What should Christians think about being ‘woke’?

Question 60045.

Woke ideology is a term that generates more heat than light, partly because almost nobody who is called woke uses the word about themselves, and partly because it has become a general purpose insult for anything the speaker dislikes. So let me define what I mean before I go a step further, because an argument with a caricature is a waste of everybody’s afternoon.

By woke ideology I mean a specific framework: the belief that society is best understood as a set of power relations between oppressor and oppressed groups, that ordinary appearances conceal these relations, and that the primary moral task is to become awake to them and to dismantle them. That is a definable position with definable claims, and it can be assessed rather than simply booed.

What woke ideology involves

The framework has several moving parts. It treats group identity as the fundamental unit of analysis rather than the individual. It regards the perspective of the disadvantaged as epistemically privileged, so that lived experience functions as evidence in a way that argument does not. And it holds that neutrality is impossible, so that institutions, language and even mathematics can be complicit in maintaining an unjust order.

The word itself came out of African American English, where staying woke meant staying alert to genuine and often lethal danger. That original usage deserves respect. What happened afterwards is that a term for vigilance became the badge of a theory, and the theory carries commitments that the original phrase never did.

The tone of woke ideology matters as much as its content. It tends towards urgency, suspicion and moral pressure, and it has a low tolerance for the slow work of persuasion. Anybody who has watched a public disagreement escalate within hours from a difference of opinion to a demand for a resignation has seen the mechanism operating.

Common ground with Scripture

I want to grant the genuine overlaps, because Christians who deny them look either ignorant or heartless. The Bible does teach that God takes the side of the wronged. It does teach that the powerful are prone to self deception. It does insist that justice must be impartial rather than purchasable, and it does reserve some of its fiercest language for those who use position to crush people who cannot fight back.

Read the prophets and you find sustained attacks on rigged courts, dishonest traders and rulers who feed themselves off the flock. Read Proverbs 31:8 and 9 and you are commanded to open your mouth for the mute and to defend the rights of the poor and needy. A Christian who is indifferent to injustice has a problem with his Bible, not with woke ideology.

Scripture also knows that structures can be sinful. Isaiah pronounces woe on those who decree iniquitous decrees, which is a judgement on legislation rather than on individual bad behaviour. So the claim that injustice can be baked into a system is not a foreign import. It is in the text.

Where woke ideology departs from Scripture

The first departure is anthropological. Woke ideology assigns moral standing by group location, so guilt and innocence attach to categories rather than to persons and their actions. Scripture will not do this. Ezekiel says plainly that the soul who sins shall die, that the son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, and you can read that at Ezekiel 18:20.

The second departure concerns impartiality. Leviticus commands that you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great, which cuts against both the old snobbery and the new one. Justice in Scripture is blind by design, and any framework that requires the scales to be weighted before the hearing has abandoned the biblical definition of the thing it claims to want.

The third is the absence of grace. Woke ideology can identify sin with some skill and has no mechanism whatever for forgiving it. There is no cross in the system, so there is no absolution, only ongoing accounting. That is why its public rituals feel like confession without a priest and repentance without a pardon.

The gospel as the better framework

Christianity offers something the framework cannot match, which is a diagnosis deep enough to explain the evidence. Why do systems keep going wrong? Because they are built by people whose hearts are wrong, and no rearrangement of the furniture cures that. Every revolution in history has discovered that the oppressed, once in power, are quite capable of oppression.

It also offers a settled identity. Under woke ideology your standing is determined by where you sit on a series of axes, and it can be revised by others without your consent. Under the gospel your standing is determined by a verdict passed at the cross, and nobody can revise it at all. That is not a small pastoral difference; it is the difference between anxiety and rest.

And it offers actual reconciliation. Paul says the dividing wall of hostility has been broken down and that the two have been made one new man. Not a truce, not a permanent negotiation between blocs, but one body. I have written more on the specifics in what the Bible says about racism and in how we handle woke interpretations of Scripture.

The danger of the anti woke reaction

Let me turn the fire around, because there is a real danger on the other side and I have watched good churches fall into it. It is entirely possible to build an identity out of opposing woke ideology, and the result is just as worldly as the thing it opposes. The tone becomes sneering, the reflex becomes contrarian, and every mention of injustice is treated as infiltration.

Congregations that go this way tend to lose the poor first, then the young, then anybody who has actually suffered discrimination and would like it acknowledged. They also start importing their theology from political commentary rather than from Scripture, which is precisely the error they accuse the other side of making.

The test is simple enough. If your response to a brother describing a painful experience is to reach for a political category rather than for a listening ear, the framework you are using is not the Bible either.

Talking about it without falling out

Practical advice, then, for conversations in the church car park. Ask what the person means before you respond, because half the disagreements on this subject are two people using one word for two different things. Distinguish the observation from the framework, since you can agree that a wrong occurred without accepting the whole apparatus of woke ideology to explain it.

Keep the categories of Scripture primary. Sin, repentance, forgiveness, restitution, reconciliation. Those words can carry everything true that needs carrying, and they come with a remedy attached. The notes on Philemon show what reconciliation across a genuine power gap looks like when the gospel is doing the work.

And be willing to be wrong about details. A Christian can hold firm on the framework question while cheerfully admitting that he had not understood how something felt from the other side of it.

Two questions worth asking of any framework

When any system of thought presents itself to the church, whether it is woke ideology or something older, two questions sort it quickly. The first is what it says the human problem is. The second is what it offers as the remedy. If the diagnosis stops short of the heart, the remedy will always be a rearrangement rather than a rescue, and the results will disappoint even its warmest advocates.

Apply that to our subject. Woke ideology says the problem is unjust power arrangements, which is partly true, and offers as its remedy the redistribution of that power, which has been tried repeatedly and has never yet produced the promised result. Scripture says the problem is a rebellion in every human heart, including the hearts of the oppressed, and offers as its remedy a new heart given by God through the finished work of Jesus.

That is not a counsel of passivity. A new heart produces a changed life, and changed lives change streets and workplaces and eventually laws. The order of operations is the argument, not the goal.

So, now what?

Do not let the culture set your agenda in either direction. If you find that your convictions about justice track your political tribe exactly, with no awkward remainder, it is worth asking whether Scripture is actually forming you or simply being cited by you. The Bible has never yet fitted neatly into anybody’s manifesto.

Then go and do the local, unglamorous thing. Know your neighbours. Deal fairly. Speak up when somebody is being treated badly in front of you, whatever the politics of it. Woke ideology grew in part because the church looked indifferent, and no amount of critique will answer that impression as effectively as a congregation that visibly loves the people the world overlooks. Who is that, in your street?

He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?

Micah 6:8, ESV