America has been a land of religious awakenings. The First Great Awakening happened in the 1730s and 1740s; the Second Great Awakening occurred between the 1790s and 1820s. Protestant revivals and the formation of new Evangelical groups marked Christianity in the US as fervent and dynamic in a way that it had ceased to be in the Old World. Two new books both take the title of “American Awakening”, one as an exhortation, the other as an ironic description of the current process of politics and society.
Joshua Mitchell’s book regards identity politics as the awakening. “Americans have not lost their religion. Americans have relocated their religion to the realm of politics.” This is not in itself a new observation. Others have noted that identity politics, or wokeness more generally, makes faith claims upon its devotees. Mitchell frames it as a narrative of sinners and saved, or white heterosexual males as the transgressors and other groups as the innocent. Under his analysis, identity politics is a religion without God, and without forgiveness. As he describes it:
“Identity politics comprehends this invisible economy in terms of a relationship between transgression and innocence, between purportedly monovalent groups—white, heterosexual men, on the one hand; and blacks, women, persons who identify as LGBTQ, and persons who identify with still other identity groups, on the other.”
The predictable outcome of the societal “scapegoating” of white men is that some of them “eventually wonder if they, too, have been victims, and begin cataloging their own wounds.” Hence the emergence of the “men’s rights” movement, often animated by discussions online denouncing all their suffering as the fault of women and minorities.
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