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Writer's pictureAndy McIlvain

Woke Culture is a 'New Religion' - Madness of Crowds - Inside Woke Culture by Brian Murray

Updated: Oct 7, 2022



Do you consider your self to be woke?

As diverse as people and culture are not everyone will fall into some neat definition of Woke.

Yet we can see certain characteristics.

What are you then if woke.

Woke is a term from the political culture/ political ads during the 1860 presidential election of Abraham Lincoln. The Republican Party helped start the movement to oppose the spread of slavery as described in the Wide Awakes movement of that time.

The Urban Dictionary defines it as: “being woke means being aware… knowing what’s going on in the community (related to racism and social injustice)”.

But woke is becoming a way people identify themselves.

In the book by Brian Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity, we see some of the problems created by wokeness.

Without traditional ways of identity: nationalism, religion, and political affiliation, people have created new identities based upon social issues. The problem is people have let it define one’s own character. Murray as an openly gay man but refuses to let it define his outlook or work. Murray describes this new ideology:

The interpretation of the world through the lens of ‘social justice’, ‘identity group politics’ and ‘intersectionalism’ is probably the most audacious and comprehensive since the end of the Cold War at creating a new ideology.

Murray in considering how we got to this stage declares that it derives from an absence of meaning from the loss of “grand narratives.” By this he means the loss of a conviction/belief that our great National experiment is no longer worth saving or maintaining.

As we have become an apostate and Godless society people are finding their idols in themselves or in ideologies.

"There is nothing new under the sun," says Ecclesiastes. Woke is nothing new just a revival of an old idea. In the past we had the "Enlightened," the "Cognoscenti," the "Philosophes," the "Brights," the "Gnostics" (the "knowing" elite), the "Illuminati," to name just a few.(to name a few).

Today we have the "woke" as the latest manifestation of a particular elitism of social issues. Movements and ideologies ultimately create thought-prisons, legalisms, and institutions posing as break-through movements.

Your identity is in Christ, be woke to his love and mercy!



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