Fear of a Woke Planet

Exvangelicals are uniquely poised to help explain "wokeness" to the skeptical.

This is Clusterhuck, my newsletter about faith, culture and a flourishing future for all! I’m glad you’re here. I can only do this through the support of my readers, and I’m grateful for everyone I’ve got. If you’d like to join, just click here. You’ll be able to read this whole post and get a free seven-day trial, including access to all the archives. 

---

If you stuck around for Bethany Mandel’s mega-viral mid-air brain fart long enough to hear her actually try to define “wokeness,” you actually got a reasonably coherent definition. 

The Vanguard @vanguard_pod

LOL: Briahna Joy Gray BREAKS the brain of Rising guest Bethany Mandel by asking her to define "wokeness"

“It is the idea that we totally need to reimagine and reduce society to create hierarchies of oppression.” That kind of tracks, I guess. The Left can sometimes fall into a sort of oppression olympics, seeing all of society in ascending striations of power and privilege. It squares with one of Richard Rohr’s chief critiques of liberals: they can get to where they can’t look at any situation without wondering who has the most power. Exvangelicals and people who’ve gone through their own Deconstruction journeys probably know what I’m talking about here, which is why I think we’re in a good place to help correct some of the misunderstanding out there.

But first, unfortunately, we do need to talk about “wokeness” a little, and its function in the current discourse. Is Mandel correct in saying that it’s just shorthand for ranking levels of power and oppression? Well, there’s definitely value in having a functional knowledge of how power and oppression operate, especially as it relates to things like race, class, gender, sexuality and so on. Most Americans could stand to have more such knowledge. But, sure, to her point, if you do too much of this, your head can get a little stuck up your own ass. I recently came across a progressive film critic who couldn’t take The Fabelmans seriously because Spielberg failed to reckon with his whiteness. This is where Mandel’s definition of “wokeness” can look pretty sensible.

The problem with Mandel’s definition is that while it might broadly hold water, her actual uses of “woke” just doesn’t fit her own definition. In 2021, she criticized Victoria’s Secret as “woke” for hiring Megan Rapinoe as an underwear model. How, exactly, was VS seeing the world in hierarchies of oppression when they hired an extremely famous athlete as a spokesperson? Or how are young Wall Street bankers going “woke” for asking for better hours?