A Response to Steve Sailer
Jun 02, 2024
Steve Sailer recently wrote an essay titled In This House We Believe: The Protestant Roots of Wokeness. Sailer states that his intent is to argue against what he calls the “obsession among callow rightists about declaring wokeness a foreign, un-American import by Marxists or Jews or Jewish Marxists or whatever.” With all the talk about “wokeism” on the right lately, it is something that warrants a serious attempt at providing an intellectual tracing of its roots, but I found this essay lacking in Sailer’s characteristically rigorous analysis.
Sailer is not the only intellectual to look to explain wokeness as an expression of Christianity or a Christian heresy. Popular blogger Noah Smith described wokeness as “a combination of abolitionism and Protestant Christianity”, arguing that the abolitionist movement of the 18th and 19th centuries, started by zealous Christian activists, was the original woke movement.
In Sailer’s case, he is inspired by a more recent essay written by a religious sociologist named Sheluyang Peng, who argued wokeness is an expression of Northern US Protestant religious values. Sailer quotes the following argument from Peng’s More Christian than the Christians:
Wokeness appears to be a syncretic blend of Puritanism and Quakerism. Woke adherents value elite education and moralizing, seem obsessed with rooting out heretics, adhere to orthodoxy, and display a sense of personal salvation, traits that were all characteristic of Puritans, while also displaying the radical openness and commitment to egalitarianism that characterized the Quakers.
I am skeptical of explanations like this, which argue secular political orthodoxies are the exact same character as religion, or try to trace a direct genealogy from the behaviour of young, barely informed political radicals back to their pious ancestors. Some “anti-woke” intellectuals have taken this kind of genealogical thinking so far they have tried to trace the origin of wokeness back to Gnosticism and 2nd century intra-Christian disputes.
This might be a fun intellectual exercise, but I think it’s a stretch to take religious attitudes and dogma, find similarities in secular political movements, and treat this as proof of some kind of causation. How could we test Peng’s theory? If Protestant attitudes were really at the root of wokeness, shouldn’t we expect their attitudes and voting patterns to have telegraphed this transformation? But of course, Protestant Christians have consistently shown the most conservative attitudes on everything from desegregation to gay marriage.
