The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Wokeness

Drawing on the concept of political religion (Voegelin 1938, Gentile 2006), this paper seeks to identify the major sources of the so-called woke activism in the United States and the countries that belong to the Protestant legacy tradition. Originally used to describe the state of being conscious of one's oppressive status, since the turn of the 2020s, the expression "woke" has been increasingly employed to refer to excessive moralism, virtue signaling, and intolerance in identity issues. Several authors (Rectenwald 2019, Znamenski 2021; Lindsay 2022; Williams 2022; Bawer [2012] 2023, Mounk 2023, Rufo 2023) have explored the intellectual sources of the woke phenomenon which they have located in the so-called identity or cultural turn that occurred within the left collective in Western academia. Others (Patterson 2021; Wood 2021; McWhorter 2021; Braunstein 2022; Buruma 2023) came to emphasize the role of secularized Protestantism as a cultural setting that amplified the woke. In contrast to the above-mentioned approaches, Hanania (2023) has stressed that it was in fact vague and contradictory legal measures and executive decisions that opened doors to woke activism. Building on all that scholarship, this paper argues that the wokeism, defined here as a totalitarian movement with elements of political religion, emerged from the interplay of all three factors: the cultural identitarian left shift away from class-based Marxian socialism, the erosion of WASP Puritan transcendental ethos by the 2010s, and regime uncertainty over identity issues in legal and administrative spheres, which spurred a bureaucratic apparatus to interpret and enforce those issues.