Gary Houchens

A recent commentary in the Daily News admonished Christians for allowing their churches to go “woke.” Predictably, this was followed by letters to the editor alternately defending the concept of woke churches and accusing the commentary writer of bigoted attitudes for rejecting wokeness.

All of this prompted a liberal friend of mine to suggest that conservatives can’t even define the word “woke.”

There may be some truth here, just like the way many liberals throw around the term “fascist” to mean any perspective even slightly right of center.

When such terms just mean opinions with which I disagree, they really mean nothing at all.

But the term woke is not actually hard to define. It was coined not by critics on the right, but by far-left adherents to an ideology they themselves labeled as such.

In a 2023 National Review article, Kentucky State University professor Wilfred Reilly easily defined the term based on the concepts of its own believers.

Reilly wrote, “a ‘woke’ person is someone who believes that (1) the institutions of American society are currently and intentionally set up to oppress (minorities, women, the poor, etc.), (2) virtually all gaps in performance between large groups prove that this oppression exists, and (3) the solution to this is equity – which means proportional representation regardless of performance or qualifications.”

To this, I would add that woke partisans believe one’s skin color and sexual impulses are the among the most important element of their identity, and that one’s alleged status as “privileged” or “victim” largely defines their destiny.

Woke means embracing a high degree of moral relativism, rejecting the notion that there are universal truths that apply to all people in all times, and insisting that we must affirm an “oppressed” individual’s subjective interpretation of their own identity.

Paradoxically, wokeness also gives permission to vigorously silence any perspectives that challenge its orthodoxy. It does this both through directly coercive means, and by labeling all dissident perspectives as inherently bigoted, and therefore immediately worthy of censure. Thus, wokeness is impervious to meaningful debate.

Of course, racism really does exist, and given our fallen human nature, throughout history one group or another has routinely sought to oppress others. To be clear: this is bad. But these dynamics do not define every pattern of politics and economics, nor is there something uniquely awful about the United States or Western Civilization in this regard.

Finally, it’s important to note what woke does not mean.

A great number of liberals seem to equate the term with simple Christian charity. It should be obvious that woke ideology means something very different. For one thing, charity does not require us to affirm others no matter what decisions they make.

In truth, wokeness is the opposite of charity. Instead, it sees conflict in all things, is motivated by manufactured resentment and hostility between groups, and inevitably leads to violent, coercive means to enforce its views on others.

Rather than fostering the unity, genuine compassion, and call to truthfulness that faith communities seek, wokeness perpetuates division by reducing complex human relationships to vengeful power struggles between artificially assigned groups.

Christians are right to reject it.

Gary Houchens, PhD, is director of the educational leadership doctoral program at Western Kentucky University.