Kaitlyn Finchler
Contributing writer
Religion can be celebrated or shunned, but new forms of religion can be deemed as “woke.” Whether or not certain beliefs follow a certain ideology is a deeply debated topic in society.
Musa al-Gharbi, sociologist and assistant professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University, will deliver his lecture, “We Have Never Been Secular,” at 2 p.m. today in the Hall of Philosophy for the Week Five Interfaith Lecture Series theme “The Spirit of Capitalism: Prosperity and the Enduring Legacy of the Protestant Work Ethic.”
“There’s been a lot of talk about how ‘wokeness’ is a new form of religion,” al-Gharbi said. “There are some ways in which that conversation goes awry and is often kind of bigoted against religion and religious belief.”
For example, al-Gharbi said the structure of the argument can portray religion as a form of extremism and irrationality, and if wokeness is a new religion, “therefore, wokeness is bad.”
“There is a deeper story that you could tell about the relationships between the kinds of beliefs and positions that people call woke,” he said. “Religious — and specifically Anglo-Saxon Protestant — belief systems explore how if you look at who subscribes to ‘woke beliefs,’ it tends to be people who work in professions like journalism, law, academia and so on.”
These professions were explicitly created as “synacures” for the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, al-Gharbi said. This was to advance the social gospel movement popular among white Anglo-Saxon Protestants at the time.
“I’m going to explore a little bit of that history, engaging a lot with the work of Max Weber and others to understand how you can have something that is created within a particular context and a particular subset of people who share one set of commitments,” al-Gharbi said.
For instance, al-Gharbi said Weber argued a lot of the modes of thinking about merit, hard work and “deservingness” were created by Puritans. Now, however, most people who subscribe to the same beliefs and practices are not Puritans.
“In fact, the influence of Puritans over society at-large has diminished even as the reach of these forms of thinking and practicing with respect to merit and hard work and so on have grown,” he said. “You can see a similar thing in the professions (mentioned earlier). They’re no longer explicitly religious. In fact, increasingly, they’re borderline anti-religious.”
There are myriad differences in how people who lean left or right politically, or who are considered invested stakeholders in certain issues, approach these topics, al-Gharbi said. One example is with trans-inclusive feminism.
“If you’re someone who rejects feminism, people on the left and right will agree that you’re not woke if you just hate feminism — you’re definitely not woke,” he said. But there is much less consensus, for example, “if you subscribe to a version of feminism that excludes trans women as women — J.K. Rowling for instance, she self-identifies as a feminist, but she subscribes to a version of feminism that excludes trans women as women.”
The study and coverage of religion is growing “increasingly marginal,” al-Gharbi said.
“This distance and ignorance on either side of the ledger is neither necessary nor inevitable,” he said. “By gaining a deeper set of insights into some of the basic foundations that people across these belief systems actually share can make things like pluralism more viable than it otherwise would be.”
The extent to which people are engaging in behaviors and political activities without being as socially aware as they could be, interferes with their ability to achieve their goals or understand what their goals are, al-Gharbi said.
“It’s important for people to have as complete (a) view as they can about what are some of the drives that these forms of political activity, and so on, are trying to fulfill,” al-Gharbi said.
When talking about issues at play in the culture wars, it’s important and valuable to take a “longer view,” he said.
“A lot of times these political and moral contestations are actually driven by really deep questions about who we are, what makes a good life, what do we owe each other and so on,” al-Gharbi said. “To the extent that people take those kinds of questions more seriously, they understand and more seriously recognize that these are some of the core questions that are driving these disputes.”
