What is the difference between being woke and being aware of social injustice?
By Connor Mortell
In the latest - as of this writing - Pints with Aquinas episode, Noelle Mering spoke about wokeness. In defining what it actually means to be woke Mering said it is the rejection of God, which leads to the acceptance of state authority, which leads to the authority of the devil. This is an enormously strong take, though it’s probably not wrong. Later, when Fradd asked how we can know what the difference is between being “woke” and trying to correct genuine injustice. In today’s world we all - at least I - tend to wince at any misuses of the word injustice because it has been so grossly misused that we forget its proper use. However, there are times when genuine injustice is done and should be genuinely corrected by us as Catholics. Peter Kreeft has explained this succinctly by listing two great injustices of the past and our great injustice of today:
America has faced three great enemies of liberty: communism, slavery, and abortion. Communism denied the right to property. Slavery denied the right to liberty. Abortion denies the right to life. The right to life is the most fundamental right of all, for if you are denied the right to life, you are denied all other rights as well
Obviously Kreeft is right that slavery and communism were genuine injustices that should have been challenged by Catholics. Today the most important battle we face is against the injustice that is abortion. So we have to ask ourselves how we really draw that line? Mering answered the question by stating that it is whether or not the person knows that the fight against the injustice is being used for something else.
While morally it may be true that the stop of injustice should not be relegated to the secondary goal, that still seems wanting. If all of us were told right now that we could outlaw abortion and the tradeoff would come with an increase in taxes disproportionately more than were needed to enforce the ban, every one of us should take that tradeoff in a heartbeat in order to end the worst injustice of our time. Equally true, if the push for “trans rights” lead to no increase in government overreach - or even a clear decrease in it - it would still be wrong to push for that movement. So we cannot just write it off that the ulterior motive makes it wrong.
The question is actually more simple than this, and while touched on later it is not exactly said. It is simply a matter of objective truth. Continuing with Mering’s definition that wokeness is a rejection of God for the authority of the devil, it tracks that wokeness would require some obfuscation of the objective truth. We see this in the gay rights movement attempting to redefine marriage and the trans rights movement attempting to redefine gender/sex and the abortion movement attempting to redefine life.
How can we know when one fight against injustice is in line with the objective truth? We can make this dividing line by turning to the Catechism paragraphs 1934-1938. The church teaches that man is created in the image of God and as such their equality of dignity must be respected. It continues to teach that there are some variants of inequalities are sinful inequalities and as such should be challenged. The Catechism gives the obvious example that there are socioeconomic differences and as such we are called to help the poor. To give charitably to the poor is obviously not “woke” and is obviously good. On the flip side, men are obviously not equal in their talents and to call for that equality of talents is completely in rejection of God. The differences between us “belong to God’s plan” and it is far more beautiful and in accordance with truth for us to recognize these differences and benefit from each others’ differences.
To fight for wokeness is to do one thing and one thing only, to fight against the truth. If we are to fight back we must do the obvious inverse of that, we must fight for the truth.