A First-Amendment Case for Freedom from the Woke Religion – New Discourses
The question of whether or not the worldview and practice for practice it intentionally is going variously by the names Social Justice, Critical Social Justice, or, more colloquially, Woke constitutes a religion is one of some general interest that seems to be growing. Until quite recently, we maintained the luxury of not having to treat the matter more deeply than as something of a curio of sociocultural philosophy, however important the issue may be. I have contended, for example, that Critical Social Justice constitutes a religion of sorts (a postmodern one, as I laid it out at considerable length; a nominally anti-racist one, as Columbia University professor John McWhorter is tackling it currently, at book length) and must be thought of as such, at least by everyday citizens though not by the law. Those were simpler times.
Now things are quite different and much more serious, so a much more serious inquiry is demanded of us. This escalation arrives not so much due to the externally obvious reasons like how profoundly parallel to religion Critical Social Justice and its practice have become literally washing black people s feet in the streets through tearful apologies against whiteness but more because of its rapid and seemingly unstoppable penetration into our public institutions, including government at every level and, more importantly, our public schools.
It is nearly always a question of considerable importance and some urgency when an ideology, especially when it comprises a totalizing worldview, decides that it is to be the fundamental basis for how we organize society and educate our children, to say nothing of other legal concerns. This, to be certain, is happening now with astonishing rapidity. The overwhelming majority of our schools systems teacher training over the summer of 2020, to prepare teachers for the new mostly-online educational demands for the coming fall term, have been heavily, if not exclusively, about issues pertinent to Critical Social Justice. Our government agencies at all levels are taking on the basic principles and tenets of this belief system as matters of both policy and recommendation.
With astonishing speed, a shocking number of our nation s school systems have taken up explicitly critical as in Critical Theory educational approaches that focus on teaching identity politics, anti-racism, and about the systems of power that the Critical Social Justice worldview assumes exists in everything.