ght for the day: John McWhorter on Woke Religion // Steven Hayward

The Glenn Show is one podcast I don’t want to miss. It is hosted by Glenn Loury, a Brown University economist, and I try to avoid missing John McWhorter, a Columbia linguist. I have been slow to read McWhorter’s latest book Woke Racism, How a New Religion has Betrayed Black America. Here’s McWhorter’s argument that “wokery” is the new religion of left.

I don’t mean that these [woke] peoples’ ideology is “like” religion. I don’t want to make a sly comparison. It is a religion, I mean. An anthropologist would not see any difference in the type of Pentecostalism and this form of antiracism. Language is never precise, so we have historically restricted the religion word to certain ideologies based in creation myths, guided and guided by ancient texts, and requiring one to subscribe to certain beliefs beyond what empirical experience can provide. This is an accident. We call tomatoes fruits instead of vegetables. The religion could be used to refer to newer ways of thinking that do not require you to subscribe to unempirical beliefs. This extreme version of antiracism is one of them.

Third Wave Antiracism is a new religion. This is exactly what the Romans witnessed when Christianity was born. The only way to see the [woke] Elect not as merely “crazy”, is to understand that they are a religion. It is not to be apathetic about them, but to truly understand what they are.