Unclearly Woke
By biblical standards, which loom over the whole “wokeness” issue, the immoral liberals are guilty of some things, while the immoral conservatives are guilty of others. The liberals (which include the “woke”) know this and constantly accuse the latter of a hypocrisy which the conservatives, for their part, do not deal with as they should.
The difference between the liberal and the conservative transgressor (broadly speaking) is that the latter claims to submit to law imposed by God—if he is a Christian, in obedience to Christ—which the liberal knows but does not recognize. The theist, with his profession of this law, operates within it to accuse himself and others of its transgression. If, however, in his opposition to his liberal counterpart, he begins to qualify the teachings of a sanctified conscience about his own sin, he has in fact crossed a critical line and become what he hates in his enemies—a functional liberal—his own god and his own law. He does not typically reject his religion in that case, but clasps it to himself as an excuse for his own transgression: Deus lo vult!
This is the sort of person, I believe, to whom James Lindsay refers when he speaks of woke conservatism. Lindsay is an atheist, at least of sorts, so he is not well-equipped to perceive the stark frontier between the religious conservative as a political creature and “conservative wokeness,” which would appear to such people, I presume, more as a declivity than as a chasm—simply the same thing with greater intensity.
The problem with using “woke” to describe an intransigent religious right wing is that this stock is borrowed from a foreign store, and so is confusing to people who are used to seeing it there and not here. The analogy implied by it is not entirely wrong, but unclear.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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