Shanice Kirabo
Staff Writer
A talk on the “woke” movement was delivered by a graduate student at Franciscan University of Steubenville on Thursday, Nov. 11, at 7:30 p.m. in the Gentile Gallery.
Noelle Mering is the author of the upcoming book “Awake, Not Woke: A Christian Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology.”
Mering said the idea of “wokeness” has been paraded by famous figures like Karl Marx.
Mering said, “You may not know about Karl Marx, but he’s concerned about you.”
She said Marx carried the torch that ushered in a new era of raising the consciousness of the oppressors to all the shadows of society. The “woke” movement is the manifestation of how atheism embeds itself in society, she said.
Mering said according to Marx, progressiveness only came about because of revolutions organized against the old harmful ways of the family, headed by a patriarch, and the faith. The sustenance of these revolutions was helplessness and rage.
The more fault lines that can be created, the more a society can be destabilized, Hering said.
These fault lines give rise to artists that present media for the sake of political revolution, Mering said. Art would emphasize the three main distortions of the “woke” movement, which Mering called “an unholy trinity.”
The first distortion is an emphasis on “groupthink,” which is the rejection of personal discretion. The second is the emphasis on the pursuit of human will and desire through expressive individualism, which transformed into the rejection of reason. And the third is the emphasis on the power of the people, which would be the rejection of the extensive right authority.
The ultimate threat to this “power” is the innocence of youth, Mering said. In the innocence is the love and goodness of God, which contradicts what defines the “woke” movement: the hatred and oppression of man. Mering said progressivism is not of the Church.
The Church’s role is to respond with a firm ground in the truth, Mering said.
Mering said, “We should stay as vessels for the Lord, commit to that mission, stick to it and nurture it … if we hope to overcome this ‘woke’ movement.”