Awake, Not Woke Quotes

“This book is an attempt to name what is poisoning us. In order to do that, we have to understand the history, premises, and tactics of woke ideology, which is fundamentally an ideology of rupture.”
― Noelle Mering, Awake, Not Woke: A Christian Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology

“Parroting woke indignance in all the correct ways by all the old things becomes tedious and thin. Everything bores us and we grow dependent on our outrage as the only emotion that we are able to access. In a carnival of pleasures, we don’t have an architecture of meaning. These are shallow but tumultuous waters to wade through. Passions are sharp and consuming. Because we don’t know how to suffer well, we suffer loudly. We are drowning in puddles when we should be learning to swim in oceans.”
― Noelle Mering, Awake, Not Woke: A Christian Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology

“While woke ideology appears as a benevolent fight for justice, it is far from that. It lures us in with an appeal to our better natures, then replaces intelligible principles with distorted ones, resulting in incoherence and chaos. p.5”
― Noelle Mering, Awake, Not Woke: A Christian Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology

“The cultural physics of a growing hookup culture result in an increasing number of men who are coarse and entitled and women who feel used and discarded.”
― Noelle Mering, Awake, Not Woke: A Christian Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology

“We can somewhat cover up the emotional and psychological toll of casual sex, but we can’t quite cover up a baby unless we get rid of it.”
― Noelle Mering, Awake, Not Woke: A Christian Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology

“For the division sought by woke ideology, distinctions between the sexes must be denied and distinctions among the races must be exaggerated so that enemies might become more entrenched across broader categories of human beings.”
― Noelle Mering, Awake, Not Woke: A Christian Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology

“While deemphasizing the difference between the sexes leads to estrangement, deemphasizing the differences between races tends to lead to friendship.”
― Noelle Mering, Awake, Not Woke: A Christian Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology

“history shows us that human beings are capable of previously unimaginable evils, especially if, hungry for meaning, they are given someone to hate, and the conviction of righteousness in their hatred.”
― Noelle Mering, Awake, Not Woke: A Christian Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology

“Moral consequentialism has led to the worst atrocities the world has known, and yet we have been propagandized to believe that it is orthodox morality that is on the side of hate. Mother Teresa would not have passed this test of “love,” nor would Mahatma Ghandi or even Barack Obama circa 2012 when he upheld the understanding of marriage as being between one man and one woman. Cowed by this demagoguery, which has picked up speed and belligerence, many Christians have remained silent for fear of being labeled a hater.”
― Noelle Mering, Awake, Not Woke: A Christian Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology

“In order to disobey God, we must first diminish him.”
― Noelle Mering, Awake, Not Woke: A Christian Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology

“By making fatherhood optional, we neuter its essence and inject chaos into our understanding of law and hierarchy more generally. The revolutionary knows that in targeting fatherhood, he mortally wounds authority in the culture. Like a child deprived of a father, a culture looks to fill that void. The un-fathered, deprived of real authority in their lives, are the first to yield to the control of authoritarianism.”
― Noelle Mering, Awake, Not Woke: A Christian Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology

“place to hang our hats. At some point, each person is startled to see his father as an ordinary and flawed human. As a deeply symbolic role meant to point the child to the authority and love of God, the revelation of a father’s less-than-perfect humanity can be placed into the proper context of a fallen nature shared by all of humanity. Such a context points us to the supreme need for a loving God. Devoid of this context, the revelation of a formerly revered father’s failures can be catastrophic. The distrust and cynicism that can follow a father’s fall from grace can too easily spread to a distrust and cynicism of all authority, and even of law itself.”
― Noelle Mering, Awake, Not Woke: A Christian Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology

“Parents have a natural and fitting authority over their children. Their authority is of both types: a reflection of a commission from above and their possession of superior knowledge to impart to their offspring. They have a knowledge not just about the world around them but also about the particular needs of their children. This is knowledge gained from the intimacy of family life that a neighbor down the street does not have. They are bound by the bonds of their relationship to be intimately invested in the good of their offspring. But it is this intimacy and obligation that makes the abuse of the parental role so devastating. But its abuse”
― Noelle Mering, Awake, Not Woke: A Christian Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology

“In contrast to this vision, when President Abraham Lincoln was asked if he was confident that God was on his side, he famously replied, “Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side, my greatest concern is to be on God’s side, for God is always right.”
― Noelle Mering, Awake, Not Woke: A Christian Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology

“We have ceased to see this struggle as one worth fighting. Increasingly, we see our good as identical to our desire. We look suspiciously at references to sin, evil, and hell. Those words are for something “out there” or from long ago, if they even mean anything at all.”
― Noelle Mering, Awake, Not Woke: A Christian Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology

“This is a spiritual and religious struggle with origins reaching back to a snake in a garden cajoling the first woman that “ye shall be as gods.” Behind every temptation to sin is this sales pitch: that we might, in trading our greatest good for various lesser goods, become autonomous, self-determining, powerful.”
― Noelle Mering, Awake, Not Woke: A Christian Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology

“Without knowing our need, our solutions seem merely sentimental. And therein lies the fundamental incoherence of woke Christianity: in seeking to offer the world a veneer of compassion, it robs that world of mercy. We become, as Cardinal George put it, a world that permits everything and forgives nothing—a world that is not only merciless but Christ-less.”
― Noelle Mering, Awake, Not Woke: A Christian Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology

“A breakdown in our common understanding of words leads to a society in chaos and frustration, inevitably mis-communicating and plagued by distrust. We become suspicious, not only of each other, but of ourselves and our ability to grasp reality. Rather than a fallible people struggling imperfectly toward a harmonious common good, we are a cacophony screaming across a chasm for recognition and moving through the world without a destination.”
― Noelle Mering, Awake, Not Woke: A Christian Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology

“Woke ideology has crept and dripped like a poison into corners and cells of an unsuspecting body of people. It corrupts Christianity by turning it into a religion without justice, without mercy, and ultimately without Christ. The stakes could not be higher. Let’s begin naming it.”
― Noelle Mering, Awake, Not Woke: A Christian Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology

“In order to disobey God, we must first diminish him. We will not adore a being who is our subordinate. We don’t stand in awe of what is beneath us. Once diminished, devotion to him becomes not only unnecessary but unreasonable.”
― Noelle Mering, Awake, Not Woke: A Christian Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology