It is too early to tell, I think, whether the “wokeness” craze has already peaked and even begun to slip into decline, or whether it’s just pausing to gather energy for another surge. What seems clear for the moment, though, is that it has lost at least some of its initial momentum, probably because it moved too quickly and failed to consolidate its gains. Heady with the thrill of early victories, it tried to weave itself into the fabric of Western culture at the deepest levels. If the day comes that we look back and see that the tipping point has already been reached, I expect we will trace it to the insistence that “trans women are actually women” and the chemical and physical mutilation of children. We will see that these were the bridges too far.
That said, while wokeism may have slowed or peaked, it is still present, still influential, and still dangerous. What’s more, the youngest generation—the generation that is beginning to come of age and take its place in society—has never known anything else and so regards it as unremarkable, normal, and good. We are a long way from ridding ourselves of it once and for all.
In 2023, Neil Shenvi and Pat Sawyer teamed up to write Critical Dilemma, a book meant to trace the origins of this movement and the critical theory that lay behind it. That book rightly received critical acclaim and was even named among WORLD magazine’s books of the year. Shenvi and Sawyer have teamed up again in Post Woke: Asserting a Biblical Vision of Race, Gender, and Sexuality, a book that may seem to be repetitive, but is actually deliberately different from its predecessor. “This book,” they say, “is our attempt as evangelical Christians to explain what happened (and is still happening) to our culture and to equip people to push back against it by reasserting a biblical perspective of race, gender, and sexuality. We want to show people not only how wokeness gets these topics wrong, but how the Bible gets them right.”
They begin, as you’d expect, by showing how this woke movement swept across society. Determined not to treat the movement or the term “woke” pejoratively, they define it respectfully and accurately as “the contemporary cultural expression of ideas rooted in the decades-old philosophical and sociological framework of the critical tradition.” It is important that Christians have some familiarity with wokeism, for though the critical tradition was born and incubated in the academy, “Woke ideas are not pure, scholarly abstractions. They are being put into practice in our workplaces, in our schools, and in our churches. Therefore, it’s crucial for Christians to understand the ideology we’re confronting so that we can push back against it.”
Shenvi and Sawyer dedicate a chapter to showing how we got to the current cultural moment and focus on three manifestations of the critical tradition: race, gender, and sexuality. They briefly trace the roots of the tradition through intellectuals like Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, and Kimberlé Crenshaw. After providing a primer on logic and explaining a few of the logical fallacies common to the subject, they provide a broad critique of critical theory, addressing questions like “What is oppression?,” “What is justice?,” and the like.
The heart of the book is the trio of chapters that focus on the most common and most perilous manifestations of the critical tradition. Chapter 6 focuses on critical race theory, for the authors believe it, more than any other, opened the gates to wokeism. “If the ideas of critical theory are as toxic as we claim, how did they ever establish a foothold within evangelicalism?” Their answer is simple: race. They show why critical race theory is necessarily at odds with a Christian perspective of humanity and why a genuinely Christian perspective of race is actually far superior to CRT. Without denying the ugly history of racism in America or the continued existence of racism today, they show that CRT will not actually solve the presenting issues but actually exacerbate them.
They turn next to gender to show how feminism led the way in unmooring sex and gender, insisting that sex is intrinsic while gender is merely expressive. From feminism came concepts like “embodied knowledges” and “intersectionality,” which are now deeply associated with the critical tradition. They offer a series of critiques to feminist teaching and, once again, show how the Bible’s perspective on gender is far superior. A similar pattern persists into the chapter on sexuality and its examination and refutation of queer theory.
Now into the closing chapters, Shenvi and Sawyer provide guidance on discussing these issues in different contexts (e.g., family, school, and workplace) and then answer some of the “what now?” questions about influencing society and protecting the church. The book that begins by considering abstract academic philosophies closes with practical instruction, and rightly so.
Christians have become well-resourced when it comes to books on the rise, persistence, and response to wokeness, but Post Woke offers a number of unique strengths. Among them, it is written for a broad audience, it is updated to reflect the current realities, and it is practical, offering specific ways that Christians can respond to it in the home, the church, the office, and the classroom. In his blurb for the book, Kevin DeYoung says, “If someone asks me, ‘What is wokeness and what is wrong with it?’ this is the first book I’ll recommend,” and I echo that. It is just the resource most people will need as they try to understand what it means to be woke, how society became this way, how they should think about it, and what they can do about it. Not only that, but it is just the book they will need to understand why the Bible offers better answers to the biggest questions.
