Moralism strikes back
What ‘woke religion’ reveals about secular morality (Part 3 of 3)
I finished Part 2 of this essay by noting that contemporary secular culture is uncomfortable with any idea of moral judgement that transcends the feelings of those directly affected.
The idea of an objective moral law is common to virtually all human cultures. (See In praise of our moral inheritance.) The Judeo-Christian tradition extends this universal idea to insist that transgressing that law incurs a personal debt with God. ‘Against you and you only have I sinned,’ prayed King David (Psalm 51), after having Uriah killed so he could take his wife. That ‘you only’ is not meant to diminish the obvious harm to others, but to emphasise the objectivity of sin. It’s possible to offend one person in a way that should be a matter of indifference to anyone else; sin is not like that. Apparently, God takes offence.
Contemporary secular culture does not know what to do with this idea. Let alone with Christianity’s unique contribution: the claim that Jesus paid that debt on our behalf. How can guilt or punishment be transferable? Intuitively, it makes little sense, at least in a post-Christian culture – or, rather, a post-Judeo-Christian culture, since it is the sacrificial system of the Hebrew Bible that establishes this way of thinking. And yet it remains intrinsic to the idea of Christian forgiveness. Christians are supposed to forgive others who wrong them, because God has forgiven their own sins. They are honour bound, because their own debt has been ‘paid on the cross’.
There are other ways to understand forgiveness, of course. Leaving God out of it, we can refuse the ‘debt’ analogy altogether. We can shrug off the harms inflicted on us by others. We can say, ‘It’s OK. It doesn’t matter.’ Well, we can say it, but can we mean it? It sure as Hell is not what Jesus meant (pun intended). That would be to deny the reality of moral harm and thus of morality itself. Morality would become no more than a game we play, one that ultimately does not matter. How many of us are really prepared to accept that?
Alternatively, we can simply ‘forgive the debt’ in the way we might write off a bad loan. We can accept that we’ve been harmed, but choose to absorb the cost ourselves rather than expecting the wrongdoer to accept responsibility. And, in fact, Christians end up doing that anyway, just like anyone else who eschews or is denied payback; forgiveness is never easy. So what difference does the cross make?
Tim Keller again: ‘Forgiveness means bearing the cost instead of making the wrongdoer do it, so you can reach out in love to seek your enemy’s renewal and change.’ So, Christianity eases the burden by demanding more rather than less from Christians – an apparent paradox that might also make a kind of psychological sense – on the basis that Jesus has done infinitely more still by dying on the cross.
So, this is the good news for poor sinners. Not only their own sins, but all those miseries inflicted on them by others, will finally be taken away – not in this unjust world but in the kingdom of heaven where it matters – leaving them free to love their enemies here and now. The fact that most modern people struggle to believe this – or even dismiss it as ‘pie in the sky when you die’ – does not diminish its centrality to our inheritance. Consciously or not, this is how modern civilisation squares the circle of forgiving wrongs while upholding justice.
A disintegrating fudge
Moreover, this moral calculus has never been entirely secularised. Christian assumptions linger unacknowledged in the way we talk about forgiveness and justice alike. Whether we prefer to talk about forgiveness and downplay justice as in therapy culture or vice versa as in woke, we can never quite disentangle the two. It’s not hard to imagine a post-Christian parallel universe in which justice is exalted and youthful advocates of therapeutic forgiveness are dismissed as being, ‘like Christians, but at least Christians believed in right and wrong’.
Indeed, some critiques of woke risk veering into a kind of woolly non-judgementalism, or ‘What was so bad about Boomer liberalism, anyway?’ It’s not a stupid question, though. As I suggested in Part 1, few ideas that gain a substantial following are entirely without merit. In this case, the Boomers bequeathed us a more-or-less robust belief in free speech combined with an implicit faith in the basic reasonableness of human beings and a resulting optimism about the future. Their moment certainly had its moments.
It is hardly a mystery, though, that the reigning ideology of the past sixty years should fail to fire the moral imaginations of the young. A worldview promising ever-expanding freedom premised on ever-expanding wealth could hardly survive unscathed when its economic model faltered, leaving various kinds of inequality looking more endemic than residual. The idea that ‘the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice’ began to look like a less than successful attempt to secularise Christian providence.
President Obama symbolised the last hurrah of the liberal Boomers; frustration and disillusion with his presidency fuelled the rise of what would become the woke movement, before his successor sent it nuclear. Having lost faith in the idea of steady progress, ‘social justice warriors’ did begin to resemble religious zealots in their determination to ‘call out’ injustice and demand a reckoning. Lacking (or rejecting) any inherited means of overcoming oppression, the movement is far more moralistic than political.
Crucially, though, the closest it comes to appealing to an objective morality is its insistence on the division between oppressors and oppressed. And, notoriously, these categories are often mapped directly onto race – white oppressors, non-white oppressed – with only cursory reference to any properly moral or political framework for understanding them. Typically these involve historic wrongs and present discrepancies, but the moral conclusions are taken for granted, not open to debate.
Moreover, woke has inherited the secular liberal idea that forgiveness – or the conspicuous lack of it – is very much the prerogative of the victim. In fact, the logic of identity politics means any individual or subgroup inclined to forgive is considered to be letting the side down. To identify as oppressed is to claim moral superiority over the oppressor. Such a valuable status is not to be compromised.
This is one of the many ways in which woke differs from Marxism, or anything like it. The point of Marxism is not to exult in oppression and exploitation, but to overcome them. If neither forgiveness nor revenge are major features of Marxist thought, it’s because Marxism is more concerned with abolishing injustice than reckoning with it. And it is because, historically, Marxists believed both that this was possible and that they had the means to achieve it through working class revolution, that they could dismiss ‘moralism’ as a bourgeois substitute for actual justice.
Abolishing morality, or fulfilling it?
Marx’s famous suggestion that religion is ‘the opium of the people’ is preceded by the less famous but much more interesting claim that, ‘Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.’ Heart and soul are not dismissed as somehow unreal or unimportant; religion is ‘opium’ not primarily in the sense of something that stupefies, but in the sense of a palliative for real suffering: ‘To call on [people] to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.’
Whatever your views of Marx’s thought, it’s a matter of historical record that those regimes established in his name failed miserably to transform the human condition for the better. Notoriously, millions in the atheistic Soviet Union turned to vodka as their opium. The West’s own current opioid crisis is a reminder that, for all its advances since Marx’s time, capitalism is also far from abolishing the kind of desperation that leads to self-destruction. On virtually every measure, it remains preferable to the apparent alternative, but liberal capitalism still needs to import its heart and soul from outside the cash nexus.
Woke is best understood as a response both to the shortcomings of liberal capitalism and to the failure of Marxism. To the extent that its adherents claim allegiance to a kind of Marxism (like the bizarrely self-identified ‘trained Marxists’ of Black Lives Matter), it is one that owes more to the spectres of anti-communism than the Marxist tradition itself. There are none of Marx’s hymns to the achievements of capitalism. Anti-capitalism and anti-colonialism join anti-whiteness and anti-cis rhetoric in a comprehensive indictment of the past and all its works.
It was the Cold War that cast Marxism as an existential threat to Western civilisation. It would never have become a mass movement anywhere in the world if its proponents had seen it that way. Christ told his own detractors, ‘Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets. I have come not to abolish them but to fulfil them’ (Matthew 5). The Marxism of Marx and his followers was an attempt – a vain, delusional attempt if you insist – to fulfil Western civilisation, not to abolish it. Crucially, that includes Christian morality, if not in its strictures then in its taken-for-granted squaring of the circle between justice and forgiveness. A just society cannot be a vindictive one.
The unforgivingness of woke, its black and white moralism and lack of openness to nuance and debate, are all testament to what’s missing from the heart of the societies that produced it. Lacking faith either in the possibility of genuine political change or in a transcendent idea of justice that makes a degree of injustice bearable – both or either of which provide grounds for debate and compromise in the moment – political life has become fraught and brittle. Woke is a symptom, not the cause.