Here are two claims that will irritate almost everyone.
The first is that “woke” isn’t simply kindness taken too far, as its critics often say. It’s a way of looking at the world.
It starts with things that are true. Power can be misused. People’s experiences matter. History leaves scars. But then it takes each of those truths and turns it into an answer for everything. I call that a master key.1 A caretaker’s master key opens every door in the building. A master-key idea claims to explain every situation, every conflict and every person.
The second is that “anti-woke” isn’t the cure. Often it’s the same master key, just filed into a different shape to explain everything.
If I’m right about both claims, then choosing one won’t fix anything. Both sides hold the same kind of key, and that key does something rather dangerous. It tells you who a person is before they’ve uttered or written a word. Meet someone who calls themselves woke, and the anti-woke key has already decided they’re naive at best or dangerous at worst. Meet someone who is wary of woke, and the woke key has already decided they’re a bigot. Either way, you’ve stopped looking at the actual human being before you.
So the real question for leaders isn’t which side we’re on of woke and anti-woke. It’s whether we can still see the person before us in the way God ask us to.
The Origins of Woke
It helps to remember where the word came from. In 1938 the blues singer Lead Belly finished a recording about the Scottsboro Boys, nine Black teenagers falsely accused of rape in Alabama, by telling Black travellers to “be a little careful... best stay woke, keep their eyes open”.
Now look at what Christians have done with the word since.
In 2018, Eric Mason, the Philadelphia pastor who planted Epiphany Fellowship, published a book called Woke Church. He chose the word on purpose. For Mason, being woke meant being awake to racism and injustice and then doing something about it, and he was clear that “being truly woke is rooted in Christ consciousness.”
Danielle Strickland, the well-known Canadian Christian teacher, writer, and avowed spiritual leader, justice advocate, communicator, peacemaker and anti-trafficking campaigner, is well known to many US and British churches and wrote in early 2025. She wrote that people kept throwing the word at her as an insult. So she took it back. Jesus, she argued, calls his followers to get woke and stay woke, and “Paul was as woke as they come.”
And in 2022, Steve Chalke, the Baptist minister who founded the Oasis charity and its family of schools, author, speaker, and former UN Special Advisor on Human Trafficking, put on Facebook with usual flair that if being woke means being alive to the needs of others, well informed, compassionate, respectful and kind, wanting a better world for every person and every living thing, then, he wrote, “sign me up for that challenge!”
Now listen to the other side of woke. In 2021, Voddie Baucham, a Reformed Baptist pastor whose theology sat very close to Mason’s, published Fault Lines, with the subtitle The Social Justice Movement and Evangelicalism’s Looming Catastrophe. He argued that antiracism had become a new religion, with its own original sin, its own gospel and its own new birth, and that the new birth was called ‘wokeness’.
Two years later, the Indiana pastor Lucas Miles went further still. The title of his book leaves no room for doubt: Woke Jesus: The False Messiah Destroying Christianity.
Same Bible. Same Lord. Mason and Baucham even share much the same theology. Yet for one the word names a calling, and for the other a counterfeit gospel.
So these days the word ‘woke’ likely tells you more about the person using it than about the actual thing they’re describing. And that’s no help at all if you lead a team, a charity or a church full of people who use it both ways.
Woke as a master key
Every school, hospital and church building has a caretaker with a master key. It’s a very handy thing to have. One key opens every door, so the caretaker never has to stop and think about which room he’s walking into.
Now imagine an idea that works like that.
Most good ideas are ordinary keys. They fit one lock well. “Power can be abused” opens a real door; it helps us understand what went on in a safeguarding scandal or a bullying workplace. “Our sense of self matters” opens another. “History leaves wounds” opens a third. Use each insight on the right door and you see something true.
The trouble starts when one of those keys gets ground down into a master key. Now it opens every door, but only because it no longer notices the shape of each lock. Every conflict becomes a power struggle. Every feeling becomes an identity. Every disagreement becomes harm. You never have to stop and think about which room you’re walking into, and that’s exactly the danger. You stop seeing the room.
You can usually tell when you’re holding a woke master-key. There are three tells:
It explains everything.
Nothing could ever count against it. Any objection just proves the point: if you disagree, that only shows how deep the problem goes.
It tells you who someone is before they’ve opened their mouth.
That last one matters most for leaders, because leadership is, in the end, the work of seeing real and actual people. Not the labels of identity politics.
So here’s my proposal, and the route I suggest to navigate all things woke.
First, what the word gets right
Let’s be honest. Racism exists. Sexism exists. Institutions get corrupted. Majorities mistreat minorities. The powerful exploit the weak. Nations do terrible things, and so do churches, businesses, charities and any kind of institution and organisation.
Christians, of all people, shouldn’t need persuading that people and institutions sin. We have a doctrine for it. Mason’s instinct, that the Church should be awake to injustice in its own history, is a Christian instinct long before it’s a political one. Strickland has spent her life among trafficked women and addicts. Steve Chalke has spent his life building schools, housing and hospitals for the people the rest of us walk straight past. When they say “woke”, that’s what they mean, and we ought to hear it.
So the question isn’t whether we should care about injustice. Of course we should. The question is whether we understand it rightly. A wrong diagnosis, delivered with enormous moral energy, can do as much damage as no diagnosis at all.
Wokeism vs Woke
When Mason, Strickland and Chalke say "woke", I think they mean an attitude: being awake to injustice and doing something about it. But ‘wokeism’ means an ideology: a set of ideas that explains not just injustice, but everything else, in one particular way. The two, woke and wokeism, often travel together, but they aren't the same thing. You can be woke in the first sense without signing up to the second. The master key belongs to the ideology, not the attitude.
Bishop Robert Barron, who makes no secret of opposing the ideology of wokeism, offers the most precise short definition I’ve come across. He calls it “a popularization of critical theory”. Critical theory is a body of ideas, worked out in French and German universities in the middle of the last century, that reads society mainly in terms of who holds power over whom. Those ideas sat in the academy for decades, and in the summer of 2020 they spilt out into the streets of everyday life.
You don’t need to have read Michel Foucault, the French philosopher who taught a generation to look for the power behind every claim, to recognise these ideas. You hear them every week, in phrases that sound like plain common sense:
“Speak your truth.”
“That’s just your opinion.”
“Who benefits from saying that?”
“Silence is complicity.”
“Be on the right side of history.”
Each of these phrases has something true in it. That’s why they catch on. But each one can also be stretched until it seems to explain everything, and that’s when it becomes a master key.
Each phrase also answers one of five big questions we all ask sooner or later: Who am I? What is good? What is true? What is this place for? Who is guilty? Think of these five questions as five doors. I’ll go through them one at a time, and at each door I’ll do two things. First, I’ll show what’s true in the phrase. Then I’ll show how it gets stretched into an idealogical master key.
Door one: who am I?
“Speak your truth.”
The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor calls ours the Age of Authenticity. The great moral command of our time goes something like this: find out who you really are inside, and then express it. Carl Trueman calls the result expressive individualism, the belief that the real me lives somewhere inside and the world owes it recognition.
There’s something good in that. Few of us want to go back to a world where class and family decided everything about us before we were born. That’s the true insight here: my inner life matters.
But notice which way authority now runs. We used to ask, “What’s true, and how should I live in line with it?” Now we’re tempted to ask, “What do I feel myself to be, and how must everyone else adjust?”
That explains a modern conundrum. We’re the most individualistic society in history, and yet we’re obsessed with group identity. How can both be true? Because they belong together. If I build my own identity, I need other people to confirm it, and confirmation is social. So the lone self goes looking for a group, a label and a cause to vouch for it.
The master key: what I feel I am settles who I am, and everyone else has to agree.
Door two: what is good?
“That’s just your opinion.”
The Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who died in 2025, noticed something unsettling. We still use all the old moral words (justice, fairness, rights, freedom), but we no longer share an account of what a human life is actually for, the very thing that used to tell us how those words fit together. We’ve kept the vocabulary and lost the grammar.
MacIntyre had a name for what happens next: emotivism. Once the grammar has gone, a moral statement such as “that’s wrong” stops meaning “that goes against what a human life is for”. It starts to mean “I feel strongly against that”. Morality turns into feeling.
There’s something true here. Feelings matter morally. Outrage at cruelty is often exactly the right response, and a person’s hurt deserves to be taken seriously.
But if feelings are all we have, our arguments can never end. One side feels strongly about equality, the other feels strongly about liberty, and there’s no agreed referee. Whoever feels most hurt, or most offended, seems to win.
The master key: right and wrong come down to how strongly people feel.
And when feelings collide, no one can say who is right. That brings us to the third door.
Door three: what is true?
“Who benefits from saying that?”
Bishop Barron seems to care a great deal about this door. At the second door, feelings stepped in to settle our arguments. At this door it goes further: power starts to look like the hidden truth behind every claim. The old question was, “Is it true?” The new one is, “Whose interests does it serve?”
Now, that can be a very good question, and it’s the true insight at this door. The Hebrew prophets asked it of the court religion of their day. Jesus asked it of the Temple.
The trouble starts when it becomes the only question we ask. Then every claim turns into a power play. A disagreement about the facts becomes an act of domination. Words become violence and argument becomes oppression. You can’t persuade anyone of anything, because everyone’s already been sorted by identity before they open their mouth.
Barron has a rule of thumb I’ve found useful: be suspicious of anyone who tells you that society boils down to one thing, especially power.
The master key: every claim to truth is a power grab in disguise.
Door four: what is this place for?
“Silence is complicity.”
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt makes a simple point I think every leader should know and return to. Every institution needs a telos, an overriding purpose that settles disputes between lesser goods. A university can serve truth, or it can serve a cause, but when the two clash, it has to know which comes first. Where truth comes first, as Haidt puts it, “bad ideas get refuted, not punished.” Where the cause comes first, awkward evidence gets buried, and anyone who asks questions becomes a suspect.
The true insight is that institutions really can be complicit, and that saying nothing is sometimes a choice.
But swap “university” for church, charity, school or business, and this warning still holds true. When the pressure to conform crowds out an organisation’s purpose, the organisation forgets what it’s for. A church’s telos is Christ. So the question for us is whether we still order everything else beneath him, or whether we’ve borrowed someone else’s without noticing.
The master key: the cause comes first. Every institution exists to serve it, and anyone who hesitates is against us.
Door five: who is guilty?
“Be on the right side of history.”
The Oxford theologian Nigel Biggar has spent the last few years asking whether Britain has drifted from honest repentance for its past into something more like guilt by inheritance. His recent book on reparations takes on the Church of England’s own plans directly. Biggar doesn’t say the Empire was innocent. He says a moral reckoning needs the whole record, the atrocities and the abolition alike. His critics think he’s too kind to that historical record, and you may well agree with them. But his question still stands.
The true insight is that history leaves real wounds and real advantages, and both are still with us.
But can guilt become an identity?
Scripture says no. Israel confessed the sins of its fathers, yes, but Ezekiel is blunt: “The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father” (Ezekiel 18:20). I can inherit consequences, advantages and a duty to help repair what’s broken. I can’t inherit guilt. I’m not my great-grandfather, and you’re not reducible to the suffering of yours.
Lose that distinction and history becomes a debt nobody can ever pay off. And where no debt can ever be paid, nobody can ever be forgiven.
The master key: your group’s past settles and decides whether you’re guilty or innocent. White guilt et al.
Five doors, one pattern
Let’s step back and look at the five doors together.
Each one started with something true. The inner life matters. Feelings carry moral weight. Power can hide behind words. Institutions can be complicit. History leaves wounds. Christians can say yes to every one of those.
And yet each one ended up in the same place, for ‘wokeism’. The key that was meant to help us understand a situation now tells us who a person is before they’ve said a word. Their feelings, their group, their side or their ancestry have already answered the question for them and about them.
That’s what I mean by a master key.
The same key, a different shape
So far I’ve been looking at the progressive key. Now for the turn I promised, and I’m aiming this one at people like me.
People who spend their lives fighting identity politics often end up building their own. The categories just swap round. My tribe is righteous; yours is dangerous. My people are the victims now; yours are to blame. Apply the three tells from earlier. Does the idea explain everything? Could anything ever count against it? Does it tell you who someone is before they speak? A good deal of what calls itself anti-woke passes all three.
Go back to the Christians we met at the start, and notice what each side does with the word. Chalke defines “woke” as compassion, respect and kindness. On that definition, anyone who objects must be objecting to kindness. Miles defines it as a false messiah. On that definition, anyone who uses it must have abandoned Christ. Both definitions settle any argument before it’s even started. Neither side has to listen, because the word has already told them who the other person is.
That’s the master key at work on both sides. To be fair, Baucham’s account of critical theory overlaps a good deal with Barron’s, and he was clear that Christians must still pursue justice. And Strickland and Chalke are right that Jesus scandalised the comfortable and sat down with the despised. Each of them sees something true. The trouble starts when the word itself becomes the explanation, and the other side becomes the reason for everything that’s gone wrong.
The anti-woke master key: whatever’s gone wrong, woke did it.
Haidt and his co-author Greg Lukianoff draw a distinction that I think helps here. There’s common-humanity identity politics, the kind Martin Luther King practised, which names a real injustice against a group while appealing to the shared humanity of everyone, opponents included. And there’s common-enemy identity politics, which holds a group together by giving it someone to hate. They’re quite explicit that the second kind thrives on the far right just as much as on the far left.
So you can reject progressive identity politics and still be completely captured by its logic. You’ve only changed teams.
Christians need to be especially careful here, and I include myself. The Church isn’t another grievance group waiting for its turn to speak. If we answer one politics of resentment with another, we lose the one thing we actually have to give.
Received, not constructed
So if both master keys fail, woke and anti-woke, what do we have to offer? Not a better master key. But I suggest something else altogether.
Both master keys reduce a person to a category: white, Black, male, female, straight, gay, coloniser, colonised, privileged, marginalised, woke, bigot. Some of those words name real things. None of them names a person.
Jesus said, “I am the door” (John 10:9).
The Christian answer to our moment isn’t a better theory that explains everyone. It’s a person who meets each one of us.
That’s where the Christian account of a person begins. Before you’re a demographic, you’re a creature. Before you’re privileged or oppressed, progressive or conservative, you bear the image of God (Genesis 1:27). Your identity is received before it’s constructed. You’re God-made, not self-made.
That doesn’t erase difference. Paul says that in Christ there is “neither Jew nor Greek” (Galatians 3:28), and yet he carries on being a Jew. Difference stays, but it’s held inside something bigger, and it stops being destiny.
The early Church went further still. Irenaeus, a second-century bishop, taught that Christ recapitulates, or sums up, the whole human story in himself. The Son of God steps into human life from the inside: a Jew under occupation, poor, a victim of empire and, on the cross, “numbered with the transgressors” (Isaiah 53:12). There’s no kind of human being he didn’t take up and heal. That’s why no one may be reduced to a category. Christ has already refused to do it.
And that changes two things for a leader every day.
It changes how we love. The medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas taught that love isn’t a feeling but a choice to will the good of the other person. I can’t do that if I no longer believe there’s a good beyond your preferences and mine. MacIntyre’s missing grammar turns out to be the grammar of love.
And it changes what it costs to be wrong. If truth is only power, then admitting a mistake means losing, so nobody can afford to do it. But Christians confess. Week by week we say out loud that we’ve sinned in thought, word and deed. Confession is the freedom to be wrong without being destroyed. And people who can confess don’t need to win every argument, which means they can afford to listen.
Six disciplines for leaders
So what does putting the master keys down look like? Perhaps these six disciplines.
Truth before tribe. A claim isn’t true because it helps my side, or false because my opponents make it. When a meeting starts rewarding right vocabulary over right evidence, notice so, and say so.
Person before category. A stranger sees labels: conservative, progressive, privileged. A friend sees a life: what someone loves, and what they've been through. Before you label anyone, ask: do I know them well enough to describe them as a friend would? If you don't, you're not ready to judge them.
Justice with humility. Fight injustice hard, but be careful how you explain it. Prejudice might be the cause. So might something else. Find out before you act. And ask yourself: what would change my mind? If the answer is "nothing", you're likely holding a master key.
Responsibility, not inherited guilt. Own the consequences you’ve inherited and the duties you have now. Don’t treat guilt as something passed down in the blood.
Disagreement without dehumanising. Someone can be badly wrong without being an oppressor, or a snowflake. Try stating their view in a way they’d recognise and sign before you answer it.
Purpose before ideology. A university needs truth. A hospital needs healing. A court needs justice. A church needs Christ. Name your telos, and test every decision against it.
Stay awake
So let me finish where I started, with a warning.
Lead Belly told people to stay woke and keep their eyes open. It was good advice then, and it’s good advice now. The real question is what we’re awake to.
The Church has a much older call to wake up: “Wake up, O sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you” (Ephesians 5:14). Eric Mason reached for the same verse when he called the Church to wake up, and he was right to. But being awake in Paul’s sense doesn’t mean seeing power everywhere, or seeing wokeness everywhere. It means seeing by a light that shows the person in front of us as more than any category we carried into the room.
A master key saves you the bother of looking at each door. Love insists on the bother.
The most radical thing a leader can do now may also be the simplest: put the master key down, and refuse to turn another human being into an identity.
That won’t take us away from justice.
It may be the only way back to it.
Further reading
Eric Mason, Woke Church: An Urgent Call for Christians in America to Confront Racism and Injustice (Moody, 2018).
Danielle Strickland, “The Great Awakening”, Right Side Up (Substack), 2025.
Steve Chalke, Facebook post, 30 August 2022.
Voddie T. Baucham Jr, Fault Lines: The Social Justice Movement and Evangelicalism’s Looming Catastrophe (Salem, 2021).
Lucas Miles, Woke Jesus: The False Messiah Destroying Christianity (2023).
Robert Barron, “The Philosophical Roots of Wokeism”, Religion & Liberty34:1 (2024), from his Acton University lecture, 21 June 2023.
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (2007).
Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self (2020).
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (1981).
Jonathan Haidt, “Why Universities Must Choose One Telos: Truth or Social Justice”, Heterodox Academy, 21 October 2016.
Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind(2018).
Nigel Biggar, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (2023); Reparations: Slavery and the Tyranny of Imaginary Guilt (2025).
The image of the master key is my own suggestion here, but the idea behind it, that one cause is made to explain everything, is not new. I draw especially on Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Cynical Theories (2020), who argue that a single lens of power and identity has been applied across fields as different as literature and medicine; on John McWhorter, Woke Racism (2021), who argues that much antiracist thought treats one explanation as the answer to every disparity, in a way that can never be proved wrong; and on Andrew Sullivan's essays in The Weekly Dish, including "The Roots of Wokeness".