I don’t get spam emails at my ASU account very often. And I never get emails from conservative political activists. But I did get a spam email from the radical left perspective. The email took time to help us understand what “woke” means. All it means is realizing an issue and trying to solve it. That’s it, according to this email. If you want to improve the lives of families, then you are woke, this email says. But is that right?
No, that’s not it. To be “woke,” or awakened, follows in the line of “awakenings” in American religious history. The idea is that you need to be awakened to your condition. In the First Great Awakening, Jonathan Edwards preached about the sinner’s condition before the perfectly just God. The preaching of Edwards and Whitefield caused many to turn to the Lord for forgiveness. Confessing their sins against God, they looked to Jesus as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.
Currently, there is a revival occurring in a number of colleges starting in Asbury. This revival follows the message of the First Great Awakening. It diagnoses the problem: we have sinned against God. It offers a solution that will help individuals and families better themselves. That is what it means to be awakened.
But “woke” in the current sense means awakened to your condition as an economically/politically oppressed person. By finding this out about yourself, you will then be able to solve the problem by forcing the oppressors to confess their privilege and make restitution by giving up their jobs and power positions to the oppressed. This “woke” leaves the person in ignorance about their condition before God, offers no solution to being alienated from God, and requires that we accept the economic and power assumption of Marx, Nietzsche, Foucault, and other European philosophers.
It was good that this email made its way to a professor of Religion in America.
Woke: adj., pejorative. A woke individual is someone who: (1) fully agrees with the current radical neo-Marxist agenda on race, gender, climate, abortion, education and DEI; (2) believes (without good reason or empirical evidence) that American society is intentionally set-up to oppress and discriminate against certain groups and perpetuate other evils; (3) advocates governmental and private-sector action as appropriate and necessary tools to redress these perceived wrongs (e.g., pay reparations, remove AP calculus from the curriculum, ban gas stoves and plastic straws and engage in reverse discrimination via admissions and hiring quotas intended to socially engineer educational and career outcomes); (4) refuses to engage in free and rational discourse to resolve differences of opinion with others on these matters; and (5) supports governmental and private-sector action (e.g., Twitter, Stanford Law School) to cancel, silence, deplatform and shout-down those who disagree.
Is that clear enough for you, Leftist?
Absolutely, you can share it. I wrote most it; I borrowed parts of it from a recent NR article addressing whether there is a good working definition of the term: https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/03/how-to-define-woke/