THERE is a maxim “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” History has always fascinated me; the mistakes and successes of our ancestors reveal so much about human nature and often have echoes in our own lives and families.
Modern history is partly about spotting patterns without sliding into determinism. So, as an amateur historian, I have been very interested in observing what some people have described as the “woke Left”, and spotting what appear to be Puritan Echoes in their thinking and actions.
The myth of a single “woke Left” has become a way of simplifying a chaotic political world, and it can unfairly be used to dismiss a range of voices, from mild social democrats to radical anti-capitalists. For clarification, for the purposes of this article, it could be applied to those who are censorious, obsessed with identity categories, and driven by ideological purity. These echoes are striking to see in what is supposed to be a post-religious culture. There is a new elect who has moved from Salem to social media.
The Puritanism that arose in Tudor England would eventually make its way across the Atlantic to New England, and it has had a profound influence on American culture. Puritans did not only build churches: they also built the American mind.
When the term “woke” started to emerge in North America in the 1930s, it was a warning from a folk singer who had witnessed the injustices of the Scottsboro Case, when, in Alabama, nine Black teenagers had been imprisoned after being falsely accused of rape. Some languished on death row until years of retrials, appeals, and plea deals led to their release.
In a written introduction to his song about the case, Lead Belly said: “I advise everybody, be a little careful when they go along through there — best stay woke” — i.e. if you are Black in America, keep your wits about you.
Social media revived the term during protests against police brutality and systemic racism. Then the word evolved into broader (and often white political) contexts. Influenced by the intersectionality of sociologists, the word “woke” was stretched and applied to injustices on the grounds of gender, class, sexuality, and disability. “Progressives” would use it positively to mean socially aware. In this stretching of an idea, a new morally aware “elect” was forming, unconscious of their strong Puritan inheritance.
BACK in Tudor England, debates about sacraments, salvation, authority, and worship were consequential. Often, they would result in exile, or, even worse, execution. The theological ideas were tested in law, prayer books, and people’s lives. Henry VIII’s break with Rome was the result of a political crisis, and was not driven forward by one particular vision, such as Calvin’s or Luther’s.
As the Church of England emerged, it tried to balance continuity and reform in a unique way. The pendulum would swing towards continuity with Roman Catholicism or the Continental Reformation. The tide would change with whoever was in power. Both sides were capable of profound cruelty and intolerance.
When various theological refugees returned from Geneva after the death of Queen Mary, they brought with them the seeds of a Reformed theology: Knox in Edinburgh, Whittingham in Durham, Goodman, eventually, to Chester, and Gilby in Leicestershire. They were working on their Geneva Bible, and this network of similarly minded “reformers” soon became known as Puritans, because they desired to “purify” the newly established Church of England.
As Puritanism was exported with the Pilgrim Fathers across the Atlantic, centuries later, wokeism would make the return journey. Both movements arose from genuine moral insight: the conviction that the world had decayed in corruption, that institutions had grown complacent. Both movements gathered momentum, and their own leaders began to generate their own code of virtue. Alongside these codes, of course, came heretics, a zeal for confession, and expelling or cancelling.
The Puritans’ desire for godliness has been replaced by secular modern progressives with the language of social justice. The historian Tom Holland, following in that rich and self-conscious historical tradition of England, has pointed out, deftly, that many modern secular values — human rights, care for the oppressed, universal moral equality — are inherently Christian in origin, even if people no longer recognise them as such (Features, 27 September 2019).
Woke ideology, in his eyes, has become a secular mutation of Christianity, removing God. This lack of a transcendent or theological context, such as grace, forgiveness, or the idea of universal sin, creates a very harsh “shaming” culture in which there is no way back.
This can become dangerously destructive. The excesses of Puritanism led to Oliver Cromwell’s coercing many of the commissioners to sign the death warrant of King Charles I. Cromwell, forceful, impatient, and convinced of divine sanction, urged them to “go on with the work; it is the Lord’s doing”. The work was regicide. Many signed to avoid another civil war, and paid with their lives after the Restoration.
AS CHRISTIANITY has receded in our post-modern, pluralist culture, an online shaming culture has emerged and been turbocharged. Many lives are being ruined in the wake of it. Jon Ronson astutely explores this in his book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed (Pan Macmillan, 2015) (Comment, 1 April 2021), in which he tries to understand how 21st-century shame is now supercharged by algorithms, anonymity, and digital mobs and pile-ons.
What attracts me to Anglicanism is gentle compromise. The Puritans recoiled from what they perceived as the moral laxity and corruption of a Church that they saw as half-reformed. Today’s social activists, driven by rage on social media, respond to inequality and exclusion that older orders have ignored or justified. The City on a Hill has become a digital pulpit.
Moral passion has a subtle and gradual tendency to harden into orthodoxy, however. The surveillance of sin became a civic duty in the Puritan commonwealth; now, wokeism has created its own virtue tests, often around the scrutiny of language. The Democrats in the United States are risking a shrinking coalition of voters, as their purity tests push away moderates and independents. This results in echo chambers rather than the famous Anglican broad tent.
Moral passion should not be suppressed, but should be tempered by humility and proportion. We need both institutions and reformers; once they believe themselves to be infallible, they wither. The wiser Puritans eventually learned that grace, not fear, sustained community.
So, what would a similar insight look like in a secular world? Perhaps that justice requires forgiveness, and that progress demands the freedom to make mistakes. The German theologian Cardinal Walter Kasper has written eloquently about how mercy is the essence of the gospel and the key to Christian life. This is theology done on its knees. When zeal forgets mercy, it ceases to reform, and begins to replace one orthodoxy with another.
Tim Byron is a freelance writer and a candidate for ordination in the diocese of Peterborough.