As McWhorter points out, you don’t have to work very hard to see the underlying religious elements of AA or other 12-step groups. All that’s missing is a call for white people to turn over their privilege to a higher power.
Ultimately, he concludes that the real problem with wokeism isn’t that it’s a religion but that it’s a bad one that focuses on an appearance of social justice purity at the expense of any good works.
An alternate-universe version of The Elect would be forging, even with a certain smug impatience with real questions, real change on the ground for real people who need help. That religion would be fine with me. In a way, it is the Catholicism of, say, Dorothy Day.
However, the this-universe version of The Elect make a pretense of being about activism when what really gets them going is shaming people and virtue signaling, while exploiting black people they don’t truly respect as tools for the former – as actual black people join them unaware of the profound dismissal that pity entails.
So the problem is not that The Elect is a religion. It’s that it’s a sh***y religion.
— Read on hotair.com/john-s-2/2021/06/28/mcwhorter-wokeism-is-a-religion-the-problem-is-that-its-a-shy-religion-n399431