The Church Ladies of the New Woke Religion

By Kyle Smith

Wednesday, January 19, 2022

 

‘Medievals with lattes” is how linguist John McWhorter describes the dogma-repeating, heretic-expelling, reason-rejecting devotees of the new religion, one that is becoming something like the state-, school-, and corporation-enforced creed of the West despite being rejected by most citizens. The creed often calls itself “anti-racism,” though it freely and frankly practices racism when it proposes, for instance, that being held to the same standards as other groups is not viable for blacks.

 

To describe the faithful, McWhorter rejects the term “wokester” as being too loaded (though I would point out that both “woke” and “politically correct” began as terms used by the in-group, not hostile outsiders) and instead refers to the practitioners of the new religion as “the Elect” in his astute and pungent book Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.

 

McWhorter emphasizes that the new obsession with racial grievance as the fons et origo of all social maladies is not like a religion; it is a religion, full stop. It’s pointless to argue with its adherents because their dogmatic views are fundamental to their self-image. Electism is not properly defined as “politics” or as a “social-justice movement.” The solemn reverence of the faithful — New York Times critic A. O. Scott called Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book “essential, like water or air” — is all around us.

 

Those who disagree that, for instance, white privilege/supremacy is the leading problem in the United States in 2022 are simply denounced — “SATAN?!” — in the way that Dana Carvey’s Church Lady used to describe all suspicious phenomena on Saturday Night Live. When the Elect deem something “problematic,” you should understand them to be saying that it is blasphemous. “Elect ideology stipulates that one’s central moral duty is to battle racism and the racist,” McWhorter writes. Which is why otherwise nice, normal, highly intelligent people can be found on social media demanding the destruction of a total stranger’s livelihood for this or that passing remark: Heresy must be ruthlessly exterminated in the name of a religion that professes tolerance. “Antiracism’s progress . . . has taken it from the concrete political activism of Martin Luther King [Jr.] to the faith-based commitments of a Martin Luther.” Ouch. “Progress” can look an awful lot like rolling back the calendar 500 years.

 

The new religion has an origin myth: The absurd contention in the New York Times’ 1619 Project that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery. It has a three-testament Bible: Between the World and Me by Coates, White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, and How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi. It lustily practices trials of the heretics on Twitter. Amusingly enough, because those of us on the right aren’t within the new church’s reach in the first place, we can hardly be exiled in the way a New York Times editor or New York Magazine columnist can be. We are damned heathens anyway, so we don’t count. (Reason enough to join our cause, I say.) McWhorter notes that the new religion is even corrupting and in some cases swallowing the old religion. In 2020, he writes, “American Christianity in many places began a slow transition into a new Elect version of itself,” with white privilege being positioned as a soul-rotting sin.

 

Casting a waspish gaze at critical race theory, McWhorter dismisses it as “a fragile, performative ideology, one that . . . reject[s] linear reasoning, traditional legal theorizing, and even Enlightenment rationalism. We are to favor an idea that an oppressed race’s ‘story’ constitutes truth . . . apart from mere matters of empirical or individual detail.” How tiresome, how confining it is to reduce all of black experience to the trope that one could wind up like George Floyd. “When ‘identity’ — i.e., against the white hegemon — is thought of as central to intellectual, aesthetic, and moral significance, one’s range of interests inevitably narrows,” he writes. “As such, Electness discourages genuine curiosity.”

 

Treating the new religion as harmless because it supposedly at least tries to advance the standing of black people is a fallacy. Elect ideology does grave harm to black people: It “teaches us that we are the first people in the history of the species for whom it is a form of heroism to embrace the slogan, ‘Yes, we can’t!’”

 

More concretely, Electism completely overlooks the harm done to black citizens by black criminals when it demands that police funding be cut, or the harm done to black students when it ignores higher rates of misbehavior and crime by black boys in school in order to produce a more statistically congenial narrative. In higher education, affirmative action creates a perpetual mismatch between black students and their schools that drives many of them into frustration and failure; a black student who might do perfectly well at a second-tier law school finds himself unable to keep up with the ultra-fast pace at an elite institution, and winds up dropping out. “The Elect’s harm to black people is so multifarious and rampant that anyone committed to this religion and calling it antiracist walks in a certain shame,” McWhorter writes. 

 

Woke Racism is, like virtually everything McWhorter writes, notable for its courage; he knows that a level head and the methodical application of logic are about as welcome in the discussion of racism as a heat wave on a ski slope. Calmly he advises readers simply to accept that they’ll be tarred as racists (or, if black, as self-hating race traitors) for pushing back against Electism. Yet push back we must. Instead of cringing and vowing to “do the work” of acknowledging sin, you should think of yourself as “Galileo being told not to make sense because the Bible doesn’t like it.” From courage stem the other virtues. Woke Racism isn’t quite as important as water or air, but it’s essential reading just the same.