Woke Church Militant in DC

The Woke Church Militant marched in DC last eve but it wasn’t a traditional church procession and marchers weren’t singing hymns.

The ostensibly “anti-racist” crowd of about 150 as they marched through Adams Morgan, a popular restaurant district, demanded that outdoor diners join them with raised fist salutes. Videos showed several diners declined, prompting marchers to confront them with angry jeers.

In one scene, a 49 year old woman seated with another woman is surrounded by shouting, raised fist marchers, demanding she pay them homage. She quietly declines. Afterwards she told a Washington Post reporter that she had herself joined Black Lives Matters demonstrations. But in this situation, “I felt I was under attack.” She didn’t want to surrender to intimidation. “In the moment, it didn’t feel right. I wasn’t actually frightened.”

One angry woman marcher shouted at her: “Are you a Christian?” There was no answer.

Interesting question. Did the brave woman’s spiritual independence provoke it? Or did the angry marcher think her target was a Christian and therefore racist? Or did the marcher self-identify as Christian and expect any Christian readily to agree with the marchers’ anti-racism?

I hope if I had been there, a street down which I routinely walk, that I would have been as brave as that woman and not surrendered to the jeering mob. Raised fists do not signal good will. They signal intimidation, anger and riotous groupthink. Most riots and groupthink these days aren’t enacted in street theater but in social media, in politics, and in wider public discourse. Defying its demands for surrender and conformity is increasingly difficult.

This mob mentality is effectively The Woke Church Militant, full of infallible though constantly evolving dogma that tolerates no heresy. Apostates must be punished or crushed. The Spanish Inquisition at least offered its victims the opportunity to repent. Woke Church doesn’t believe in mercy or forgiveness.

Woke Church is an attitude and a movement. Some Christians and other traditional religious people subscribe to some of its tenets. They often focus a lot on conforming their traditional religious institutions to Wokery’s demands. Those demands often include apologizing for traditional religion’s ostensibly countless sins against woke justice.

Carl Trueman yesterday wrote “Woke Repentance,” in which woke religionists seek to gain the world’s approval through their apologies:

Today, one needs barely glance at Christian Twitter to see endless repentance for the sins that the world regards as top priority. One finds many horizontal repentances directed toward other men and women, but little that is directed heavenward. Not many repentant racists use the language of “against you, you only, have I sinned” when they mull over past bigotry to which their churches, or maybe even themselves, have been party. And that is interesting.

And:

I wonder if today’s turmoil is partly due to the fact that much of this current repentance is but hokey wokeness, selective in the sins it calls out—and selective on the basis of what the world thinks is important.

Trueman is focused on wokery within traditional churches. But The Woke Church Militant is primarily an attitude and movement that substitutes for traditional religion, especially among “religious nones” who are typically post-Christian in some sense. Often they are people who two generations ago would have at least nominally identified with Mainline Protestantism. But today they are unaffiliated and perhaps spiritual but supposedly not religious.

Yet often these post-Christian adherents of the Church of Woke are very religious, with doctrines, sacraments, soteriology, demonology and cosmology. And for many of them, the path of salvation is as straight and narrow as for any of the most exacting traditional churches.

Jody Bottum in his book An Anxious Age said this mostly post-Protestant phenomenon possesses “an intense spiritual hunger that has no outlet:”

There’s no way to see people kneeling, or singing ‘Hands up, don’t shoot’, or swaying while they hold up candles, and avoid acknowledging that it’s driven by a spiritual desire. I perceived this when I wrote about Occupy Wall Street, and it’s become even more like this. It is an intense spiritual hunger that is manifesting itself more violently. Because to the post-Protestants, the world is an outrage and we are all sinners.

And:

These ideas used to be corralled in the churches. If you let an idea like Original Sin – that’s a dangerous and powerful idea – loose from its corral, it goes to a place where it can exist, which is politics. One of the great dangers is that religious ideas are in politics. 

Traditional churches teach salvation through Christ. But Woke Church seeks salvation through adopting politically correct views on social ills. Says Bottum:

If it’s all about social ills, then you know you are a good person if you are opposed to those social ills, if you are anti-racist, even if you don’t do anything. You are convinced of your own salvation. You are one of the Elect if you adopt this stance of being opposed to the great sins.

The Woke Church Militant marching through DC last eve harassing heretical diners who wouldn’t return their clinched fists in solidarity was seeking salvation. But they won’t find it where they’re looking, which only will increase their anxiety and anger.