Earlier (2001): America’s National Question Problem: Decaying Protestantism…
From my new Taki’s Magazine column:
In This House We Believe: The Protestant Roots of Wokeness
Steve Sailer
May 29, 2024In 2017 the pseudonymous blogger Spotted Toad appears to have coined the term “The Great Awokening” to denote the decade of identity politics mania that began about 2013.
His joke was of course a pun upon the various Great Awakening religious revivals that periodically swept Protestant America in the 1730s and the early 1800s (especially in upstate New York’s “burned-over district”), and the liberal Social Gospel movement of the late 19th century that inspired humanitarian reformers such as Jane Addams.
But Protestant history, which was long recognized as absolutely central to American history, is increasingly seen as boring, and thus all this is fading from consciousness.
Moreover, to the left, being aware of this fundamental U.S. narrative sounds bigoted. While to the right, the notion that the woke call is coming from inside the house is distressing. Thus, we see the obsession among callow rightists about declaring wokeness a foreign, un-American import by Marxists or Jews or Jewish Marxists or whatever.
Yet, a recent article in American Affairs by Sheluyang Peng called “More Christian than the Christians” makes a strong case for wokeness as an outgrowth of traditional Northern U.S. Protestant tendencies in an age of declining faith.
Read the whole thing there.
