I’ll start by claiming no special knowledge of the word-history of “woke.” But, as a relatively alert person, I do remember a time in the not-so-distant past (say, the 2010s), when it simply meant “not asleep anymore.”
About the time of the rise of Black Lives Matter and Antifa(scists), our American right-wing—that is, the Anti-antifa(scists), which would appear to make them Pro-fascist—those folks began to sneer at and smear over the obviously good intentions of The Woke. You know, like paying attention to long-standing inconsistencies in our National Ideals of Equality and the “General Welfare” specified in our Constitution.
This is not to say that “being awake” has never been a plainly accessible metaphor for moral mindfulness. In fact, one of the icons of American individualism, Henry David Thoreau, tells us in his mighty (sometimes ponderous) masterpiece Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854 . . . Sidebar: Is 1854 back when America was “great”? before the Civil War and Emancipation?):
(Thoreau does not mention women here as being awake or not).
So, wokeness. How is it we have come to a place where some people assert, against all kinds of
evidence from the Founding Fathers’ own words, that we are a “Christian nation”? I cite here our “Amendment I” to the Constitution: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. . . .” This seems to me to say that no one can impose one’s religion upon another with the legal authority of our Government.
However, as a Christian myself, I must ask, as does Roger Lovette, in his essay “The Woke Bible” (March 2023), if the United States government is Constitutionally constrained from imposing/establishing religion on its citizens, why do some citizens think it’s Super-Duper-American to force their traceably religious, doctrinal beliefs onto fellow citizens who don’t share those beliefs? And, perhaps more to the point, why would such S-D-Americans think it’s “Christian” to judge others with such anger in their hearts that they literally cannot see the other side’s moral arguments? Why is that?
How can poverty, racial discrimination, systemic greed resulting in massive income inequality that damages our economy, political favoritism/cronyism, national isolationism, etc., proceed from good “awakened” hearts?
Following “false prophets” might be part of the problem. Demagogues rely on emotional power more than on reason and compassion, stoking the blind fury that arises from fear and hate, especially when their targets are people different from ourselves—The Other, or The Marginalized, as we have learned to say.
It’s worth remembering that not so long ago in human history, we not only shunned but also attacked—verbally and physically—people with physical or mental disabilities, thinking of them as “possessed” or under God’s punishment for some unspeakable (and undiscoverable) sins of their parents (God help us all!). Just yesterday (20 March 2023, the vernal equinox) I read a “Christian” posting online excoriating those with “plural” pronouns as being possessed of many demons. Well said, “Christian,” if you are cruelly intent on punishing and persecuting such persons!
There’s been a lot of “Scriptural cherry-picking” lately. All those high-heat judgmental passages from the Bible in which God punishes evil-doers—sheep to heaven and goats to Hell, that sort of thing. I prefer to cherry-pick one Sermon on the Mount, in which Jesus is kind, loving, forgiving, hopeful.
It’s a whole bushel of cherries, I’d say. In Matthew 5, Jesus speaks of being “cast out” (5:13), “in danger of” three times (5:22), “cast into prison” by way of an “adversary” (5:25), that “plucking out” of eyes and “cutting off” of hands in two verses (5:29-30)—so you can cherry-pick a half-dozen verses out of 48 for the hard-eyed punishment stuff; but the overwhelming weight of The Sermon falls on “Love thy neighbor” and “Love thine enemies.”
But I really don’t mean to argue from a Scriptural basis for “wokeness”; we “United States People” are decidedly, purposely-from-the-beginning a Constitutional—not Theocratic—Republic. The legal cultural basis for our societal agreements should be Secular, adhering to Human Law instead of Christian Theology, no matter how flexible or debatable that theology may be.
One thing is certain: if the “un-woke” minority institute their iron-clad, hide-bound, trussed-up, idiosyncratic views as The New Law in our America, we will no longer be America—and certainly not “The United States”; rather, we shall have become a darkly oppressive society striving in self-righteousness toward some trumped-up homogeneity, exclusive rather than inclusive, a nation of blindered sleep-walkers rather than the vigorous woke-folk of whom our founders and our progeny might be proud.
