No one can agree on what woke is supposed to mean.
This is why John McWhorter decided to call antiracism evangelists ‘the Elect’. The Elect, he writes, are people who ‘see themselves as having been chosen … as understanding something most do not’.
Understanding wokeness as an essentially Protestant phenomenon helps us to recognise the logic behind some of the rituals that have become customary in recent years: specifically, the public apology. Catholics confess to priests in private and are absolved of their sins, until it is time to confess once more. Many Protestants are encouraged to affirm their virtue by making public confessions of faith.
It has become an all too familiar story: a man, or sometimes a woman, expresses an opinion or uses a word that is considered tone-deaf or offensive; he or she apologises in public, and offers to do some kind of penance.
The ritual of public avowals began in Europe with the Reformation. Whereas Jews and Catholics are ceremonially initiated into their religious communities as young children, many Protestants, such as the Anabaptists, declare their faith before their brethren as adults, sometimes in so-called conversion narratives.
Think of Elmer Gantry, the evangelical huckster in Sinclair Lewis’s eponymous novel. Gantry is a serial sinner and a serial confessor. Near the end of the book he begs forgiveness yet again for his many sins in order to be allowed back into the fold of the true believers, before promptly ogling the ‘charming ankles’ of a young woman in the choir.
Every Sunday televangelists invite people to come forth with their arms aloft and confess their sins to millions of viewers before they deposit a financial contribution. The same thing could be witnessed, in decades past, on more secular television programmes like The Oprah Winfrey Show, where talk show luminaries act as confessors to erring movie stars.
The spirit of hard work
In his famous book The Protestant (...)
