Soundings

Wokeness and the Church

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The theme that the editors of the Methodist Message have assigned for this issue, “The Sphere of the Church“, provides an opportunity to discuss a phenomenon that is becoming more pervasive in evangelical churches in the United States, and which is just beginning to influence some churches in Singapore.

I am referring to the phenomenon of “wokeness”.

In 2015, at an Urbana missions conference, a young speaker by the name of Michelle Higgins shocked her audience when she gave a fiery speech in which she denounced the Church for committing “adultery” with “white supremacy”.

Speaking to the sixteen-thousand strong gathering, Higgins thundered:

Do you see that racism is the age-old idol in our closet that we can’t manage to tear down? Do you see it in our houses of worship, my brothers and sisters …? Do you see it? Tear it down and admit, with torn shirt, ash in our hair, on our hands and knees, ‘Oh, God, we have committed adultery with white supremacy’.1

To readers who are unfamiliar with the concept, wokeness generally means an awareness of or being awakened to social injustices against a particular group of people.

In his excellent book on the subject, Owen Strachan describes wokeness in this way:

Wokeness is first and foremost a mindset and a posture. The term itself means that one is ‘awake’ to the true nature of the world when so many are asleep. In the most specific terms, this means one sees the comprehensive inequity of our social order and strives to highlight the power structures in society that stem from racial privilege.2

At first blush, the concerns expressed by wokeism appear to echo those of the Christian faith. Shouldn’t Christians be concerned about racism and racial discrimination? Shouldn’t Christians be passionate about justice and social justice?

Perhaps that is why some Christians are attracted to wokeism and the social justice movement. They appear to speak the same language and share the same concerns of biblical Christianity.

There are, however, many reasons why Christians should not have any truck with wokeism. Space allows me to highlight only four.

Firstly, the real inspiration behind wokeism and social justice is not the Bible or the Christian worldview. Their sources can be traced to the grand ideas generated by social Marxism, the Frankfurt School, critical race theory (CRT) and intersectionality.3

These social theories and ideologies are atheistic to the core. They are hostile to the Judeo-Christian tradition. They seek to deconstruct and overturn established moral and social conventions, and erect a new social order based on a materialistic worldview.

Secondly, wokeism is a destructive movement. It seeks to dismantle existing social and political institutions such as civil authorities because they are regarded as the foci of evil and injustice.

This includes the family which, according to the scholars of the Frankfurt School such as philosopher Max Horkheimer4 and the psychologist Eric Fromm,5 perpetuates generational authoritarianism.

Thirdly, wokeism is guilty of and perpetuates the very sin it claims to address, namely, racism. This is seen acutely in its insistence that all “white” people everywhere are incorrigibly “racist”, and therefore the “oppressors”.

White people always foster “white supremacy”, even if they absolutely have no intention to do so. They just cannot help it.

The only solution is to recognise that one is irredeemably racist and take steps to enact antiracism. For “white” people, this means that they must make every effort to be “less white”.

As the influential Boston University professor and antiracist activist, Ibram Xolani Kendi, puts it: “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination.”6

This is an extremely dangerous idea. It suggests that the only solution to the problem of racial prejudice is racial prejudice, but of a different kind!

Fourthly, despite all their emphasis on justice and equity, wokeism and social justice in fact corrupts true justice and even promotes injustice. This is because wokeism is only concerned with distributive justice, that is, the re-apportioning of privilege to those whom the woke deem are without it.

According to wokeism, the fundamental duty of civil law is to enact social or distributive justice based on social and cultural considerations. Civil law is not about retributive justice, which has to do with applying justice proportionate to human actions by rendering to individuals what they deserve.

In this sense, social justice is inimical to true justice, which is focused on equal treatment of all people and the just punishment of lawbreakers. This has led Christian writers such as Jeffrey D Johnson to rightly conclude that “[s]ocial justice, by its very nature, is not just”.7

Wokeism is the new heresy that has captured the imagination of some Christians.

Those who are attracted to wokery would do well to take heed of the clear warning issued by Owen Strachan:

We must sit up and take notice: This is not God’s Gospel. This is a worse gospel, infinitely worse. This is man’s gospel; legalism is what comes out of the heart of man, not divine grace. This is in truth an anti-gospel. It is anathema. This unbiblical system will not save you. Following wokeness all the way through means that you will be in eternal peril, trapped in your works even as you trust them to make you more ‘antiracist’, striving for salvation but never attaining it … You will be trapped; in that hour, you will be what the Scripture says: taken captive.8


1 InterVarsity Christian Fellowship USA, “Michelle Higgins–Urbana 15”, YouTube, January 27, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVGDSkxxXco.

2 Owen Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement is Hijacking the Gospeland the Way to Stop It (Washington D.C.: Salem Books, 2021), 7-8.

3 For a more comprehensive discussion on critical social justice and wokeism, see Roland Chia, “What is Critical Social Justice? An Anatomy of an Ideology,’ Ethos Institute for Public Christianity, 1 August 2024, https://ethosinstitute.sg/what-is-critical-social-justice-an-anatomy-of-an-ideology/.

4 See Max Horkheimer, “Authority and the Family” in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. Matthew J O’Connell et al. (New York: Continuum, 2002), 47-128.

5 Rainer Funk, “Erich Fromm’s Concept of Social Character”, Social Thought & Research 21, no. 1/2 (1998): 215–29, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23250038.

6 Ibram Xolani Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (New York: One World, 2019), 19.

7 Jeffrey D. Johnson, What Every Christian Needs to Know about Social Justice (Conway: Free Grace Press, 2021), 54.

8 Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness, 87.

Dr Roland Chia is Chew Hock Hin Professor of Christian Doctrine at Trinity Theological College and Theological and Research Advisor at the Ethos Institute for Public Christianity.

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