Friday's Required Reading: Why Wokeism is a Religion

Those on the atheist left have invented many of their own religious exercises over the years in an effort to try to fill their empty souls with meaning. The Global Church of Climate Change is a prime example, filled as it is with religious dogma and religious figures like de facto Pope Al Gore and Cardinal Greta Thunberg. It is a true religion in which anyone identified as a non-believer is to be shunned, cancelled and have their lives ruined by the mob.

COVID masking and vaccination has now also advanced into a leftist religious exercise. The Pope of the Church of COVID is of course Anthony Fauci, the wearing of masks in public and even at home the main visual symbol of the religion’s faithful, the bragging about being fully-vaxxed and support for the denial of medical services for “anti-vaxxers” examples of the religion’s dogma that is repeated mindlessly across Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and Tik-Tok, the social media platforms that serve as the religion’s substitute sanctuaries.

Michael Shellenberger, writing at Substack, published a terrific expose’ of another of the left’s true religions on Thursday, that of Wokeism. Like the Churches of Climate Change and COVID, the Church of Wokeism exhibits all of the elements of a true religion, a clear exercise in cultish behavior that is now followed by millions in our society.

Michael put in a ton of work on this story, and it deserves to be distributed as broadly as possible.

Michael Shellenberger @ShellenbergerMD

When does a political ideology become a religion? When it comes to rely upon easily debunked myths and supernatural beliefs. Here's why Wokeism is a Religion

michaelshellenberger.substack.comWhy Wokeism Is A ReligionIntroducing the Taxonomy of Woke Religion

Michael Shellenberger @ShellenbergerMD

Special bonus: Woke Religion: A Taxonomy Co-authored with @peterboghossian

Here’s an excerpt from that story at Shellenberger’s Substack blog:

Why does there exist such a massive divide between perception and reality on so many important issues?

Part of the reason appears to stem from the rise of social media and corresponding changes to news media over the last decade. Social media fuels rising and unwarranted certainty, dogmatism, and intolerance of viewpoint diversity and disconfirmatory information. Social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram reward users for sharing information popular with peers, particularly extreme views, and punish users for expressing unpopular, more moderate, and less emotional opinions. This cycle is self-reinforcing. Audiences seek out views that reinforce their own. Experts seek conclusions, and journalists write stories, which affirm the predispositions of their audiences. It may be for these reasons that much of the news media have failed to inform their audiences that there are no racial differences in police killings, that emissions are declining, and that claims of rising trans killings are unscientific.

Another reason may be due to the influence of well-funded advocacy organizations to shape public perceptions, particularly in combination with social media. Organizations including the American Civil Liberties Union, Human Rights Campaign, and Drug Policy Alliance have misled journalists, policymakers, and the public, about police killings, drug policy, and trans killings, often by simply leaving out crucial contextual information. The same has been true for climate activists, including those operating as experts and journalists, who withhold information about declining deaths from natural disasters, the cost of disasters relative to GDP growth, and declining U.S. emissions. 

But neither of these explanations fully captures the religious quality of so much of the progressive discourse on issues relating to race, climate, trans, crime, drugs, homelessness, and the related issue of mental illness. A growing number of liberal, heterodoxical, and conservative thinkers alike use the word “woke” to describe the religiosity of so many progressive causes today. In his new book, Woke Racism, Columbia University linguist John McWhorter argues that Wokeism should, literally, be considered a religion.

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