Wake/Woke
Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash
I have pondered the two terms, “wake” and “woke.” Critiques of “wokeness”—both cynical and robust—have come to dominate some corners of the political discourse, though especially among those who wish to critique efforts focused on social justice and equity. For some, to be “woke” is to be concerned with performative acquiescence to certain left-leaning ideologies. In contrast, for the communities who first started using the term, “woke” is a call to awareness of the deadly injustices still pervading society and requisite action in response. In this maelstrom of political discourse and in these irreconcilable definitions of “woke,” the language of wokeness has too often become a cudgel that defines political enemies. We may need to revitalize what these terms signify among us through two resources: the Bible and a recent book, We Have Never Been Woke by Musa al-Gharbi.
Turning to the Bible, we find that the term “wake” is a persistent summons of gospel faith that voices the urgency of apocalyptic intrusion. It concerns vigilance for the abrupt arrival of God’s newness among us. Think for instance of Luke 9:32. At the “Mount of Transfiguration” we learn that Peter has the capacity to see “his glory” as he is accompanied by Moses and Elijah because he stays awake. (The parallel texts in Matthew and Mark do not utilize our term.) The term is employed by Luke exactly to indicate the decisive, inexplicable in-breaking of Jesus into the life of the world. The disruption defies ordinary perception.
Our term “wake” is utilized twice in the Pauline corpus. In Romans 13:11, Paul issues a summons to live differently because salvation is near:
Besides this, you know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers.
That different way of living consists in a life of obedient discipline:
Put on the Lord Jesus, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires (v. 14).
In the later text of Ephesians 5:14, the writer voices a parallelism that equates “sleep” with “being dead.” The church is summoned, alternatively, to a new life marked by glad singing and much joy:
Be filled with the Spirit, as you sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves, singing and making melody to the Lord in your hearts, giving thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ (vv. 18-20).
This is a life that is rendered back to God in glad, grateful obedience, a life quite in contrast to one of self-indulgence.
I am attentive to this accent on “wakefulness” in the New Testament because of my reading of We Have Never Been Woke by Musa al-Gharbi (2024), a book that invites a sharp contrast with any contemporary notion of being “woke.” Whereas “wakening” in the gospel is an alert response to the gift of new life in the gospel, “woke,” al-Gharbi contends, is actually a self-satisfied term used by and for those who claim for themselves special powers of discernment and privileged awareness of the reality of life that are not available to “lesser” persons. In this way, al-Gharbi points to a renewal of our thinking about what it means to be awake or woke. Drawing upon al-Gharbi’s work, I suggest the following as a way to order our thinking about claims made for and by those who are especially advantaged.
1. The “woke” are the elite who claim for themselves special status. Al-Gharbi considers especially the “symbolic capitalists”—doctors, lawyers, journalists, bureaucrats, nonprofit workers, tech workers—who function to manage and manipulate the symbols that sustain our society (65). Such a self-claimed notion of special entitlement is “the primary driver of rising inequality and stagnating social mobility in recent decades” (134).
Al-Gharbi concludes,
Wokeness does not seem to be associated with egalitarian behavior in any meaningful sense. Instead, “social justice” discourse seems to be mobilized by contemporary elites to legitimize and obscure inequalities, to signal and reinforce their elite status, or to tear down rivals—often at the expense of those who are genuinely vulnerable, marginalized, and disadvantaged (296).
The point cannot be overemphasized. Such wokeness does not lead to egalitarian conduct. To the contrary, it leads to self-congratulatory self-promotion and advantage.
2. It is easy enough for the “woke” elites to imagine that they are most particularly entitled to advantage, nothing more than they rightly deserve.
Symbolic capitalists grow much more aggressive in mobilizing social justice discourse to paint themselves as worthy of power and wealth—and to declare their adversaries and rivals as undeserving of the same. This is what Great Awokenings are fundamentally “about”: frustrated erstwhile elites condemning the social order that failed them and jockeying to secure the position they feel they “deserve.” (303). (See note 1)
3. It follows from such self-serving claims, that “others” who do not have such access and resources are in fact “undeserving.” Thus, for example, Jeff Bezos (Amazon) famously described his exploited workforce as a “march to mediocrity.”
His company willfully pushes manual laborers to the point of burnout and then casts them aside when they’re all used up…All of the exploitation just described is the cost of saving symbolic capitalists some trips to the store (or even to multiple websites)—and to spare us the indignity of waiting a reasonable amount of time to receive online orders. “Everything” is available on one site, the prices are low, and the shipping is fast and free because others are paying high costs to make this a reality. And we love Amazon for its willingness to exploit these others on our behalf. According to one striking study by the Baker Center at Georgetown University, Democrats (America’s “left-wing” party) place more “institutional confidence” in Amazon than in any other company or institution in American life. Faith in Amazon is higher than in colleges and universities, nonprofit institutions, the press, religious institutions, any branch (executive, legislative, judicial) of government at any level (local, state, federal), labor unions, the military, law enforcement—you name it (150).
Those persons who suffer pain or disadvantage in the process are viewed as quite dispensable instruments of production; capitalism assures that there is an ample supply. Thus the “using up of labor” is easily replaced by more labor that continues at a level of usage that is unsustainable. (See note 2)
The contest between “the awakened in the gospel” and the “woke” in society, as defined by al-Gharbi, is sharp and jarring. The awakened are about the arrival of God’s alternative rule of compassion, mercy, and restorative justice. They keep learning afresh about the in-breaking of God’s new rule that arrives, surprisingly, here and there as a cup of water, a welcome to a stranger, or a visit to a prisoner. The rhetoric we employ for such in-breaking is large and bombastic, but the lived reality is most often door-to-door, one at a time. Conversely, the status of so-called “woke” is one of entitlement and privilege so all-containing that the neighbor may not even be noticed as needy or entitled.
As I pondered this rather dramatic either/or, it struck me abruptly that the word pair of “awakened/ woke” is a contemporary replay of the old and abiding interface of love and knowledge. There have been, of course, endless attempts to cast the gospel as “secret knowledge” concerning the nature of God and the world. In the post-canonical literature of the New Testament, such pursuit of “knowledge” flourished. But the New Testament itself is a sustained insistence that it is love, not knowledge, that accords with the character of God’s rule. The defining text on the matter is 1 Corinthians 13, even though we have trivialized the text for purposes of emotive affection at weddings. In fact the chapter exhibits the apostle, in lyrical fashion, making a frontal challenge to and full-throated resistance against the gospel as knowledge. In the opening lines of the chapter, Paul three times uses the phrase, “… do not have love”:
If…but do not have love;
If…but do not have love;
If…but do not have love.
Life without agape-love is reckoned to be
a noisy gong, a clanging cymbal.
Paul continues,
I am nothing;
I gain nothing.
In this performed either/or Paul starts out with the astonishing truth that agape-love characterizes the nature of the world. We are endlessly silenced by the force of knowledge, and no doubt knowledge may well inform our thinking in decisive ways. But knowledge in itself has no saving capacity for, as we know, knowledge can be as readily put to destructive use as easily as constructive cause.
Thus we may ponder this ancient word pair:
Love: transformative power;
Knowledge: control.
When the matter is stated as clearly as that, it is easy enough to see where the life of the church is settled. This claim is not a bid for ignorance, but it is a recognition that the primary claim of the gospel is on self-giving love.
We may indeed reflect quite concretely on missional performance in the life of a congregation. It may well be that “knowledgeable” persons will eagerly participate in missional activity of a demanding kind. But such missional activity is characteristically moved by and led by those who are committed to the generative force of transformative love. That transformative love may variously take the form of food pantries, public housing, free medical service, or political advocacy. The story of the church is the narrative of ordinary people being caught up in the transformative power of love, with a readiness to extend the reach of that love to more and more zones of action, including the many instances in which the supposedly “undeserving” are on the receiving end of transformative generosity, forgiveness, and hospitality.
There is no doubt that the world is in part constituted by the practice of knowledge, all the way from learned scholarship and medical advances to management of the market. None of that knowledge, however, has any transformative capacity unless it is infused with the force of love that does not keep score, that does not bargain or calculate about gifts given, and that does not worry about the cost of self-giving sacrifice. Thus we may imagine that when the local congregation meets, it convenes every time to acknowledge, yet again, that it is funded by and hopes for the impact of God’s love in the world. Every meeting of the church is something of a confirmation that in a world of great knowledge, we are committed to self-giving love that may indeed violate our wisest reasoning.
One such direct encounter of knowledge and love is the narrative in John 3 concerning Nicodemus. Nicodemus is a learned Pharisee. Nicodemus has the grace to present himself to Jesus for instruction; he is nonetheless bamboozled and bewildered by the teaching of Jesus that invites him back to an elemental innocence. The status to which Jesus invites Nicodemus would require of him a readiness to forego the power and leverage of his great learning. But then, that is exactly how the gospel comes at us. We are required to give up the props we have acquired, to present ourselves in open-handed vulnerability for gifts that are essential to our lives that we cannot generate for ourselves. To be “awakened” is to be able to recognize that our best certitudes are displaced and negated by the order of God’s love in and for the world. That force of love requires that we relinquish the management of our lives and yield ourselves to the practices of neighborliness that make newness among us possible. By contrast, the so-called “woke” do not expect or desire newness but only a continual extraction of privilege and advantage. Being “awakened,” in contrast, leads us to the neighbor. Our life is thereby repositioned,
for the neighbor,
with the neighbor.
These so-called “woke” imagine their own autonomy. But we know better than that as we are continually on the receiving end of God’s unfathomable goodness.
Note 1:
Musa al-Gharbi identifies the self-serving justifications of privilege and advantage by claims of self-critical rationality:
While we might not “deserve” everything we have in some metaphysical sense, we nonetheless view ourselves as good stewards of the “privileges” we’ve been given. Indeed the very fact that we are self-critical is held up as proof of our essential goodness, fairness, and rationality. Again, cognitive sophistication renders symbolic capitalists especially good at producing these kinds of rationalizations to ourselves and others (304).
Note 2:
As al-Gharbi observes,
Symbolic capitalists generally demand amenities like beautiful parks, bike paths, diverse and high-quality restaurants, convenient and reliable transit options, and so forth. They gravitate toward cities with a vibrant cultural (art, music, nightlife) scene. And they aggressively purge anyone who isn’t “their kind of people.” (159).
It is required that those who must be “aggressively purged” are essential for the manual tasks of society, but must be kept invisible, out of public places, and inhabiting less desirable, more remote quarters.
