How Wokeism Allowed the Religious Right to Return

And how to build the coalition to defeat them once again

This is the bad news: the religious authoritarians have returned in full force, and they are smarter and more cunning than ever. The evidence of their influence is all over the news: draconian abortion bans, anti-LGBT bills, and more. Looking back, religious authoritarianism last peaked around the mid-aughts (around 2004-06), and that time we successfully pushed back on their attempt to teach unscientific intelligent design theory in schools, and defeated their moral panic campaign around gay marriage, which provided a strong foundation for winning the reform later on. Looking back, the aughts were definitely an underrated example of resistance to authoritarianism, that ultimately also led to some social progress backed by widespread support. Now that the religious authoritarians are back, I think we need to revive the coalition that defeated them last time.

Of course, we also need to be aware of the different tactics that they are using this time around. One thing that is different about the religious right this time is that they are, at least when facing mainstream audiences, less open about their religious motivations. They often resort to arguments for the 'common good', or capitalize on the widespread frustration with wokeism, as their starting point. However, the religious motivations are still clearly being articulated, if you pay attention. For example, all the prominent postliberal intellectuals are deeply religious, and many have essentially argued for religious values to have a bigger influence on law and policy. On the more technical side, 'common good constitutionalism', and other similar legal philosophies based on 'natural law', are ultimately religious political ideologies too. What is happening is clear: religious authoritarians are out to make the West less liberal, and make it OK for the government to shove their religion down your throat. And they are doing it by attempting to gain power while not being fully upfront about their religious motivations.

The rise of woke thinking is actually helping the religious right hide their religiously driven motivations. This is because postmodern critical theory has no respect for the power of ideas and free will. Instead, they believe that everything is part of interconnecting systems of oppression, and that analyzing and deconstructing those systems are the only important thing to do. The woke won't seriously engage in a debate of ideas that is not connected to their theories of systemic oppression. This means that they won't take on the ideas of religious-driven authoritarianism seriously. Instead, abortion bans are to be explained by 'patriarchy', anti-LGBT bills are to be explained by 'heteronormativity', and the solution is to 'fight these systems' by deconstructing and dismantling everything. This ultimately results in distraction from the problem at hand: that reactionary religious zealots are attempting to shove their religion down our throats, and that only a serious attempt at defeating their bad ideas by rational debate will save our freedoms.

There are also other ways wokeism has allowed the religious right to return. Firstly, it was the force that was responsible for breaking up the aughts coalition against religious authoritarianism. The divisiveness of postmodern critical theory was what caused the split, with the controversy around 'atheism plus' a good example of this. (I am not an atheist so I am not familiar with the specifics of this, but the controversy was famous enough for me to know about it.) Secondly, its weakening of the classical liberal consensus has allowed the religious right to make the case for authoritarianism much more easily. Thirdly, its attempt to impose an agenda based on religion-like philosophical commitments on the rest of society has normalized the once outrageous idea of shoving religion down other people's throats. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, frustration towards wokeism is being used by the religious right to attract support, with quite a bit of success.

All this is why the new coalition against religious authoritarianism just cannot include the woke. Instead, we need to attempt to rebuild the coalition among those who will fight the religious right like it's 2004 again. I think we should try to deradicalize as many of the woke as possible, so that they come back down to reality, and become able to join our fight against the religious right. However, we also need to be realistic that this work can only be done to a certain extent, especially if we are talking about the short to medium term. Therefore, the more important work will be in making the non-woke see that the religious right is rapidly becoming a big problem, because they want to make the West less liberal and more theocratic, by participating in the culture wars while not being upfront about their motivations. Once more people realize this, we will be able to build a strong coalition to push back, just like we did two decades ago.