Writing about “Woke” has at least two pitfalls. One is that any criticism of its excesses provokes accusations of racism, xenophobia, transphobia, misogyny, or white supremacy. The other problem is the word itself, which has been a term of abuse employed by the far right, a battle cry for the progressive left, and an embarrassment to many liberals.

No one can agree on what woke is supposed to mean. The right has blamed it for everything from the spike in school shootings to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, while many who are described as woke on the left see themselves as fighting a long-overdue battle for social and racial justice. These disagreements are not just political. In fact, they sometimes seem to be antipolitical. Arguments over wokeness are often tests, as the word indicates, of moral and spiritual enlightenment.

This is why John McWhorter, the author of Woke Racism, decided to drop woke as a descriptor of antiracism evangelists and instead call them “the Elect.” This has the right religious and class connotations. The Elect, he writes, are people who “see themselves as having been chosen . . . as understanding something most do not.” Like pre-modern Christians, the Elect must either convert or punish those who have not seen the light.

The religious roots of wokeness are rather specific, however. What McWhorter calls “religion” is really a quasi-religious offshoot of Protestantism, which is what prompted the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat to write of the “Great Awokening,”alluding to the waves of evangelical fervor that swept the American heartland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Douthat and McWhorter have both drawn on the work of the Catholic commentator Joseph Bottum, who argued in his 2014 book An Anxious Age that the moral fervor of contemporary progressivism should be understood as a secularized inheritance of the Protestant Social Gospel. (Bottum also prefers the term “elect”—in his case, as an improvement on “elite.”)

Understanding wokeness as an essentially Protestant phenomenon helps us to recognize the logic behind some of the rituals that have become customary in recent years: specifically, the public apology. One element that distinguishes the Protestant tradition from the other Abrahamic religions is its emphasis on public avowal. 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.

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