Is Wokeness A New Age Political Religion?
Many have outlined the ways in which the woke are religious. I find some of those arguments compelling, but I also find that there is something askant with them. It is my view that the woke are more akin to New Agers than they are the traditionally religious.
Consider that the followers of Western faiths—whether Christian, Jewish, or Muslim—typically adhere to specific doctrines, official scriptures, rigid hierarchies, and repetitive rituals. The woke, on the other hand, do not really bother with protocols, have no single holy book they rely upon, and do not have weekly meetups. Still, instead, they display a loose affiliation structure, study a slew of texts listen to an assortment of soi-disant gurus, and only sporadically interact. Very New Agey.
Most importantly, the woke tend to align more with the New Age ethos and certain motifs of that movement. Consider the many parallels: bad energies easily map onto concepts like implicit bias, shadow work might be seen as uncovering white privilege, and reading auras could mean detecting unconscious racism. The desire for oneness is expressed in the embracing of open borders, unconditional love in advocating for policies like cashless bail and extreme leniency toward criminals, and manifesting abundance through various forms of wealth redistribution.
Bad karma might be seen as being born with whiteness, and holy mantras take the form of various slogans like no justice, no peace! Sacred spaces can be seen as safe spaces. There are also esoteric teachings that ostensibly exist to help the woke evolve in consciousness and gain insights into the real nature of reality, such as race is prejudice plus power. It could be said that the third eye is the critical eye as both are supposedly used for discernment. The evil eye comes in the form of the male gaze. Moreover, lived experience is often glorified as if it is the testimony of the subjective state of the mystic.
A divine life to the woke becomes the activist life; the higher self, the social justice warrior, and a healer is an anti-racist. A woke spiritual journey is doing the work, a vision quest would be exploring critical consciousness and astrological signs are represented by your intersectional state. While New Agers seek to employ language to cast spells and speak things into existence, the woke focus on discourses that construct reality.
The spiritual-but-religious adore the idea of alchemy and/or the belief that one can become anything they desire. Versions of these beliefs can be observed in the woke support for certain radical assertions of the transgender movement (e.g. the opinion that a transperson fully becomes the opposite sex).
New Agers and the woke have their empaths, that is, people who claim to be able to feel the pain of others literally. For the woke, it’s the marginalized that they feel emotionally attuned with. We might say that a woke mystical union is a feeling of merging with oppressed minority groups.
Cosmic consciousness translates to something like climate consciousness. Spiritual guidance comes in the form of indigenous knowledge and other ways of knowing. We could further claim there exists woke meditation which they call problematizing. Mindfulness becomes checking privilege, and ego death is de-centering. Spiritually aligned means being a political ally.
They also have ascended masters and teachers that you can pay to hear speak or to have access to: e.g. DiAngelo, Rao, and others.
Moreover, the woke and New Agers both seem to believe in invisible, sometimes diabolical forces that are insidiously at work in people's lives; for the spiritual it’s astral, and for the woke it’s systemic racism or the patriarchy. And there is the notion that associating with traditional liberals or conservatives is similar to the New Age idea that some low-vibration people can corrupt one’s energy field.
And just like in spiritual-but-not-religious groups, there is an ongoing one-upmanship among the woke, a holier-than-thou contest. Members annoyingly and incessantly try to outdo each other in terms of affectatious performances of compassion and piousness. Lastly, consider that the very term woke signals something akin to Eastern enlightenment, awakening, or ascension.
Now, some of wokeism's adherents are atheists, unwittingly using politics as a kind of substitute for a spiritual life. Others—what I call the namaste woke— more consciously channel their New Age ideals into their political activism, which almost inevitably leads them toward the far left. New Age guru turned presidential nominee Marianne Williamson may not have won anything, but the ethos of the New Age movement that she represents is alive and well—both consciously and unconsciously in progressive circles—and spreading.
In sum, there is an aspect of the woke mindset that, in my opinion, is determined to try to achieve a kind of sainthood through politics. Every political issue, in their minds, morphs into an opportunity to emulate Saint Francis's embracing of the lepers. This may all seem noble, but in fact, it is a mixing of categories. It is a tainting of the spiritual with the political.
In the final accounting, it ends up not being spiritual and also becomes politically disastrous as spiritual concepts in the political world are usually arrantly naive and therefore deleterious to society. There are many ways to view wokeism, but I think one very accurate frame is the channeling of New Ageism into the political. It seems, for me anyway, quite a better fit than calling them religious.
Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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Good analogy, thanks. Only this time it's a pharma cult rather than healing crystals. Quackery is the common thread.
You make a good point but miss one very religious act we see from the woke: heresy must be punished. Wrong think must be called out and wrong actors must be punished and then banished. Very much like the witch trials of Salem (or would be if we would only let them burn someone).