John McWhorter has been saying for quite a while now that wokeism is a religion. He doesn’t mean that it is like a religion he means that it really is one. And that insight has made him pretty pessimistic about the chances of having a conversation with the people driving this. They don’t want to discuss, they want to gain adherents and condemn heretics. A couple months ago he gave an interview to Reason which I wrote about here:

“We have to understand that you can not reason with people like this,” he said. “It’s very rare that you teach somebody out of their religion and this is a religion. And so to try to talk these people down doesn’t work. All they know is that you’re a racist and that’s all you’re going to get. So the idea is not to try to have a dialogue with them about these sorts of issues…I think we simply need to start telling people like this no.”

McWhorter has been working on a book about this and posting some excerpts from the work in progress on his Substack. Friday he wrote that he’s been getting a lot of pushback from critics who argue that he doesn’t know enough about religion to criticize wokeness as one. But McWhorter argues you don’t need a degree in theology to know when something is transforming into a cult. He offer several examples including the deification of Michael Brown:

What, then, do we make of a theologian who thinks Michael Brown was a modern Jesus?

“As with Christ, the flesh of Michael Brown, Jr. made him imminently killable in the eyes of many and mitigated any claim of empathy on the hearts of too many others,” Stephen J. Ray informs us. “Michael Brown Jr. is and will be our shining Black Prince for from his death God has brought Life to us all and in his gaze we are enveloped in its power.”

Now, the Elect defense here is to say “Oh, this guy is just some ….” – but watch it! He’s “just some” black President of the Chicago Theological Seminary, penning a serious article called “Black Lives Matter as Enfleshed Theology” in this book.

Another example comes from a recording of a teacher at Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School who suggested white people needed to gather in the equivalent of AA meetings to discuss “their problem.”

The student continues, “These comments are particularly concerning. Comparing simply being white to an alcoholic is dehumanizing and just plain wrong. CGPS is definitely embracing critical race theory… “ pic.twitter.com/mQIqi5p9MB

— speakupcgps (@speakupcgps) May 31, 2021

As McWhorter points out, you don’t have to work very hard to see the underlying religious elements of AA or other 12-step groups. All that’s missing is a call for white people to turn over their privilege to a higher power.

Ultimately, he concludes that the real problem with wokeism isn’t that it’s a religion but that it’s a bad one that focuses on an appearance of social justice purity at the expense of any good works.

An alternate-universe version of The Elect would be forging, even with a certain smug impatience with real questions, real change on the ground for real people who need help. That religion would be fine with me. In a way, it is the Catholicism of, say, Dorothy Day.

However, the this-universe version of The Elect make a pretense of being about activism when what really gets them going is shaming people and virtue signaling, while exploiting black people they don’t truly respect as tools for the former – as actual black people join them unaware of the profound dismissal that pity entails.

So the problem is not that The Elect is a religion. It’s that it’s a sh***y religion.

McWhorter doesn’t say this but he’s basically framing the woke as modern day Pharisees, the legalistic religious scholars Jesus criticized as hypocrites in the New Testament: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness.”