All of us should recognize that, as Christians, we must constantly test our beliefs against Scripture and ask whether our political ideology or our social activism or our economic philosophy has usurped the allegiance in our hearts that only God should command.
With issues of racism, white supremacy, and police brutality flooding our newsfeeds, with renewed calls to remove Confederate monuments and take down the statues of slave owners, and with books like DiAngelo’s White Fragility and Kendi’s How to Be An Antiracist topping the bestseller lists, the “woke movement” has come to dominate our public discourse. Understood descriptively -not pejoratively- the “woke movement” is a grass-roots social campaign to overturn unjust systems and structures based on racism, sexism, classism, and other forms of oppression, as oppression is understood within the context of contemporary critical theory. While it aspires to noble goals, like the eradication of injustice, many commentators have expressed concerns at the growing fanaticism, intolerance, and even violence we see being expressed on- and off-line by some devotees of Social Justice.
Against this backdrop, James Lindsay, a left-of-center agnostic and co-author of the upcoming book Cynical Theories with Helen Pluckrose, wrote a fascinating article on the need for secular people to determine their “woke breaking point.” He mused:
It struck me that many of the people in my life who remain sympathetic or outright denialist about the excesses of the Woke (Critical Social Justice) movement haven’t grappled with the possibility that it isn’t quite the noble and necessary cause that it sells itself to be. What I realized is how very helpful it is for people, rather than becoming confrontational, to encourage their Woke-sympathetic friends to start identifying and naming what their non-negotiable lines will be… Whose statue has to come down? Seriously, whose is the last straw? Abraham Lincoln? Martin Luther King, Jr.? Whose? What freedom has to be stripped? Due process of law? Speech? The right not to suffer cruel and unusual punishment?…When is enough, enough? Who has to get cancelled? Fired? How many people have to lose their livelihoods?
As a Christian who is concerned about the inroads that contemporary critical theory is making within evangelicalism, I have similar questions for fellow evangelicals who are sympathetic to the “woke movement” and see it as a necessary step towards biblical justice. I’d like to ask them: what would it take to convince you that the “woke movement” is a real threat to evangelical theology? In other words, what would convince you that theological concerns about contemporary critical theory are not just the paranoid fever dreams of a handful of racist, misogynistic, right-wing discernment bloggers who want to Make America Great Again but instead accurately characterize a deep ideological conflict?
This question is made difficult by the fact that conservative evangelicals are likely to concede that the “woke movement” as a whole is non-Christian. Evangelicals will repudiate racism, but will not usually affirm with Kendi that “We cannot be antiracist if we are homophobic or transphobic.” Evangelicals will deplore police brutality but are unlikely to argue that we should abolish the police entirely. Evangelicals will abhor sexism, but will usually not insist that abortion is a “women’s rights” issue. Consequently, it will be easier for evangelicals to dismiss the excesses of “woke” activism as obvious deviations from their own beliefs.
