The strange emergence of the woke right

By Neil Shenvi, Op-ed contributor Wednesday, October 30, 2024

Critical theory should be rejected by Christians, whether it's peddled by the Left or the Right.

Our culture is still experiencing the aftershocks of what pundits have dubbed the “Great Awokening,” which tore through the U.S. in the late 2010s and early 2020s. Words like “intersectionality,” “white fragility,” “ableism,” and “heterosexism,” leaked out from college Gender Studies classrooms into the pages of major newspapers. Books by scholars like Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi became runaway bestsellers. And hordes of hapless employees had to sit through Neo-Marxist struggle sessions at their places of work as they “interrogated their whiteness” or “grappled with their male privilege.”

It's no surprise that this cultural revolution met with resistance, not only from conservatives but even from disaffected liberals appalled by what they saw. But what is surprising is that left-wing wokeness appears to have created a reactionary doppelgänger: the woke right. Many die-hard opponents of wokeness, including author James Lindsay, conservative activist Chris Rufo, and Pastor Doug Wilson, are now warning about this bizarro-world analog of the woke left. What should Christians think about it?

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Understanding critical theory

To understand the woke right, we first have to understand the woke left, which has embraced a worldview based on an ideology called critical theory. Critical theory grew out of the work of Karl Marx in the 19th century and his Neo-Marxist followers at the Frankfurt School in the 1930s. In all its iterations, critical theory is concerned with how power circulates within society to create winners and losers, oppressors and the oppressed.

Today, critical theory is an umbrella category that includes numerous critical social theories like critical race theory, intersectional feminism, queer theory, and postcolonial theory. All of these theories aim to dismantle the systems and structures which (according to critical theorists) undergird racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, imperialism and other oppressions.

As Dr. Pat Sawyer and I argue in our book Critical Dilemma, contemporary critical theory can be explained in terms of four central ideas: 1. the social binary, 2. hegemonic power, 3. lived experience, and 4. social justice.

First, the social binary is the idea that society is divided into oppressed and oppressor groups along lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, and a host of other identity markers. Thus, society is made up of an oppressive ladder with straight white men at the top and disabled, black trans-women at the bottom.

Second, hegemonic power is the ability of the ruling class (whites, men, heterosexuals, Christians) to impose their straight white male values on culture such that they seem “normal,” “natural,” “objective” and even “God-ordained.” Because all of us are socialized into systems of white supremacy, the patriarchy, and the gender binary, we don't even realize that we're brainwashed.

Third, oppressed people can escape their socialization through their lived experience. They can achieve a “critical consciousness.” In other words, they can “get woke.” They can come to see reality as it actually is, a stifling web of oppression. Since the rest of us are blinded by our privilege, we should defer to them.

Fourth, the end goal of contemporary critical theory is social justice, defined as the deconstruction of all the oppressive norms and values of the ruling class.

If we understand these four ideas, everything from Drag Queen Story Hour to Queers for Palestine to “decolonizing mathematics” begins to make more sense. All of these phenomena are manifestations of a coherent, comprehensive, anti-biblical worldview that Christians must reject. As a professor at NC State once told me, “Once you see it, you can't unsee it.”

Understanding the woke right

For years, wokeness was confined almost exclusively to progressives. But more recently, people on the dissident right, including professing Christians, have begun embracing critical theory and adopting a posture eerily reminiscent of that of the woke left (examples can be found here).

First, they, too, believe that modern American culture is constituted by a hierarchy of power. But straight white (Christian) men are not at the top of this hierarchy. Rather, they are at the bottom. As a result, some on the woke right openly call for white racial solidarity on behalf of white identity politics. This may seem strange given that white men are disproportionately overrepresented within the government, the corporate world, and academia and hold far more wealth than their non-white, female counterparts. Yet their belief makes sense given how they view power.

The woke right — like the woke left — conceptualizes power in terms of largely invisible, covert hegemonic discourses. But rather than our nation being suffused with white supremacy, patriarchy, and heterosexism, the woke right believes that the tyranny of the ruling class is expressed in DEI initiatives, “the Longhouse” (the gynocratic rule of feminine values), “the postwar consensus” (an emphasis on equality and individualism), and “Judeo-Christianity” (the minimization of the West's uniquely Christian heritage). They believe all these taken-for-granted narratives must be dismantled.

Third, the woke right also embraces critical consciousness. All of us “normies” have been socialized into ideas like democracy, egalitarianism, and civil rights theory. But rather than being freed from oppression by lived experience, we must be freed from “Trashworld” by “taking the red pill,” recognizing the ways that democracy, technology, feminism and classical liberalism have enslaved us.

Finally, the goal of the woke right is a “RETVRN” to some earlier cultural vision, whether one based on patriarchy, or rule by a Christian Prince, or blood-and-soil ethnonationalism. Regardless, like the woke left, the woke right believes that our current system is irredeemable and must be remade.

What should Christians do?

To reach the woke right, Christians should start by understanding their legitimate concerns. Many young, straight white men are angry at being painted as the arch-villains of history. In the same way that actual experiences of anti-black racism drove some blacks toward the woke left, actual experiences of anti-white racism are driving some whites toward the woke right. In both cases, the Christian response should not be disdain or ridicule. Instead, we should insist that all forms of racism are wrong while also insisting that embracing wokeness is not the answer.

Second, our responses should be biblical, not partisan. Frankly, Christian political thought is extremely varied, and the Bible does not command one particular form of government. Therefore, we should not anathematize a random 16-year-old for merely asking whether democracy is an unqualified good. Rather, we should focus on issues that are clearly outside the bounds of Christian orthodoxy and orthopraxy. Many on the woke right — even professing Christians — often participate in absolutely vile forms of racism and anti-Semitism and spew abusive, ungodly speech from their (anonymous) social media accounts. Brothers and sisters, such things should not be.

Third, Christianity will disrupt the identity politics of both the woke right and the woke left for the same reason: for Christians, our identity is ultimately in Christ rather than in our race, class and gender. The moment that any ideology teaches us to identify more with our skin-color than with Christ and with God's people, it has run afoul of Gal. 3:26-28, Eph. 2:11-22, Phil. 3:8-10 and a host of other Scriptures.

Fourth, we should insist on dialogue and debate, exposing everyone's ideas to biblical scrutiny. Wokeness, by its very nature, opposes rational debate because it attempts to “see through” people's arguments to expose their hidden motivations: “You only say that because you're a straight white male,” “You only believe that because you're captive to the postwar consensus,” “that's just your Western, patriarchal interpretation of the Bible,” “that's just your pozzed, effeminate interpretation of the Bible.” This approach should be a non-starter for Christians, who reject a postmodern approach to objective knowledge and Scriptural truth.

Finally, we should not overestimate or underestimate the threat of the woke right. At the institutional level, it is of negligible importance. Left-wing wokeness is the regnant paradigm in large segments of the government, academia, and the corporate world. In contrast, right-wing wokeness is largely confined to anonymous internet edgelords with little actual power.

However, the spiritual danger of right-wing wokeness is significant. When “defeating the Regime” displaces proclaiming the Gospel as our primary mission and when we begin to identify more with fellow based, gigachad dissidents than with our brothers and sisters in Christ, something has gone deeply wrong with our spiritual lives.

Christians need to learn to recognize this new phenomenon and combat it, through compassion, patient discipleship, and faithful biblical teaching that turns aside neither to the Right nor to the Left, but seeks to proclaim and obey all that Christ commanded us.