It is now difficult to escape wokism. The term has imposed itself, at least in the French-speaking world of Quebec, for nearly two years. Thus, if The Press, The Journal of Montreal and The duty make no mention of it between 2017 and 2019, these three media have accumulated more than 400 texts where the term appears between 2020 and today. When reading the many works and forums devoted to wokism, one element emerges almost systematically: the comparison with religion. For example, in the columns of Montreal JournalRichard Martineau pointed out on July 10 that the wokes “are religious extremists, blinded by their faith”.
This comparison with religion does not come out of nowhere. We find it first of all among American intellectuals who make wokism a sort of substitute religion for a whole section of American youth. Having detached herself from traditional religious affiliations and nature abhors a vacuum, she would have turned to these immanent beliefs of a political nature. But the comparison between religion and political ideologies is older: it was in particular the French philosopher and sociologist Raymond Aron who, in 1941, proposed the expression “secular religion”. And, it was in 1955, in The opium of the intellectuals (a nod to Marx’s “opium of the people”) that he developed the analogy between religion and the communist system.
This omnipresence of religious vocabulary to deal with wokism deserves to be discussed, and one can even wonder if the comparison is able to help us to grasp the phenomenon. The French sociologist Nathalie Heinich devoted an enlightening text a few years ago in which she pointed out the tendencies of observers of contemporary societies to draw systematic comparisons with religion. As she wrote then: everything “tends to become ‘religious’, by an aspiration effect which draws towards ‘religion’ all that, closely or remotely, resembles it, without the relevance ever being discussed. of such assimilation.
It is this relevance that must be questioned in the case of wokism. The “aspiration effect” mentioned by Heinich has the effect that the observer is no longer able to decipher the phenomenon in itself, placing on it an already known interpretative framework. A kind of fallacious syllogism is thus established: “we know religion; wokism is a religion; so we know wokism”.
It therefore appears that the comparison with religion is the symptom of a kind of intellectual laziness which exempts the observer from any fine empirical approach. Moreover, it fulfills a rhetorical function where the comparison with religion does not so much have the function of informing as of denouncing and condemning. The great historian Paul Veyne had proposed, in How we write history distinguish between two types of comparison: compare with (bring out similarities and differences between two classes of phenomena) and compare with (equate one thing to another based on common elements).
This second form of comparison leads to the transfer of qualities between two classes of phenomena that are nevertheless different. Thus, we lend to Wokism a form of intransigence, irrationality or even fanaticism, qualities that we will readily associate with religion. Moreover, the analogy has the effect of creating a kind of unity to what is, at best, a movement. In the same way that a religion has a vision, Wokism would have a planned program.
But what religion is it? Mainly Christianity in its Protestant declension. Thus, in the United States, several authors maintain that the fundamentally religious character of wokism is intimately linked to the role of Protestantism – especially in its puritanical form – in American society. If this is the case, it is difficult to see how authors do not hesitate to propose an identical reading in national contexts where the relationship to religion is very far from the American reality.
Finally, the analogy with (Christian) religion has the effect of limiting the analysis of the phenomenon to a superficial search, within wokism, of allegedly structuring elements in religion. In a soberly titled essay wokism, the French essayist Anne Toulouse declines the elements of the woke “creed”. For example: “The woke follows a doctrine where there is no space between good and evil […]. They need demons. In this regard, Donald Trump complacently fulfilled the role of the Beast of the Apocalypse. »
In addition to the fact that this excerpt testifies to a summary and selective knowledge of Christianity, it perfectly illustrates how analogy leads one to look in the observed phenomenon only for elements that will come to confirm the initial hypothesis, which ends up being presented as a indisputable fact. While the initial function of analogy is to show, in the present case, it only awkwardly camouflages an absence of rigorous analysis, based on an empirical approach.