The Worldview of Wokeness

In a recent Fox News segment, socially conservative contributor Tucker Carlson made this comment about the woke movement: “It's easy to dismiss woke activism as a kind of childish sideshow that plays out mostly on college campuses and public radio shows. The cringing, the self-hatred, the hair-on-fire hysteria, the total obliviousness to historical reality -- the whole thing is like an adolescent rage fit that goes on forever.” While this diagnosis rings true to any rationally thinking person who can see through the fog of social insanity that is poisoning the United States, we would be remiss to let Carlson’s statement be the last word on the worldview of wokeness for it is much more diabolical and much more destructive than most Christians realize. Indeed, many well-meaning followers of Jesus Christ have succumbed to the lies of this heretical worldview through a desire to right social wrongs mixed with a profound misunderstanding of the woke movement. But such alchemy is a smoke screen that distorts what is truly happening to the governing principles and social fabric of America; and it is nothing less than the denial of core doctrines of the Word of God.

Make no mistake. Wokeness is not Christianity 2.0. Nor is it a set of clarifying principles that can inform Christian ministry or evangelism as many well-known and well-meaning evangelical leaders errantly suppose. Wokeness is a reworking of the liberation theology of the 1970’s but with a sharpened edge. Like liberation theology, wokeness is an anti-capitalist, Marxist movement that seeks to destroy free enterprise and redistribute wealth. While couched in Robin Hoodesque terms, Marxist redistribution of wealth and the means of production are always beneficial to the elites in control to the detriment of the masses. What is regrettable is that the fomented fury of the masses that historically drives the march from capitalism to Marxism is always a shell game that divides people based on their group identification. This is at the heart of the woke movement.

The theology of wokeness, and yes it is certainly a theology because this movement is seeking nothing less than to establish a new religion divorced from the central biblical doctrines of man, sin, and forgiveness among others, is a racist religion of identity politics with man at the center. In the coming days, you will need to familiarize yourself with these key terms/ideas of the woke movement, although this list is by no means exhaustive: intersectionality, colorblind racism, internalized oppression, lived experience, heternormativity, gender performativity, cisheteropatriarchy, compulsory heterosexuality, whiteness, virtue signaling, social binary, ethnic Gnosticism, and critical race theory.

If this seems a little dizzying, fear not. We may want to just look forward and stay our course without having to deal with this divisive, anti-biblical assault on America, but we must recognize that this anthropocentric worldview will shape the societal and cultural landscape of our children and grandchildren. We do not have the doctrinal luxury of not responding to the heresy of wokeness with the truth of the Word of God. In every era of Christian history, the godlessness of societies, and more importantly the distortion of biblical truth from within professing Christendom (as we see occurring today in the larger evangelical community regarding wokeness), has fueled the reemphasis of doctrinal soundness in Bible-believing churches. At the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D., Athanasius’s clarification of the doctrine of Christ as fully God and fully man, and the Protestant Reformation touched off my Martin Luther’s ninety-five theses, are but two examples. Today, the heresy of wokeness provides an opportunity for another needed clarification of biblical truth, but will Christians have the courage to eschew the lies of woke activism for the salvific truth of Scripture. In the long view of human history which God sovereignly ordains, the divine purpose will be accomplished. The question is whether churches and individual Christians will rightly discern the days in which we live.