Another distinctive feature, now evident, of Leo XIV’s pontificate is the critical distance with which he stays clear of the “woke” movement and its intent, destructive – as “cancel culture” – of both Western civilization and the Christian religion, accused of being irremediably colonialist, racist, oppressive.
During Francis’s pontificate – as Settimo Cielo had brought to light – this ideology had also insinuated itself into the leadership of the Catholic Church, in the name of defending the “innocent” tribes of the Amazon as well as the indigenous children “forcibly re-educated” in Christian schools in Canada.
Born in the United States, the “woke” ideology has recently been subjected to a popular reaction of rejection there, expressed among other ways in the election of Donald Trump as president. But in America and Europe it still carries weight among the educated elites and in “politically correct” language, above all because it has taken shape as a new secularized religion.
"La religion woke" is the title of a book by the French philosopher Jean-François Braunstein, published in France in 2022. And “Il wokismo : cosmovisione sostitutiva e religione secolare” is the title of an essay by the philosopher of religion Gabriele Palasciano, released in the latest issue of La Rivista del Clero Italiano published by the Catholic University of Milan.
In Braunstein’s judgment, “Wokeism can be analyzed as a religious phenomenon that possesses : a literary canon composed of numerous reference texts ; a system of beliefs ; and a ritual that includes public ceremonies of ‘confession’ of historical guilt toward the discriminated against and violated minorities.”
An emblematic case of this ritual is the genuflection (see photo) in memory of George Floyd, the African-American man murdered by police officers on May 25, 2020, in Minneapolis, meant as a symbolic act of atonement for Western racism.
But in any case, wokeism is “stripped of any reference to divine reality,” writes Palasciano, from whose essay the quotations here are taken. “It is an exclusively worldly endeavor, a socio-political proposition.” This does not prevent its activists from “perceiving themselves as part of a chosen class,” called to a “prophetic” mission and endowed with “an unshakable trust in their own moral superiority.” It is not surprising that wokeism should find room among the various American Protestant denominations.
And it is precisely to this religious dimension of wokeism that Palasciano devotes the most original part of his essay. Not without first examining its “theoretical pillars” and its “philosophy.”
The theoretical pillars, he writes, are three :
- “gender theory, which privileges the perception that the individual has of himself over the objective biological reality of sex”;
- “race theory, which criticizes the ‘white privilege’ from which arise numerous forms of ethnic-racial and religious discrimination”;
- “guilt theory, which calls for reparations for the historical injustices suffered due to the domination exercised over the world by Western societies.”
As for philosophy, Palasciano identifies the main origin of the “woke” movement in Jacques Derrida’s “deconstructionism.”
But it is for the “religion” of wokeism that he reserves the most extensive section of his analysis.
First of all, he notes that “due to cancel culture, wokeism is often associated with Puritanism, a religious movement that arose in the late 16th century in England and was then transplanted, starting in the 17th century, to North American soil.”
But in reality this juxtaposition is “rather crude,” because Puritanism was the exact opposite of cancel culture. “The Puritans were great pioneers of universal literacy, as well as untiring promoters of free and universal education, through the establishment of educational centers, schools, and universities, including Harvard and Yale,” the same ones where, in a curious reversal of history, a large part of the “woke” movement has taken root.
More attractive, Palasciano continues, is the juxtaposition “with the Protestant ‘awakenings’ that occurred between the 18th and 20th centuries, first in the European context and then in that of the United States, with the aim of rousing the consciences of believers from what they considered a widespread spiritual lethargy.”
There is in effect a consonance between the word “awakening” and the adjective “woke,” which in Black English, the African-American vernacular English, means “awake,” “alert,” “attentive.”
But here too there is a considerable distance between wokeism, which puts the accent ethnic-racial, religious, and sexual discrimination in a completely intramundane context, and “the numerous Protestant awakening movements, which asserted the centrality of the biblical text, as Sacred Scripture, and of the figure of Jesus of Nazareth, professed as Christ and Son of God, insisting on the redemption from sin that he brought about.”
More convincing, in Palasciano’s judgment, is to juxtapose wokeism with “a context that, while culturally and theologically linked to the Protestant tradition, is defined by the concepts of ‘post-Protestantism’ and ‘neo-Protestantism’.”
From this perspective, “wokeism appears as a form of secular religion, that is to say a sort of cultural Christianity, detached from theological and, in particular, Christological content. Although ethics and religion may remain interconnected, sin is no longer conceived as a personal transgression requiring divine intervention, and therefore God’s work of redemption through Christ, but rather as a collective phenomenon connected to social injustices. In all this the spiritual concerns of Protestantism seem to shift toward the socio-political sphere, shaping or transforming politics itself into a secular soteriology.”
In any case, wokeism is a worldview that excludes the divine, and even more so the Christian God. The Catholic theologian Paul F. Knitter, a specialist on the relationship between the Abrahamic religions, attributes to the “woke” vision that “replacement theology” – now disavowed by Catholic doctrine – which maintained precisely the “replacement” of the Old Covenant with the New, of Judaism with Christianity. With wokeism now claiming in its turn to replace the Judeo-Christian tradition, to be wiped out en bloc.
As for the beliefs that wokeism means to convey, Palasciano identifies “at least four.”
The first is anthropological in nature and maintains “that the white heterosexual Western male, cause and origin of a culture of machismo and patriarchy, must be urgently deconstructed.” With the result of “thereby paradoxically promoting a ‘racist’ anti-racism, based on the conviction that the white Western individual is intrinsically racist, with no possibility of redemption outside of deconstruction.”
The second concerns sexuality. “‘Gender fluidity’ becomes an ideal that defies any bodily determination, while gender change is presented in the religious terms of a ‘new birth,’ that is, a rebirth according to a secularized perspective.”
The third concerns cultural history. “Wokeism maintains that Western history is dominated only by colonialism, racism, and sexism, aspects that invalidate any artistic, cultural, and scientific achievement. The deconstruction of Western history therefore aims to free the world from the millenary
oppression generated and exercised by the West.”
The fourth concerns scientific knowledge. “Western science is seen as the expression of both androcentrism and colonialism.” And therefore “wokeism proposes a ‘decolonization’ of knowledge, an operation that includes questioning the objectivity and universality of modern science, promoting alternative, even local, epistemologies that challenge the traditional scientific narratives.”
In short, Palasciano concludes, wokeism represents not only “a threat to Western civilization and Christianity,” but also “an aggressive secularization through the promotion of a replacement religion.” Its target is “the personal, transcendent God of the three monotheistic religions, but primarily of the Judeo-Christian tradition.”
But “wokeism nonetheless represents, at least from a certain point of view, a positive challenge for Western civilization itself.” It offers the opportunity for “a reexamination of the structures of political-religious power” and for “a critical dialogue on some fundamental questions regarding the identity, memory, and values of the West.”
“Christianity is also called to contribute to all of this, and can offer answers pertinent to the current crises through constant, ever-new reference to the evangelical message.”
(Translated by Matthew Sherry : traduttore@hotmail.com)
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Sandro Magister is past “vaticanista” of the Italian weekly L’Espresso.
The latest articles in English of his blog Settimo Cielo are on this page.
But the full archive of Settimo Cielo in English, from 2017 to today, is accessible.
As is the complete index of the blog www.chiesa, which preceded it.
