What Does It Mean to Be Woke? A Biblical Perspective on Woke Culture

Have you ever been to one of those steakhouses with the soft-serve ice cream machine right next to the salad bar? The drill is simple. You eat the steak first, and then you reward yourself with a little ice cream on the way out. I love soft-serve. It might be my favorite dessert. But nobody walks into a steakhouse, bypasses the beef, and eats nothing but soft-serve. Nobody except a kid who doesn't know any better.

I've become convinced that a lot of us are doing exactly that when it comes to truth. We're bypassing the beef and filling up on soft-serve. And nowhere is that more obvious than in the conversation around one little word: woke.

I've taken a deep dive into this, and I'll be honest with you. It's confusing. Trying to pin down what "woke" means is like trying to nail ice cream to a wall. So let's have an open, honest conversation about it, and let's do the hard work of chewing on some beef.

What Does "Woke" Actually Mean?

When I Googled what it means to be woke, here's the definition that came up: someone who is alert to injustice in society, especially racism. I read that and thought, "That's me." I've got my eyes open. I'm alert to injustice. Is there racism in the world today? Yes. Are we against it as followers of Christ? Absolutely. So at face value, it sounds good. I guess I'm woke.

But don't jump on that train so fast. Here's what woke culture actually does. Like any belief system, it takes words we're all familiar with and quietly redefines them. What counts as racist to a "woker" is not what's racist to a follower of Christ. What social justice means to them is not what it means to you and me. The words sound the same. The definitions underneath have been swapped out.

After reading a lot of thoughtful Christian writers and plenty of non-woke atheist ones too, here's the definition I landed on. Woke is an authoritarian worldview that seeks to deconstruct the foundations of the Christian faith by overwhelming, overpowering, and overthrowing those who don't adhere to its ideology. If I had to boil it down to one word, I'd say pride. If I had to use two, I'd say moral superiority. The whole engine runs on this idea: I'm woke, and you're not. I can see, and you're asleep.

Why "Woke" and Christianity Can't Be Combined

Here's where it collides head-on with the gospel. The good news of Jesus tells you and me that we're all sinners saved by grace. The moment we turn from our sin and receive Christ, our record is forgiven, cleansed, power-washed. That's the heart of the whole thing.

Woke ideology offers no such thing. In that system, if you belong to the wrong group, you can never fully be redeemed or forgiven. There's no cross to run to, no grace to receive, just an endless treadmill of trying to prove you're good enough. One worldview ends in forgiveness. The other never lets you off the hook. That's why you cannot bolt the two together, even though a lot of churches try. It can't be done, because at the core they're pointing in opposite directions.

I was in Puerto Rico a while back with about seventy-five pastors of some of the largest churches in North America. I decided to stir the pot at dinner and asked the table, "Hey, what are you all doing about this? Are you talking about it?" One after another said, "No way. Too controversial. I just preach Jesus." I understand the instinct, but I'd push back on it. The gospel itself is already offensive. It tells you you're a sinner separated from God who needs a Savior. If we're willing to say that, we shouldn't go quiet on the ideas quietly reshaping how people think.

How Did We Get Here?

A friend of mine who isn't a believer stopped me in his store one day, worried about what his teenage daughter was being taught, and asked me point blank, "Ed, how did we get here?" Let me give you the quick history I gave him.

It runs through three men: Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud. Marx was an atheist who set out to tear apart the foundations of Christianity. His whole thesis divided the world into the oppressor and the oppressed, and he wrote the Communist Manifesto around it. The problem is that Marxism has never actually worked. People loved it in theory, but once word got out about what was really happening in Russia and China, a lot of them jumped off that train.

Nietzsche came next, declaring that God is dead and that life is ultimately about power, about the strong surviving and the weak falling away. Then Freud added that everything ultimately comes down to sex. Stack those three on top of each other, mix in critical theory and postmodernism (the idea that there's no absolute truth), and you've got the recipe. Those ideas got taught in universities, absorbed by a couple of generations, and carried into corporations, schools, and media. Notice the pattern too: envy, pride, and pleasure are the same three temptations the enemy has used since the garden of Eden. There's nothing new under the sun.

What Am I Supposed to Do About It?

Here's the good news. We're not helpless, because we have the answer, and the answer is a biblical worldview. Think of it like a really good pair of glasses. When I put on a new prescription, everything sharpens up. I can suddenly see the back of the room, the details I was missing. A biblical worldview does the same thing for your soul. It filters out the contaminants and lets you see reality the way it actually is.

Scripture puts it plainly in Colossians 2:8: "See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Christ." Notice that word, captive. You either take your thoughts captive, or your thoughts take you captive. There's no neutral.

Living out that worldview comes down to five simple checkpoints. Run everything through these, and things start turning right side up again.

1. Identity. Woke culture says your identity is your grievance. You are what was done to you. Scripture says something better. Galatians 4:7 says, "So you are no longer a slave, but God's child; and since you are His child, God has made you also an heir." I refuse to let anyone reduce me to the color of my skin or my grievances. I'm a child of God.

2. Thoughts. We think tens of thousands of thoughts a day, and studies say most of them are negative and repetitive. So what do you do with them? Second Corinthians 10:5 says we take "captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ." Every impure or fearful thought gets run through that filter instead of being handed more art supplies to paint with.

3. Truth. Woke ideology says truth is subjective, that what's true for you is true for you and what's true for me is true for me. But the claim "there's no absolute truth" is itself an absolute truth claim, so it collapses on itself. If one plus one doesn't equal two every time, the whole world falls apart. Jesus said, "You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free."

4. Feelings. Feelings are real, but they're a byproduct of truth, not a substitute for it. The culture treats feelings as facts. Scripture flips the order. We express our emotions honestly, then we submit them to what God has actually said, because feelings change by the hour and God's truth never does.

5. Living. Ultimately you either live to glorify yourself or to glorify God. Glorifying God means reflecting Him in everything you do, say, and touch. That's what we were made for.

Woke or Awake?

So here's the real question. It was never really about being woke or being asleep. It's about being awake to God. Ephesians 5:14 says, "Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you."

You can keep living on melted soft-serve, or you can sit down to the protein of God's Word. One will leave you empty. The other will let you see clearly for the first time. My prayer is that you'd dive deep, recover the lenses God has for you, and put them back on.

If you've never given your life to Christ, you can do that right now, right where you are. Just tell Him, "God, I admit I'm a sinner. I turn from my sins and I turn to you. Jesus, come into my life." That's the best decision you'll ever make, and it's the first step to seeing everything the way it was always meant to be seen.