In American Awakening, Georgetown political theory dean Joshua Mitchell unmasks identity politics for what it is: a toxic outgrowth of Protestant Christianity that threatens the American regime of liberty and self-government. The book builds on popular critiques of wokeness by placing the phenomenon in the grander scheme of our post-1989 experiment in secular hyper-liberalism.
While other writers have noted the religious fervor that underpins wokeness, few have gone beyond caricaturing it. For many religious-minded people, to speak of any similarities between identity politics and Christianity sounds like wild exaggeration. Yet Mitchell argues compellingly that the absence of God and forgiveness is the only substantive difference between the moral paradigm of wokeness and the Christian one that it seeks to replace. His argument reveals an entire alternative theology undergirding identity politics.
Both the Christian and woke worldviews build moral orders around the categories of innocence and transgression—but with vastly different effects. In Christianity, original sin stains all human beings as transgressors, so the path to redemption cannot lie within anyone who belongs to this world. The woke worldview amounts to a shortcut to the same salvific end; though Christians believe that Jesus Christ descended from heaven to achieve salvation for all in a world beyond this one, identity politics places the keys to the kingdom within human grasp, in the here and now—provided one belongs to the right group. By claiming the mantle of innocence that identity politics confers, oppressed minorities can extricate themselves from transgression altogether and demand justice and moral redress by means of exacting payment from the transgressors. And only by scapegoating themselves and others of their group can white, heterosexual men—the transgressors, in the identity politics schema—cleanse themselves of the stain of their own natures.
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