The goal of woke culture is not to hold views that one necessarily holds. The goal is to ensure that you hold all the appropriate views and are evidently woke as a result. And so people wait to react rather than think through issues and come to a conclusion. One’s personal views are immaterial, what matters is holding the ‘right’ views.

We can all be a bit reactive at time, can’t we?

There is an assumption that being reactive is always negative, as in always reacting in an aggressive and not very pleasant way, and that’s not necessarily true. One can either react against someone or something, or can react to someone or something. It’s not that our response is necessarily aggressively anti the thing we to which we are reacting, it’s that our response is entirely dependent upon the stimulus of the thing itself.

For example, when I was a History & Politics student, there were quite a few folks on the politics course who were clearly politically minded. And many of them wanted to be seen as left-wing (whatever that meant back then). But rather than working out what they thought about various things and then owning a political label depending on where that placed them on the political spectrum, they instead tried to work out what the ‘left-wing position’ happened to be and then insisted that was what they thought all along. In other words, they placed themselves on the political spectrum, attempted to work out what views would keep them there and then adopted them.

How did they work out what these views were? They either had discussions with people on the course about views on things and – as their mates whom they wanted to emulate expressed opinions on certain issues – they began to fashion their views accordingly. Otherwise, when political issues cropped up in the news, they didn’t form an opinion on what they thought to be right but waited until the Tories said something and then opposed that or Labour said something else and supported it. But it was always quite reactive. The people they respected, or liked, said it so they adopted the view. The people they didn’t respect, or like, said something they opposed it. Rarely did their actual views come into the matter at all.

It is, interestingly, a similar thing we see around woke culture. The goal is not to hold views that one necessarily holds. The goal is to ensure that you hold all the appropriate views and are evidently woke as a result. And so people wait to react rather than think through issues and come to a conclusion. One’s personal views are immaterial, what matters is holding the ‘right’ views.

I mentioned left-wingers above because – being generally labelled among them – I don’t want to be accused of bias. But I have seen it among right-wingers too. What is the right-wing position? What might Mrs Thatcher have said about this? The same implicit reactive approach exists across the board.

But I wonder whether you have seen this sort of thing in the church too? I certainly have. Few, it seems, are willing to be properly Berean about things. Instead, we form our theology based on whoever we happen to like the most. In the more extreme cases I have seen, if someone respects or likes a person – whoever they happen to be and whatever their qualification – their views are almost immediately adopted. If someone has little or no respect for someone, it doesn’t matter how cogently they argue or how biblically faithful their position, they’re definitely wrong all of the time.

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