Wokeness is Christian Heresy

The Cult of the Victim

‘Progressive’ or ‘woke’ politics is undoubtedly religious. But not in a good way. In championing transgender, ethnic minority, or postcolonial ‘victims’, it fully embraces the zeal of the Hebrew prophets and Jesus to raise up the downtrodden. And it shares their righteous ire against those who do the treading down. But there’s a problem. Prophetic zeal unrestrained by other elements produces a distorted Christianity. Wokery is a Christian heresy.

Since I was dragged into the Culture Wars in 2017, because I didn’t think that colonialism was simply wicked, I’ve spent over eight years dealing with ‘woke’ critics, many of them with the title ‘Professor’ or ‘Reverend’ in front of their name, or ‘Church Commissioner’ behind it. My consistent experience has been that they don’t behave like creatures and sinners. They betray no sign of feeling the need to learn or be corrected. They conduct themselves as if they have absolute possession of the truth and the only reason some might disagree is that they’re morally wicked (that is, racist). So, they don’t listen or reflect thoughtfully on what dissenters have to say. Instead, they respond with unscrupulous aggression—smearing critics’ reputations, misreporting their words, twisting them into strawmen the easier to blow down, and seeking to intimidate them into silence. As Priyamvada Gopal, the Cambridge professor who first brought the Culture Wars to my doorstep, tweeted to her comrades after reading about my ‘Ethics and Empire’ project, “OMG. This is serious shit. We need to SHUT THIS DOWN’. In my experience, instead of behaving as if they were subject to God and his moral requirements, ‘woke’ prophets conduct themselves like little gods, subject to none but themselves, tyrannical and merciless. (Readers looking for further substantiation of my claims here can find chapter and verse in The New Dark Age: Why Liberals must Win the Culture Wars.)

A leading feature of decolonising ‘wokery’ is its exaggeration of the sins of Western civilization—the civilization that Christianity has done most to shape. One common expression of this is the wholesale damnation of the British Empire. Now, we can argue about whether the Empire was, all things considered, more a force for evil than good. But no one holding themselves accountable to the facts of history can deny that it chalked up some major humanitarian and liberal achievements. Exhibit A: the Empire was among the first states in the history of the world to abolish the hitherto universal practice of slavery and then led the world in suppressing it from Brazil to New Zealand for over a century. Exhibit B: from May 1940 when France fell, to June 1941 when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the Empire offered the genocidally racist regime in Nazi Berlin the only military opposition, with sole exception of Greece. But these achievements the ‘woke’ prophets adamantly refuse to acknowledge, lest it muddy the simple waters of their absolute condemnation.