THE PROBLEM WITH ANTI-WOKE LIBERALS: They are foot soldiers for the status quo.

For [John] McWhorter, “the Elect” win by duping well-intentioned modern people into adopting a malignant worldview. Wokeness, in this telling, is just a set of bad ideas. Bad religious ideas, to be precise, which assail the rational, individualistic pillars of the “post-Enlightenment society we hold dear”. If that’s the case, the “solution” is for the rest of us to double down on secular individualism. We, the non-Elect, should simply recognise that we’re dealing with faith-based fanatics, people who can’t be reasoned with, and “work around them”.

The author is less than clear on what this might mean in practice, other than answering progressive claims with a resounding “No”: No, we won’t apologise. No, we won’t recant. No, we won’t mouth your inanities.

There is much that is sensible here. It’s especially commendable for a black, liberal intellectual, for example, to warn that the quest to extirpate all racist thoughts, once for all, is quixotic and dangerous.

But I’m afraid his diagnosis, and the treatment that follows from it, are woefully lacking. For one thing, the anti-woke liberals, who trend heavily toward Christopher Hitchens-style New Atheism, badly misunderstand religion, McWhorter especially so.

In fact, he admits early on that the book is likely to get pilloried for “disrespect[ing] religion.” But the problem isn’t so much his mean caricatures of traditional faiths as his sloppy definitions and the unaccountably sharp divisions he draws between religious and “secular” reason. These lead him to lose sight of the liturgical character of all political society, even the ardently godless.

Certainly, it’s hard to deny the religious characteristics of wokeness. The woke have their own liturgies (like the ones I witnessed in Houston). They believe in original sin (slavery, colonialism) and exalt themselves as a sort of secular Elect and excommunicate heretics (cancel culture). They’ve built a hieratic structure, composed of high priests (the UCLA critical theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw, say), popular preachers (Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo) and ordinary pastors (your workplace diversity consultants). And because theirs is a messianic faith, they are hellbent on imposing it on the rest of us.

So far, so familiar. After all, it isn’t exactly ground-breaking to notice the religious dimensions of secular ideologies. The classic of the genre remains Raymond Aron’s Opium of the Intellectuals (1955), which exposed the messianic dimensions of Communist ideology. But where Aron was nuanced and sophisticated, and obviously learned when it came to a Christian faith that wasn’t his own, McWhorter is too often downright crude. Straight-faced references to The Da Vinci Code as a guide to understanding how believers think? Check. Blanket assertions that the Bible “makes no sense”? Check. Constant evocations of “the medieval” as shorthand for superstition and barbarism? Check.

Read the whole thing.

In other dispatches from the religious left: The left’s Nicene Creed. Those ‘IN THIS HOUSE, WE BELIEVE’ signs are very revealing.