I grew up in the world of Protestant Evangelicalism and I think that the history of Evangelicalism, in North America can shed some light on the current phenomena called “Wokeism”.
Before Evangelicalism arose the Protestant religious culture of North America had what would be called a “Calvinist” flavour. The church of the original colonies was made up of various versions of entrenched Puritanism, underpinned by Calvinism. The orthodox Puritan colonies were societies of status and subordination, with the ranks of men arranged in strict hierarchies. Lower classes were subservient and obedient to a class of spiritual and governing elite, made up of upper-class gentlemen and scholars. The church saw this hierarchy as a status that was fixed at birth, and the doctrinal emphasis was placed on the depravity of the common man, belief in a strict form of predestination and the sovereignty of God, as represented by the church leadership. It was a pretty top down / totalitarian society.
As an aside, the English Puritans took it upon themselves to topple statues and utterly destroy Catholic churches and monasteries. They did much more damage to Catholic real estate than did the original Protestant reformers.
Fast forward to 1982. My friend Dale committed suicide! He wrote his suicide note to me and fully expected me to find him. As an early adolescent, he had had some negative experiences with the church and had adopted a militant atheistic outlook. About a week before he died, he said to me, “You know when I first met you, I considered myself an atheist but after our chats I think I’m now an agnostic”. A week later I find his body!
I was distraught beyond. I was told by a Calvinist flavoured Christian that Dale had committed the “unpardonable sin” and he was predestined to do so. He was predestined to be one of the class of people called “reprobates” who had the “property” of being destined for Hell in order to satisfy God’s righteous anger. Not property in the real estate sense but in the sense that copper has the property of being malleable. I could mourn Dale’s passing but also rejoice that God’s will had been done! My response: “What the hell!”
As an aside, the Catholic Church had its own version of Calvinism called Jansenism. It was condemned as a heresy in 1665 by Pope Alexander VII.
People had been reacting against this suffocating spirituality and leaving their churches. What is called the First Great Awakening started in 1740 as a call for people to return to piety. This movement fostered a form of an Evangelical Calvinism which had less emphasis on the predestined will of God and more of an emphasis on our free will.
To be sure there was a lot of “hellfire and brimstone” preaching but the strict notions of predestination were proving to be incompatible with the promise that humans could, by a voluntary act of faith, by “giving your heart to Jesus”, achieve salvation. Revival swept the land. The churches could not hold the attendees, so the services were moved outdoors to a more “camp-meeting” type atmosphere.
From 1740 to 1742 around fifty thousand people were added to the churches of New England during the First Great Awakening, which was significant for a population of about 300,000 at that time. These converts were mainly people who had left the churches and were coming back to their faith. It was and attempt to “revive” the faith of the congregants hence the term “Revival meetings.”
Johnathan and Charles Wesley were evangelists during this period and spoke to crowds numbered in the thousands. From their preaching the Methodist and Wesleyan churches were born.
Not everyone was on board with the free will based “personal salvation” approach of the Evangelicals. The established churches offered stiff resistance to the revivalist wave. For example, here in Nova Scotia, in the 1740’s any children born to Baptist parents were considered illegitimate in the eyes of the law! “Baptist bastards” was a legal term. The Anglican Bishop of Nova Scotia had itinerant Baptist ministers arrested and jailed. One preacher in Yarmouth County was “tarred and feathered” and eventually died of his burns! It looks like there were a few Anglican ”bastards” as well!
An appetite for freedom of religion and freedom of speech developed out of the First Great Awakening and set the stage for those freedoms to be enshrined in the American Constitution in 1787, after the 1776 War of Independence.
The Second Great Awakening, from the 1790s to around 1840, was led by many, including Charles Finney who was a devoted abolitionist and encouraged Christians to see slavery as a moral issue rather than a political or economic one. This was during the days of the Wild West, when camp meetings were held in tents with sawdust floors, and itinerant preachers shared the gospel. Thousands and thousands of Americans, who had not been church goers, came to faith during this time. This was also the period when there was an explosion in the growth of the Black Evangelical churches.
The phraseologies of things like “being born again”, “giving your heart to Jesus”, “Jesus is my personal saviour” and “having a personal relationship with Christ” all developed in this Evangelical culture. Coming forward in a church or camp meeting to pray the sinner’s prayer and accept Jesus also came out of this period.
America’s Third Great Awakening, from 1857 to 1859, began with a prayer meeting in New York City. Though small, it exploded after the stock market crashed, and within six months, ten thousand New Yorkers were gathering daily for prayer. Around one million people came to believe in Jesus during the Third Great Awakening.
The emphasis of the equality of all believers, Galatians 3: 28, “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”, had social ramifications. The Great Awakenings seeded the anti slavery, women’s emancipation, and the civil rights movements. Someone’s poverty was not seen as being predestined by God but rather the result of social ills. The emphasis on “free will” meant that you had responsibilities towards your brothers and sisters.
But wait, there was something else going on! The 1840’s and 50’s was also the time frame that Karl Marx was developing the religion of Marxism. His “Communist Manifesto” was originally entitled “The Communist Confession of Faith”. Marx was also in the “property management” business in that he divided society into two cohorts, the bourgeoisie, and the proletariat. The bourgeoisie have the property of being addicted to exploiting the proletariat. Predatory capitalism flowed in their veins. Marx’s god, the “World Spirit”, sees the bourgeoisie as social reprobates who need to be re-educated or destroyed for the will of the God of History (aka Baal?) to be fulfilled. Think of the 1970’s and killing fields of Cambodia where whole classes of people were murdered for the will of the Marxist god to prevail. Society’s reprobates were removed so that salvation could descend to the earth!
In 1891 Pope Leo XIII issued his encyclical Rerum Novarum which was a detailed analysis and a critique of both unrestricted Capitalism and Marx’s ideological solution to it. He said moral considerations must be paramount in all social and economic interactions. Since the Awakenings were populist type movements, you needed someone with the intellectual chops of Pope Leo to give clarity to the situation.
Interestingly Pope Leo wrote and instituted the Prayer of St. Michael, in 1886, for ongoing protection in the spiritual battle with evil. In his vision of the future did Pope Leo see the Woke barbarians on the distant horizon?
"Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil; May God rebuke him, we humbly pray; And do thou, O Prince of the Heavenly Host, by the power of God, thrust into hell Satan and all evil spirits who wander through the world for the ruin of souls. Amen."
Going back to our original trajectory, this is a quote from the reporter Greg Laurie, about the recent movie, “The Jesus Revolution”. “That brings us to the fourth and most recent spiritual awakening, also known as the Jesus Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. I had the privilege of being there; I had a front-row seat. At the time, I didn’t know it was a revival. I didn’t realize I had walked into the middle of a great spiritual awakening. There was a pastor named Chuck Smith, who opened his heart and his church to this spiritual movement, and as a result, thousands of people—especially young kids and hippies—were getting saved. A lot of churches took one look at those kids who were hungry for God’s Word and for fellowship and said, “You’re not coming in here looking like that!” But for the churches that opened their doors to the Jesus People (or the Jesus Freaks, as they were sometimes called), those churches experienced revival.”
Canadian Philosopher Charles Taylor, from McGill University in Montreal, talks about ‘social imaginaries’. Social imaginaries reside at the deepest level of a particular society. By analogy, the social imaginary is the ontological substrate that the society draws on. It sets up the conditions for the possibility of a particular set of ideologies to take root in the culture. Since it is ontological it resists being explained purely in terms of psychological or historical analysis, since those analyses only make sense within the framework of the social imaginary itself.
In other words, were the Great Awakenings a deeply spiritual phenomenon that changed the social imaginary of their times and bore particular religious, ideological and political fruit that nourished a free society?
Where are we in 2023? There is a new “property manager” in town and he is not part of a Great Awakening but of a Great Awokening. As just stated, the Great Awakenings have had a positive impact on the fabric of our society. Current public intellectuals like Jordan Peterson and James Lindsey, who do not espouse the Christian religion, say that without the Judeo-Christian influences on our society over the past few centuries we would be living in a totalitarian hell.
Borrowing from the approach in C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, is wokeism a type of inverse exorcism where the good is being expelled and replaced by evil? The 1960’s Marxist theorist Herbert Marcuse, whose ideas form part of the underpinnings of woke theory said that he got his ideas from returning to the garden and taking a second bite out of the apple! Even Marcuse, then, intimated at a spiritual substrate to his work.
How is this inverse exorcism being attempted? – by invoking the “property” that woke theory terms “whiteness”. Now whiteness has nothing to do with skin pigment but has to do with what we would term a Judeo-Christian worldview. Anyone holding that worldview whether, black skinned or white skinned, are diseased with “whiteness”. Since the woke are philosophical nominalists, meaning that for them words are just pure labels and have no linkage to the essence of what they are labelling, therefore “white” is not really white. For example, in the nominalist world I can label myself a “man” one day and a “woman” the next. You cannot use words to define, “What is a woman?” since words cannot touch the hem of the garment of reality.
The woke use our vocabulary but not our dictionary. Deceit is a legitimate weapon in their arsenal. “Whiteness” has lots of historical and social connotations that are extremely helpful for the woke agenda. It is an exquisite PR strategy!
Take their other favourite deceit colored term “compassion”. As Christians we can be tempted to follow behind them as they carry the banner of compassion. But is that woke compassion leading us to the promised land or to captivity in some new Babylon?
If wokeness is a casting out of the of the positive effects of the Great Awakenings, are we returning to a totalitarian hyper Calvinism, this time not of the Christian God, but of Marx’s “World Spirit”, aka Baal, the choreographer of human sacrifice par excellence? Today, there is the sacrifice of the unborn, the sacrifice of adults (M.A.I.D), the sacrifice of the innocence of our children and the sacrifice of the fertility of our young people via the various gender ideologies. The woke God operates on the inverse of Hosea 6:6 for he desires sacrifice and not mercy!
Are we then, as Christians, the new bourgeoisie deemed to be infected with the defiling property of Judeo-Christian “whiteness”? And are we, like my friend Dale, seen as nothing more than “white reprobates” predestined to burn in some woke hell?
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