value, much less protect, innocence. The #metoo phenomenon exposed the folly of the idea that the sexual revolution can be restrained by corporate sermons on consent, absent the internal restraint of habits of life that lead to virtue.

In undermining fatherly authority, the revolutionaries knew they would also undermine authority generally, specifically the authority of God who is the originating principle of all being. In the attack on authority, it is His fatherhood that is reimagined as our ultimate oppressor. But in reality, all human authority must be subject to authority. A good leader is in service to something beyond himself, or else he is corrupt. The paradox of ideology is that it seeks to make man limitless by limiting his world to himself.

Archbishop Fulton Sheen wrote, “No man has a right to command until he has learned to serve, and no man has a right to be a master until he has learned to be a servant, and no man has a right to power until he has learned to be obedient.”12 True authority is grounded in reverence and accountability. In this way, a person’s authority is both limited and ennobled. In Christ, we see that leadership in any capacity, for men or women, is a calling to servant leadership, a rebuke of the old trope that all authority is oppressive.

Consequences of the Third Dogma

The mortal wounds the revolution seeks to inflict on the concept of fatherhood leave a society of orphans. Like a child deprived of a father, a culture looks to fill that void. The un-fathered, deprived of real authority in their lives, are the first to yield to the control of authoritarianism. Over the past couple of years, I’ve often heard people muse about how the “Question authority” generation of the 1960s became the compliant generation, imploring tech companies to silence anyone who, well, questioned authority.13

But this behavior makes perfect sense if we understand that there is a chasm of difference between authority and authoritarianism. The call to question authority, popularized by countercultural icon Timothy Leary, was not an effort to root out corruption to preserve proper authority. Rather, it was an effort to undermine the understanding that there is any such thing as authority at all. The ironic consequence of the smashing-authority ethos is the irrational compliance with authoritarianism.

Having Exchanged the Truth of God for a Lie

The woke revolution elevates the tribalism of group identity over the dignity of the human person, human will over reason, and human power over higher authority. What is rejected — the person, reason, and authority — are the three characteristics of the Logos Himself. The Logos is the mind of God, communicated in the person of Jesus Christ, who is the author of and authority over all. It is He who is the ultimate target of the woke revolt. It is a war of words against the Word. Once the internal logic of the movement is understood, it becomes impossible not to see how such ideas have eventually played out time and again — Maoist China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Stalinist Russia.

The United States of America faces a crisis that extends far beyond partisan politics. This is a religious struggle. Citizens of good will who want to understand, never mind counter, our current cultural revolution need to start viewing the “woke movement” as a revolutionary religion with its own dogmas. Unlike orthodox Christianity, which seeks truth through science, reason, and revelation, wokeism is ideological, taking partial truths and totalizing them in ways that require manipulation, violence, and coercion.

The three dogmas of the woke redefine both God and man. God becomes our oppressor, as well as our subordinate, and man becomes an isolated deity. In ensuring God revolves around us, we conceive of Him as being what He is not, and in that void, we make gods of ourselves. It is now we, not He, who seemingly know all, love all, are all-powerful. If we keep God around at all, it is for the sake of sentimentalism or custom.

This is at the heart of the will’s triumph over reason, over nature, and over God. But as with any attempt to triumph over God, the result is not power, but slavery — slavery to a politicized identity group, slavery to the insatiable tyranny of transgression, and ultimately slavery to authoritarianism.

An Ennobling and Humbling Way

The division between orthodoxy and ideology (both within and without the church) has reached a new level of obstinacy. Both sides fear the other poses an existential threat to their core values, and in a way both are correct. Woke ideology is a jealous god and will not coexist with Christ in the heart of man. One or the other will eventually triumph, one through annihilation or the other through redemption.

Perhaps it’s time to be constructive, to remember and restore a positive and meaningful vision of family — both human and divine — to which each person is called. In reifying our deepest identity as sons and daughters of a loving God, and potential fathers and mothers (biological or spiritual), we situate each member of the human family with respect to his or her duties to God and to one another. Rather than a power contest of political identities and individual wills seeking self-expression, every person is invited to the cooperation reflected in a vision of family life that is both ennobling and humbling because it is a vision grounded in reality and reverence.

Our response, as Christians, should be neither to contradict the times so as to become merely a mirror version of a politicized identity nor to accommodate the times so as to be absorbed by them. Our duty to love the person is not in tension with the need to fight this dehumanizing revolution. The former requires the latter. We need to see the stakes in the battle — the souls that can be lost (including our own) — but also the ineffable mercy of our Lord.

Noelle Mering is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. She is the author of Awake, Not Woke: A Christian Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology (TAN Books, 2021), an editor for TheologyofHome.com, and a coauthor of the Theology of Home (TAN Books) book series.


 

NOTES

  1. This article is partially adapted from Noelle Mering, Awake, Not Woke: A Christian Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology (Gastonia, NC: TAN Books, 2021).
  2. Gregory A. Smith, “About Three-in-Ten Adults in America Are Now Religiously Unaffiliated,” December 4, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/12/14/about-three-in-ten-u-s-adults-are-now-religiously-unaffiliated/.
  3. Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore Jr., and Herbert Marcuse, A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 95–137.
  4. Rosemarie Ho, “Want to Dismantle Capitalism? Abolish the Family,” The Nation, May 16, 2019, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/want-to-dismantle-capitalism-abolish-the-family/.
  5. Mary Eberstadt, Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics (West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press, 2019), 9–14.
  6. Sam Dorman, “NYT Reporter, in Now-Deleted Tweet, Claims There’s ‘a Difference Between Being Politically Black and Racially Black,’” Fox News, May 23, 2020, https://www.foxnews.com/media/nikole-hannah-jones-politically-racially-black.
  7. Ibram X. Kendi, “Ibram X. Kendi Defines What It Means to Be an Antiracist,” Penguin, June 9, 2020, https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2020/june/ibram-x-kendi-definition-of-antiracist/.
  8. 8 V. I. Lenin, Lenin’s Selected Works in Three Volumes, vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), 119–271.
  9. “Saul Alinsky Is the Cause of Our Political Divisions,” Wall Street Journal, February 26, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/ saul-alinsky-is-the-cause-of-our-political-divisions-1519662559.
  10. Jonathan Haidt, “Victimhood Culture Explains What’s Happening at Emory,” Heterodox Academy, March 26, 2016, https://heterodoxacademy.org/blog/victimhood-culture-at-emory/.
  11. Paul Kengor, Takedown: From Communists to Progressives, How the Left Has Sabotaged Family and Marriage (Washington, D.C.: WND Books, 2015), 147.
  12. Fulton J. Sheen, The Eternal Galilean (1934; Providence, RI: Cluny Media, 2021), 29.
  13. See, e.g., Andy Greene, “Neil Young Demands Spotify Remove His Music Over ‘False Information About Vaccines,’” Rolling Stone, January 24, 2022, https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/neil-young-demands-spotify-remove-music-vaccine-disinformation-1290020/
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