The Heresy of Wokeism (Part 1)

You might wonder, “What exactly is wokeness?” My goal in this article is to explain what it is; I will follow up with a second article on how the church should respond. My hope is that these articles will help our church to think clearly about these issues, and will guide us to have the courage to confront them when they arise.

I remember a conversation just a few years ago with a young man about some steps our denomination was taking toward rectifying racial injustice in our past. He responded, almost without even thinking about it, “Oh yeah, that’s woke.” Now, this is a young man I respect, and so I wanted to be open to what he was saying; but at the time I thought, “Racism is an issue. Abuse is an issue. You can’t just dismiss every mention of racism or sexism or any other -ism as ‘woke’. What if you end up enabling injustice in the process?”

Even though I initially thought his judgment was too flippant, after some time passed, I came to see he wasn’t wrong. These measures (taken by our churches) basically amounted to no new minority churches in our denomination and seemed to function as a way to make a largely white church feel better about itself. I say that as someone who is actually very interested and invested in minority-church planting. I agree that it is a huge strategic problem that the Presbyterian Church in America is so white, especially as our nation becomes less white. I’ve been working in my own ministry to partner more with minority churches, and I’ve been particularly interested in immigrant-church planting in the US, and in finding ways to make it easier for them to find support in the PCA.

Wokeness, functionally, is the belief that sin is concentrated in people with power and authority, and innocence, or righteousness, is concentrated in people without it.

But I think our problems have largely stemmed from administrative and strategic places, rather than some underlying racism. All that to say, I can tell that in a subtle way, the spirit of wokeness has been influencing our church, and I can see how it has influenced me. 

Racism and the mistreatment of women are both sins that should be condemned by the Church. But wokeism is saying something stronger and more totalizing than this. You might wonder, “What exactly is wokeness?” My goal in this article is to explain what it is; I will follow up with a second article on how the church should respond. My hope is that these articles will help our church to think clearly about these issues, and will guide us to have the courage to confront them when they arise.

What is wokeness?

Wokeness, functionally, is the belief that sin is concentrated in people with power and authority, and innocence, or righteousness, is concentrated in people without it. I know this is not the definition you might read online, but it is basically how it manifests itself in practice.

Someone might object that I am a white male pastor, so I am only objecting to wokeism because I am its target—all three of those titles put me in a position of power and privilege. Should I feel a general sense of guilt because of my position or my gender? Not only does the gospel not require that, I also don’t think it would do anyone any good. I strongly believe that human beings thrive in community, and communities need fathers, mothers, pastors, leaders, elders, deacons, business owners, authorities, teachers, and so on. Having no one in authority, that is, having no one with power, means having no one in community.

The word “woke” has roots in the opposition movement to injustices faced by African Americans in the early 20th century. There were many specific laws that can be named that oppressed black people in earlier American history. There may even be some today. But the meaning of woke is now far more comprehensive and abstract than criticizing unjust laws. It has become a totalizing worldview that wants to explain every facet of human society. It claims not simply that individual people can be racist or abusive, but that any system where one person is privileged above another is inherently racist or oppressive.

Wokeism ultimately believes that authority, wherever it exists, must be overthrown. Its spirit is one of deep resentment and envy (culminating in hatred) that seeks to upend the society that had been formed by the Bible over the past thousand years.

This is because wokeism is essentially an outgrowth of the earlier Christian heresy of Marxism. Though Marxism originally focused on the rich and the poor, it espoused a narrative of history whose underlying storyline was always about the oppressor and the oppressed. These are the opening lines of the communist manifesto (1848):

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”

The historian Tom Holland (Dominion, 2019) first helped me understand that Marxism is a Christian heresy. By that, he means that no other civilization in human history would have ever generated it except a Christian one. Marxism depends on an assumption of compassion that was only taught to humanity by Christ. 

“For a self-professed materialist, [Marx] was oddly prone to seeing the world as the Church Fathers had once done: as a battleground between cosmic forces of good and evil…The very words used by Marx to construct his model of class struggle— ‘exploitation’, ‘enslavement’, ‘avarice’—owed less to the chill formulations of economists than to something far older: the claims to divine inspiration of the biblical prophets. If, as he insisted, he offered his followers a liberation from Christianity, then it was one that seemed eerily like a recalibration of it.” (Dominion, 557-58)

Marxism wasn’t some other religion or worldview that emerged totally independent of Christianity. It was more like a parasite that lived off the ethics and wisdom of Christendom but sought to kill Christendom from the inside. It took the Christian care for the weak and oppressed, which would have never been embraced by the Romans or Greeks, and made it into a new worldview. (I’ve had many people tell me over the years that when they read Acts 4:32-37 about the early Christians, they couldn’t help but think it sounds to them like communism.) Even though we might associate communism more with eastern countries like China now, it was originally a western ideology developed out of the worldview of Christendom. Marx was writing in France in the 19th century, taking Christian ideas, and twisting them into an atheistic doctrine hostile to the gospel of Christ. 

Heresies always sound Christian, while subtly striking at some of the most fundamental aspects of the Christian worldview.

In the 150 years following the revolutions of the mid-19th century, Marxist thinking has spread into every area of life where there is any kind of inequality—but particularly in the areas of race and sexuality. Historian Carl Trueman has written an extensive account of the growth of Marxism into areas other than economics. In particular, Marx’s views on oppression were combined with Freud’s notions of sexual repression. The fruit was the rise of sexual revolution. Similarly, the rise of the therapeutic culture brought a massive skepticism to the parent/child relationship, undermining the nuclear family. Basically every human relationship that has any hint of hierarchy has been challenged by revolution. Wokeism ultimately believes that authority, wherever it exists, must be overthrown. Its spirit is one of deep resentment and envy (culminating in hatred) that seeks to upend the society that had been formed by the Bible over the past thousand years.

Why is it a Heresy?

This just gives a sketch of what wokeism is. I’m sure most people can see these threads as they’ve worked their way into our society, politically, socially, and even spiritually. Woke influence may not be as strong as some might say it is in the PCA; I see a lot of resistance to it also, especially as pastors like me become more aware of its harmful effects. But it is there.

As a result, I now believe one of the greatest pastoral duties of our generation is to recognize, name, and condemn the spirit of wokeness and to make sure this cancer does not kill our churches. Wokeism is the great heresy of our generation, and just as the church in every age has had to carefully discern the heresies that seek to undo her, this is the one of today.

The reason I call it a heresy is because it relies on ideas and language derived from Christianity. Heresies always sound Christian, while subtly striking at some of the most fundamental aspects of the Christian worldview. Let’s think of the early Christian heresy of Arianism. Arians believed that Jesus was God’s first and highest creation (which sounds very honoring of Jesus), but did not believe that Jesus was eternal or divine. 

The thing that is deceptive about Arianism is that it uses lots of the same language as orthodox Christianity, and calls people to follow Jesus, but in reality it is a completely different religion, and it is spiritually deadly. 

Something very similar is happening with wokeism. Woke sounds Christian. The Christian church is the most diverse community in human history because of Jesus opening his kingdom liberally to people from every tribe, language, and culture. The Christian church has welcomed women throughout history and insisted that they be treated well. The church has cared for the poor and defended the oppressed. So how should the church respond to the cultural pressures of the day? I’ll answer that in part two of this series.