Atheism Did Not Cause Wokeism
If the decline of religion really did bring about wokeism, the last place we would expect it to arise is the United States.
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About the Author
Helen Pluckrose is a political and cultural writer and commentator who highlights and opposes ideological capture in vital institutions. She is the author of The Counterweight Handbook: Principled Strategies for Surviving and Defeating Critical Social Justice Ideology – at Work, in Schools and Beyond and co-author of Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity – And Why this Harms Everybody.
Above all, Helen just wants people to value evidence-based epistemology and consistently liberal ethics.
Isn’t Christianity better than wokeism? Don’t we need shared systems of belief to have community and meaning? Isn’t it clear that atheism has failed? Hasn’t atheism, in fact, brought about wokeism?
These are the questions that are repeatedly being asked of anti-woke atheists. Underlying them is the Substitution Hypothesis of Wokeism. This holds that people need a religious structure to bring them community, purpose and meaning, and, as religion declines, they seize onto another quasi-religious structure to take its place, and this is wokeism. As we (anti-woke atheists) clearly see that wokeism is terrible for society, can we not admit that Christianity was better and consider going back to it?
Absolutely not, no.
The Substitution Hypothesis is coming overwhelmingly from the United States, but if the decline of religion really did bring about wokeism, the last place we would expect it to arise is the United States. The US has degrees of religiosity much closer to that of Iran than the rest of the Anglosphere. When a country has the highest level of religiosity of all the wealthy countries and the highest degree of wokeism, we can be pretty confident that the cause of wokeism is not the decline of religion.
It makes little sense for American anti-wokeists to perceive the choices before us all as Christianity or wokeism when it is quite clear that the US has astoundingly high degrees of both. It makes even less sense to blame atheism for wokeism when the US has so little of it and the countries that are predominantly atheist don’t have the same problem with wokeism.
The facts of the matter do not, of course, speak to the underlying desire to find shared values and community so that the fighting will stop. I empathize with this, but to borrow E.O. Wilson’s famous saying about Marxism, “Nice Idea, wrong species.” We cannot say that shared belief systems have never been tried. They have been the main way of governing societies historically and still are in many countries. A look at countries in which one religion dominates answers the question of whether this reduces conflict or not.
“These countries are mostly Muslim,” some people will say. “Christianity is an entirely different thing.” Again, no. 450,000 denominations of Christianity exist for a reason and that reason is that humans do not do well at sharing belief systems. They branch off and form sects that want to kill each other, often even more than they want to kill people of an entirely different faith. As my background in late medieval Christian history informs me, making everybody believe the same thing does not reduce Culture Wars at all. It just makes them bloodier.
“Now you are being hyperbolic” I hear my imaginary interlocutor say, “Nobody is advocating for medieval attitudes to Christianity or making anybody believe anything.” Well, if you are not, you are speaking about a later form of Christianity softened by liberalism and rendered optional by liberal democracies. If that is the case, can we skip the whole Christianity part and go straight to the liberalism? Especially as God continues to seem not to exist?
You could lead here, America, the one country founded as a liberal democracy with secularism built into its constitution. Rather than trying to get people to all hold a shared belief system, let’s work for a consensus on better managing the different belief systems any society of humans will inevitably have. Let’s strengthen and enforce the liberal principle of, “You may believe what you wish but you must not force it on me.” Let’s expand and enforce the secular principle of separation of Church and State to include separation of wokeism and state (and any other ideology and state).
If we can get enough people to do that, everybody really will be able to find meaning and purpose and community in their own way. I think we should do that.
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Quite the contrary. You would expect to find the new religion--wokeism--arising in precisely the place where the old religion is most acutely missed. And especially in a formerly Christian country, since Wokeism is essentially a new Christian heresy, having pretty much all the superficial aspects of the old religion with the exception of redemption and forgiveness. But in lacking connection to the source of the virtues it claims to uphold, it veers wildly off course.
As Flannery O'Connor put it: “If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
I wrote about this here: https://pairodocs.substack.com/p/in-defence-of-the-christians
I would look at atheism in the academy, not the general population. That’s where wokeism started.