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I think there’s a fascinating throughline from older Christian moral enforcement to what the essay calls “wokeness.” Historically, a lot of Christian movements
by Leary 2y ago
I think there’s a fascinating throughline from older Christian moral enforcement to what the essay calls “wokeness.” Historically, a lot of Christian movements had the same impulse to legislate language and behaviors—just grounded in sin rather than privilege. For instance, the 19th-century American Puritans famously policed each other’s speech and actions because the stakes were framed as eternal salvation versus damnation. That social dynamic—where the “righteous” person gains status by exposing the lapses of others—feels remarkably similar to what we see now with “cancellations” on social media.
- xkcd-sucks 2y agofr Nathaniel Hawthorne is immensely relevant in the present day
- narag 2y agoChristians are so new. I wonder why Pharisees aren't mentioned more often when bringing in this topic. Actually, "pharisaical" is the dictionary definition for this kind of hypocrisy.
- freedomben 2y agoMy guess would be because most of the audience it's said to are much more familiar with Christianity than with 0000s Judaism. If the person hearing the comparison don't know anything about the operand then for them it becomes a meaningless comparison.
- aubanel 2y agoIf anyone's familiar with Christianism they will be also familiar with Pharisians, mentioned probably mentioned more frequently in the New Testament than the old (Jesus often recused their ways)
- cosmic_cheese 2y agoI was raised Christian and yes, the Pharisees were not just taught about, but a subject of focus. This makes the modern American strain of Christianity all the more puzzling to me, with how it in many ways shares more with the Pharisees than it does with the religion's namesake, but that’s a topic for a different post.
- o11c 2y agoEhh ... it's indisputable that in $CURRENTYEAR that there are a lot of people whose only experience with Christianity is "things people said on the Internet". If many random readers won't understand a reference to "Pharisee", and people trying to make a point stop using it as a result, then even fewer Internet-educated readers will get the reference.
- dang 2y agoProbably because this topic is American and it's the history of American Christianity that's being referenced.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ComposedPattern 2y agoAn optimistic explanation is that they don't want to be antisemitic. The present-day term for "Pharisee" is "Jew." The early rabbis who created Judaism as we know it were Pharisees, and theirs was the only first-century Jewish sect which survived until today. You can even see the alternation between "Pharisee" and "Jew" in The New Testament. For instance, in some verses it criticizes the Pharisees for washing their hands before eating, whereas in others it levies the same complaint against Jews generally: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%2011%3A38%2CMatthew%2015%3A2-3%2CMark%207%3A2-5%2CJohn%203%3A25&version=NRSVUE https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%2011%3A38%...
- CooCooCaCha 2y agoThe difference here is people are trying to address people’s actual life experiences instead of something they believe based on faith.
- ImHereToVote 2y agoOr so they believe
- rockskon 2y agoAll peoples' life experiences equally matter. Just some areas more equal than others. /s
- commandlinefan 2y agoI grew up in the 80's - I felt exactly the same about evangelicals then as I feel about the woke today.
- gooseyard 2y agoan interesting article on this topic: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2024/02/more-christian-than-the-christians/ https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2024/02/more-christian-th...
- thegrim33 2y ago[flagged]
- andrewflnr 2y agoNot exactly. The article doesn't try to draw a causative link between Christianity in particular to "wokeness".
- dang 2y ago"Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."" https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- grahamj 2y agoThe difference is religion’s justification is the words of a fictitious being whereas “wokeness” stems from principles of equality and tolerance. Surely some adherents of each use it to feel righeous/superior, but in only one case is it actually justified.
- svieira 2y agoWhere do these principles of equality and tolerance come from? Are they descriptions of a stochastic processes produced by one of an infinite series of marble machines, or do they have a deeper root in something that is true for all places and times (I'll even accept roots in something that is true (not just acceptable) for this time, for all people within this time)?
- FarmerPotato 2y agoI know what you're trying to say--But also, the (unintentional?) irony makes me chuckle: "Sure, my group sounds self-righteous, but our view is justifiably superior." Nobody wins a shouting match.
- grahamj 2y agoIt was somewhat tongue in cheek ;) but between real, human impacting principles and made up stories about fairies I'll take the former every time.
- prewett 2y agoThe book "American Nations", whose basic idea is that the US + Canada is composed of 12 cultural "nations", also observes that the Puritans were rather intolerant. The Puritan culture influenced what he calls "Yankeedom" (New England west to Minnesota) and the "Left Coast", which was settled by Yankee shipping. My impression is that these two areas are the most "woke"; it seems that Puritan intolerance casts a long shadow, even though those areas rejected orthodox Christianity a long time ago.
- dpe82 2y agoRight: it's worth noting the Puritans departed England in part because they were, basically, zealous pains in the butt who didn't get along well with contemporary English society.
- potato3732842 2y agoThe Pilgrims left. The Puritans got kicked out. It's hilarious the extent to which New England history is one of people showing up in Boston, looking around, realizing who was running the show and deciding that the frontier and the natives didn't sound all that bad.
- NeutralCrane 2y agoMy 2 cents is that this book was one of the worst excuses for historical analysis I've ever read (not that the author is even a historian; he's a journalist). It felt closer to astrology or a Buzzfeed quiz about what Harry Potter house you belong to than anything of actual value. It reminded me of a litany of corporate workshops I've experienced, where the author comes up with an interesting hook and then works backwards to support their conclusions. Great for selling a story to those looking for intellectually empty calories. Pretty much garbage otherwise.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 2y agoCan you recommend a better book on the same topic? Is it possible that this is just the nature of writing about regional cultures?
- int_19h 2y agoThe parallels between the "original sin" in Christian theology and "... privilege" in social justice discourse are pretty obvious. I also find it rather amusing that the social justice movement tends to be so US-centric - i.e. focusing on the issues that are specific to or manifest most strongly in US, and then projecting that focus outwards, sometimes to the point of cultural intrusiveness (like that whole "Latinx" thing which seems to be nearly universally reviled outside of US). At the same time many people sincerely believe that US is not just a bad country - I'm fine with this as a matter of subjective judgment, and share some of it even - but that it's particularly bad in a way that no other country is. It's almost as if someone took American exceptionalism and flipped the sign. Which kinda makes me wonder if that is really what's happening here.
- hombre_fatal 2y ago> that whole "Latinx" thing which seems to be nearly universally reviled outside of US Well, there are a few things to clear up: 1. Latino is an American word that's only useful in the US to summarize people south of the US in Latam. People in Latam don't use the word since that grouping isn't otherwise useful to them. 2. There definitely are Spanish speakers who do use the -x or -@ suffix like "tod@s" and "todxs". The mass confusion between these two facts is responsible for most of the discourse you'll read about latinx. Americans don't understand that #2 exists. "Woke" Mexicans, for example, do use the -x suffix. "Non-woke" Spanish speakers think the -x suffix is dumb in their own language. But they don't represent all Spanish speakers.
- zahlman 2y ago>"Non-woke" Spanish speakers think the -x suffix is dumb in their own language. But they don't represent all Spanish speakers. Active users of the suffix are a small minority: https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2024/09/12/how-well-known-is-latinx-among-u-s-hispanics-and-who-uses-it/ https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2024/09/12/ho...
- mbarria 2y agoThat article is on latinx specifically. As someone from and living in LatAm I can attest that use of todxs, tod@s, and even todes are not rare sights as replacements for "todas y todos". This is a distinct phenomenon from latinx.
- pea 2y agoTo quote mark fisher “…It is driven by a priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster’s desire to be one of the in-crowd.”
- aprilthird2021 2y agoEveryone does moral enforcement though. Even this blog post we are commenting about (which I really agree with) is an attempt at moral enforcement. He even prescribes that wholeness be treated like a religion and gives a whole list of scenarios where one should deny the request of a woke person (same as one would a religious person). To constantly keep up this equality among all ideologies requires rules and enforcement of those rules, aka moralizing
- rockskon 2y agoThe frequency and severity of enforcement are the distinguishing factors here.
- aprilthird2021 2y agoMaybe, but where's the proof that woke was more frequently and more severely enforced than other things?
- stainablesteel 2y agoi definitely believe in the relationship between modern wokeness and some older religious traditions of moral policing there seems to be a territorial overlap between the two