A ‘woke up’ call

RICHARD A. SOKERKA

The new social movements that exist in the U.S., such as “wokeness,” “identity politics,” “social justice,” “intersectionality,” or “successor ideology,” should be understood as “pseudo-religions, and even replacements and rivals to traditional Christian beliefs.”

That was the clarion call from Arch­bishop Jose Gomez of Los Angeles, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, in discussing the rise of new secular ideologies and movements for social change in the United States during a virtual address to the Congress of Catholics and Public Life.

He asserted that it is “Important for the Church to understand and engage these new movements, not on social or political terms, but as dangerous substitutes for true religion. Today’s critical theories and ideologies are profoundly atheistic,” Archbishop Gomez said. “They deny the soul, the spiritual, transcendent dimension of human nature; or they think that it is irrelevant to human happiness.”

The archbishop said that these movements “reduce what it means to be human to essentially physical qualities — the color of our skin, our sex, our notions of gender, our ethnic background, or our position in society. With the breakdown of the Judeo-Chris­tian worldview and the rise of secularism, political belief systems based on social justice or personal identity have come to fill the space that Christian belief and practice once occupied,” he said.

How dangerous are these social movements to the Church and society?

Archbishop Gomez compared today’s social movements to that of Marxism and noted that they resemble other heresies found in Church history. “Like the Gnostics, they reject creation and the body,” Gomez said. “They seem to believe that human beings can become whatever we decide to make of ourselves. These movements are also Pelagian, believing that redemption can be accomplished through our own human efforts, without God,” he said.

He also pointed out to the “shrinking space” that Christians, Church institutions, and Christian businesses are allowed to occupy with the social changes at work. “We recognize that often what is being canceled and corrected are perspectives rooted in Christian beliefs — about human life and the human person, about marriage, the family, and more.”

The “woke story,” he said, “draws its strength from the simplicity of its explanations — the world is divided into innocents and victims, allies and adversaries,” adding that “many of America’s leading corporations, universities, and even public schools are actively promoting and teaching this ‘vision.’ ”

These social movements are a “woke up call,” for the Church and our society as Arch­bishop Gomez rightly points out.

But, rather than be intimidated by them, the archbishop said the answer to them is, as always, the Gospel. “It remains the most powerful force for social change that the world has ever seen. The world does not need a new secular religion to replace Chris­tianity,” he said. “It needs you and me to be better witnesses to the Gospel message.”

For the sake of the Church and the future of our society as we know it, heed the words of Archbishop Gomez.