What Is a Religion, and Is Woke Progressivism One?
John McWhorter claims that woke progressivism is a religion – not just like a religion but literally a religion. This is in his book Woke Racism (https://www.amazon.com/dp/0593423062/). Caveat: I haven’t read the book, but I listened to some interviews with him, such as this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXPMsrQ44b4.
Here is how some of the Woke react to the book (https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2021/11/30/what-happened-to-john-mcwhorter/):
“I just think he’s a dumbass.”
“I’m sure he’s expecting head pats from Master for parroting right-wing bullshit. With Black people like McWhoter [sic], who needs the KKK?”
“[T]he often justified cynic in me thinks he just saw an opportunity to write a book to make some money. ‘Hey what will inflame the libtards and trigger the right to buy a book?’”
“I think David Chapelle made a sketch about this; the blind black Klansman.”
These reactions don’t exactly convince me that McWhorter is wrong. But perhaps you can find some more serious critiques of McWhorter’s ideas out there; I haven’t searched for it. Be that as it may, I’ve often noticed the resemblance between woke ideology and religion too. Q: Is it really a religion?
TL;DR: Not literally. It is literally an ideology. However, many ideologies, including this one, are very similar to religions, such that it is illuminating to view ideology in the light of religion.
Note: The rest of this is more about the nature of religion & ideology than about woke progressivism specifically.
What Is Religion?
“Religion”, just like pretty much all other concepts, is probably not precisely definable. The concept, like almost all concepts, was formed by looking at examples of things that strike us as similar to each other, but these examples need not all have any one thing in common; there might just be a cluster of different intercorrelated properties (see Wittgenstein’s idea of “family resemblance” concepts). So what are the typical characteristics of religions?
1. Faith: Religion is typically not mainly based on standard forms of empirical evidence and reasoning. McWhorter mentions this too – he says there is an element of suspension of disbelief. E.g., a certain amount of faith is involved in believing in a God whom you’ve never seen direct evidence of, or believing in reincarnation (unless of course you’ve read my paper [https://philpapers.org/archive/HUEEIE.pdf], but then you’re not being religious).
Note: My claim is not that religious people always claim that their religion is based on faith. I am claiming that all or nearly all religions are in fact significantly based on faith. In some cases, arguments are later devised for propaganda or rationalization purposes.
Note 2: The claim also is not merely that religions are insufficiently supported by the evidence. “Faith” is more specific than that. E.g., if you have psychotic delusions, or if you just made a miscalculation in your reasoning, or if you have incorrectly but reasonably weighed up the evidence on something, that’s not faith. Faith is more agential. It’s more like choosing to believe something because you want to believe it or you think you morally ought to believe it.
2. Supernaturalism: E.g., religions commonly believe in Gods, heaven, and/or supernatural powers.
3. Worldview: Religions give people a story about how the world works on a very general level (but usually not on a detailed level, e.g., they won’t tell you how to make a vaccine). Often, they are very incomplete – they fail to address lots of important things. But they at least appear to their adherents to address the most important stuff, or the stuff that the adherents care most about.
Connected to this is the intellectually dominating effect on adherents’ minds – devout adherents to a religion try to view everything they can through the lens of their religion. When they hear about a new issue, they do not try to think about that issue in its own terms. They don’t try to address it through uncontroversial evidence, nor try to adopt a position that could be expected to appeal to anyone outside their religion. They try to figure out what is the “x-ist” thing to say about that issue, where “x-ism” is their religion. ("What do you think of the new Dune movie?" "It's leading people toward Satan.")
Note: Among the nominal adherents of a religion, some are much more religious than others, so there is wide variation in how much these traits apply to individuals.
4. Source of Meaning: They tell us what is important, what we should be doing with our lives, and what is our place in the world. And this enables us to escape the despair of living in a cold, uncaring universe; it makes life feel meaningful. This is a big part of the motivation for #1, the leaps of faith that people are willing to make.
5. Self-support: Frequently, religions include a self-referential doctrine that declares the religion itself to be super-important and valuable, and often that it’s morally obligatory to believe the religion. In Christianity, Faith is a key virtue, and traditionally it was thought that all non-Christians were doomed to eternal torment. Islam says the same about non-Muslims. In Buddhism, they don’t have hell, but believing Buddhism helps you move toward enlightenment, which is the most important thing in the world.
6. Religious Emotions: People tend to have very strong feelings about their religion, and there are distinctive emotions associated with religions. Some things are sacred, and there is a particular emotion of reverence that one feels about the sacred. Other things are blasphemous, which calls forth another distinctive emotion, a kind of righteous indignation.
These emotions, by the way, also explain why religions give rise to expletives, such as “goddamn” and “Jesus H. Christ!”
7. Ingroup Identification: Religion is one of the things that triggers people’s tribal instincts. Tribalism involves favoring your “ingroup” over the “outgroup”, often in extreme ways. This has often led to physical violence between groups, though this has gotten rarer in recent times. People may identify ingroup members by geographical residence, or by race, or by social class, or … by belief system. Religious belief systems are particularly popular foci for ingroup/outgroup distinctions.
8. Source of Identity: Closely related is the fact that people regard their religions as part of their “identities” – as characteristics that define “who they are”, not superficial traits and not easily changeable.
9. Organization: Most religions have a particular organization, a church, that most adherents belong to. But of course you can be religious without belonging to an organization.
Notice how most of these characteristics are tied together, esp. #2-8. E.g., it makes sense intuitively that people would have strong emotions tied to their religious beliefs, given that the religion tells them what is important in the world, etc.
Why Does Religion Exist?
On the face of it, religious beliefs are often quite odd, compared to most of our beliefs. Isn’t it odd, e.g., that you would be totally convinced that there is a person listening to you whom you have never met, never seen any direct evidence of; that you’d be convinced that this person loves you and is answering your prayers, when outside observers can’t see any evidence of this? Why is there such a phenomenon at all?
I don’t exactly know. But it may be because religion satisfies certain psychological needs that human beings have – the need for that sense of meaning in life, the need for a feeling of understanding the overall order of the world, even a need for an ingroup and an outgroup.
Ideology
Ideology is similar to religion. Ideologies (which are usually political, but not always – e.g., I’d describe logical positivism as an ideology, but not a political ideology) have most of the characteristics of religion, except for #2 (supernaturalism). #9 (organization) is also less common for ideologies, and #1 (faith) is perhaps a little weaker. Since they don’t require belief in the supernatural, ideologies have less need for faith. However, it is still common for a good deal of faith to be involved in adopting and maintaining an ideology, because the facts of reality by themselves rarely provide optimal support for your most preferred beliefs.
Why do we have ideologies? Probably for the same main reasons that we have religions: the need for meaning, for a worldview, for ingroup identification. These needs used to be filled mainly by religion. But religion has waned in recent years in the more advanced societies, largely due to the increasing influence of modern science, which tends to chase out beliefs in the supernatural. Hence, humans needed a non-supernaturalistic substitute for religion. They found it in ideology.
What About Woke Progressivism?
I’ll briefly comment on wokism and the nine characteristics of religion (I don’t have time for detailed discussion of each):
1. Faith: Obviously, the woke will angrily deny this, but it looks to me like their belief system is mostly articles of faith.
2. Supernaturalism: No, they don’t have this.
3. Worldview: Woke leftists have a whole worldview, at least about the social world, and they try to relate every issue that they talk about to racism, sexism, etc. ("What do you think about the new Dune movie?" "It's so racist.")
4. Source of Meaning: Wokism tells people their place in the world and what they should be doing with their lives (“fighting racism”).
5. Self-support: The woke regard spreading wokism itself as basically the most important goal.
6. Religious Emotions: The woke have very strong feelings about their woke beliefs, and questioning these beliefs is treated like blasphemy (as McWhorter notes). I.e., they feel righteous indignation at “racist” (etc.) ideas, they think people advancing such ideas are not to be engaged with but simply attacked. Much as with religion, we even have distinctive expletives forbidden by the woke belief system, particularly racial epithets.
7. Ingroup Identification: The woke view “antiracists” as their ingroup, and other people as the outgroup, and they actively seek to harm the outgroup.
8. Source of Identity: The woke think of being “anti-racist” as a key part of their identity.
9. Organization: There isn’t really a woke organization analogous to a church.
So woke leftism has a lot in common with religion – all the characteristics except #2 and #9. So it’s understandable that McWhorter would think it is a religion. (I don’t know how many of these he lists, since, again, I don’t have his book.) However, the lack of #2 and #9 is enough to disqualify it as a “religion”, because that is in fact the main way that ideologies in general (e.g., Marxism, logical positivism) differ from religions. I assume we don’t want to say that ideologies in general are religions.
If we didn’t have the concept of ideology, we might sensibly fold wokism into the category of religion. But given that we have a distinction between religion and ideology, it’s pretty clear that woke leftism counts as more of an “ideology” rather than a “religion”.
So What?
Why is this interesting? Well, since woke leftism has become very influential recently, and of course other ideologies and religions have long been influential, if we want to understand the social world we need to understand what’s going on with religion and ideology.
From that standpoint, the distinction between ideology and religion isn’t terribly important. Basically the same thing is going on – both are belief systems that satisfy similar psychological needs. This helps to explain why the people with these belief systems (or as Elon Musk describes it, “mind viruses”) behave in the way they do, and why it is so difficult to change their thinking.
Pace John McWhorter, though, I don’t think it’s impossible to reason with religious or ideological people. It is difficult, but sometimes such people lose their faith because of logical arguments. Many a Christian has given up Christianity because of arguments against it. This is especially likely to happen when they are young (good luck converting a 40-year-old).