Wokeism is the New Religion’s Name

Shellenberger               McWhorter

Michael Shellenberger is author of Apocalypse Never and San Fransicko, and a TIME “Hero of Environment.” As a climate changer but cancel culture target, he experiences environmental religion up close. To him, as with this blog, environmentalism combined with what’s now called “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion [DEI]” — the former “Critical Race Theory” — are progressives’ new religion. Shellenberger places the two under one word—“Wokeism.”

Religion isn’t science. Shellenberger reminds us of facts our Woke media ignore or hide:

despite the decline in police killings of African Americans, the share of the public which said police violence is a serious or extremely serious problem rose from 32% to 45% between 2015 and 2020. Despite the decline in carbon emissions, 47% of the public agreed with the statement, “Carbon emissions have risen in the United States over the last 10 years,” and just 16% disagreed. Meanwhile, 46% of Americans agree with the statement, “Deaths from natural disasters will increase in the future due to climate change” and just 16% disagreed, despite the absence of any scientific scenario supporting such fears. And despite the lack of good evidence, mainstream news media widely reported that the killing of trans people is on the rise.

Shellenberger has found “a whole series of mythological and supernatural beliefs” in Wokeism, such as making today’s whites responsible for past white racist actions and believing climate change will make humans extinct. Both woke racism and environmentalism link present-day evils to an original sin (slavery, the industrial revolution). Each has guilty devils (white people, “climate deniers”) sacred victims (black people, poor islanders), “The Elect,” a self-appointed elite crusading against evil (BLM activists, Greta Thunberg), a set of taboos (saying “All lives matter,” criticizing renewables) and purifying rituals (kneeling/apologizing, buying carbon offsets).

Racial and environmental Wokeism share the belief that people are victims or oppressors, based on their identity or experience. Shellenberger explicitly draws upon the work Woke Racism, where Columbia University linguist John McWhorter (covered earlier here and here) argues that Wokeism is a religion. 

Where Shellenberger is serious, McWhorter understands “The Joy of Religion.”  McWhorter draws on the poet Czeslav Miłosz's recalling the sense of pleasure and relief conformity provides, the joy of having it figured out, of solving an algebra problem, of understanding why a romantic relationship went bad. McWhorter adds Wokeism is better than Marxism, which is hard for a difficult-to-motivate proletariat to grasp. George Floyd – he was no abstraction.

McWhorter quotes Douglas Murray saying of religion,

People imbibe because they like it. It lifts them up and exalts them. [T]hey become the self-appointed representatives of the living and the dead.   .   .  the self-appointed redeemers of mankind. From being nobody one becomes somebody.

The Sixties’ “sex, drugs, and rock and roll,” the elite’s failure in Vietnam, the civil rights and feminist revolutions all helped overwhelm established churches, leaving much of America with an empty hole. Consciously or not, the elite have moved toward the replacement faith Sigmund Freud suggested the West would need: the “system of doctrines, and from the outset this would take over all the psychological characteristics of religion, the same sanctity, rigidity and intolerance, the same prohibition of thought in self-defense” -- the racial plus environmental faith Shellenberger brands "Wokeism."

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