American Spirit or Great Awokening?
The Battle to Restore or Destroy Our Nation 

by Bruce D. Abramson 

Academica Press 

160 pp., $35.00

There is now a small collection of books that examine wokeism as a kind of corrupted and totalitarian religion. These books range widely in quality and intellectual depth, but their mere existence is an indication that a central cultural problem is now increasingly widely recognized.

Bruce Abramson, the author of American Spirit or Great Awokening?, is an attorney with a Ph.D. in computer science who was raised in an observant Jewish family. He fell away from that familial tradition into materialist secularism before beginning a critical rethinking of his trajectory. That reevaluation eventually led to the publication of this book.

Abramson is at his best in his careful decoding of the hidden religious elements of wokeism’s fascination with climate apocalypticism and trans identity. Measured, objective consideration of how humankind’s technological inventions contribute to global climate is perfectly possible. Yet much of what we hear from the prophets of climate collapse is something else. Abramson deftly dissects the ways in which the new climate end-timers dance exactly the same dance as earlier religious movements did as they condemned humankind’s moral fallenness and issued apocalyptic prophecies. Sober scientists recognize how difficult it is to accurately demonstrate causal inputs into global climate and how nearly impossible it is to make accurate long-term climate predictions.

Moral drunkenness, however, occupies an increasingly large role in all expert communities. Science is, therefore, ever more frequently harnessed to ideological projects of the progressive left. The moral thrust of alarmist wokeist climate eschatology points to a beleaguered Mother Earth. She is exploited and victimized by the greedy inventors of new technologies, which increase human control over the environment. 

Dispassionate science has no chance to stand long under that fervent heat. It must be made to show that if we do not repent of our desires to live longer and in greater material comfort, to eat foods that we like to eat, and to travel more conveniently and with less physical labor, we will bring about the end of the world. The fervor of the pronouncements from this new cult is as extreme and intolerant as that of any of the cargo cults in the anthropological literature.

Abramson is most brilliant in his reading of the trans movement. Although the cultists of this movement also chant the constant mantra “follow the science,” it is only too clear that there is no scientific, purely materialist basis to justify reassigning someone to the opposite biological sex. 

What the members of the trans cult do instead is mendaciously refer to the science as settled. They cite only research done by advocates for their movement to support their claims while retreating to the position that, ultimately, what makes a transwoman a woman is more than mere biological facts. Instead, it is something that cannot be demonstrated scientifically but resides simply in the emotionally charged belief of the individual that he is a she, or vice versa. 

Abramson neatly ties this existential methodology into the broader desire of humankind everywhere to arrive at some firm, unchanging, immortal essence of self that is not confined by the vicissitudes of the physical body. The discussion here is sensitive and profound. It reminds us that, even while we must remain vigilant and prepared to defend human culture from the efforts of the trans movement to deform and destroy it, we also should feel compassion for the sincere individuals who genuinely want to be other than what they are. 

Deep down, these suffering, deluded people suffer from a dire inability to come to terms with their own foundational secular materialist belief that the world is solely a natural, material entity. We should recognize in them a longing that has the same root as the traditional religious defense of the idea of the soul. This is so, even if our belief, unlike theirs, is oriented toward a spiritual world to come and calibrated after millennia of theological development within traditional social institutions and identities.

American Spirit or Great Awokening? unfortunately makes some significant missteps. Even in his superb analysis of trans ideology, Abramson wants to separate the trans movement from the segment of “the gay community” he describes as fully contributing to “the healthy fabric of American communal life.” This distinction does not hold up, as there has been a consistent, unified radicalism within the LGBTQ cultural movement over the course of its now more than 50-year lifespan.

When one looks into how fully homosexuals participate in normative American institutions, one makes remarkable findings. The U.S. homosexual population is much less likely to be married and to include children than the heterosexual majority. Only about 10 percent of American homosexuals are married. That percentage has not risen significantly since the Obergefell Supreme Court decision, which activists insisted would produce a flood of gay marriages otherwise prevented by the discriminatory state of the law. Among married male homosexual couples, children are present in less than 10 percent, while in homosexual female married couples, they are present in barely one in four.

Of course, conservative moral criticism of homosexual behavior can be made even in cases in which homosexual couples marry and raise children, but the American public was sold homosexual marriage as substantially similar to heterosexual marriage. The truth is that the LGBTQ movement has represented a radical offensive against marriage and the family from its very beginning. Trans ideology accelerates that movement in a number of ways, but it is perfectly consistent with the earlier waves of the movement in its basic hostility to the institution of the family. 

Abramson’s chapter on COVID and the pandemic conveys a skepticism toward public health officials and vaccines that, for me, is another low point—though I’m aware that many readers of Chronicles may agree with Abramson. It is certainly true, as Abramson argues, that wokeists exaggerated every possible aspect of the virus in the interests of their cult of safetyism and the expanse of state power. And it is true we would do well to keep out of positions of power those who still drive around alone in their cars wearing masks. But to insinuate that COVID is basically indistinguishable in its lethality from other respiratory viruses, such as influenza, that have been with us for thousands of years, is to show basic ignorance of the data on these diseases.

It is especially egregious for Abramson to claim that public health officials should have known that measures like masks and social distancing would be ineffective. Public health measures in the early days factored in our lack of information and made risk calculations that were in many cases perfectly reasonable. 

The remarks he makes about the COVID vaccines are equally suspect. Abramson correctly notes that there are extremists who incorrectly believe that if only everyone had been vaccinated and boosted multiple times, worn masks religiously 24/7, and stayed in lockdown for five years, we could have eradicated COVID and prevented all infection. But he apparently also believes that the vaccines, which he calls “failed,” were only “at best, marginally effective” because vaccinated people still got infections.

No vaccines have ever provided complete immunity from the targeted virus. The only question is what advantage the vaccines provide compared to the scenario without vaccines. We have reasonable estimates on this matter. A late 2022 study of mathematical models of actual COVID infection in comparison with hypothetical scenarios in which the vaccines did not exist showed more than 3 million fewer deaths in the U.S. as a result of the vaccines.

It is one of the most disheartening phenomena within the online right to see so many otherwise cogent analyses and criticisms of wokeness descend into the kind of scientifically allergic ranting that saturates social media. Abramson is too smart for this kind of silliness. His background in computer science is insufficient on its own for him to speak intelligently about virology and epidemiology, so he allows his own ideological druthers to drive the car here, to disastrous effect.

In the final analysis, and despite its numerous strong points, Abramson’s book fails to propose anything coherent or systematic in response to the wokeist religion. He admits that he has little specific to offer in that regard. We need religion, he argues, and I agree. But he refrains from speaking at length about the kind of religion we should have instead of wokeism. 

What he does offer is an allusion to what he calls “the American spirit.” By this, he means the cultural embrace, from whatever faith tradition, of a set of essentially nondenominational political values that are more or less what has been called the “American civil religion” (this is Robert Bellah’s adaptation of the phrase he borrowed from Rousseau). It consists, Abramson writes, of “faith in a creator, natural law, the inherent equality of all humans and a set of individual rights.” 

The same criticism religious conservatives typically make of so-called civil religion is applicable to Abramson’s case on “the American spirit.” With nothing more morally subterranean to base these quasi-religious political values on, it is not at all clear that this is enough to sustain a non-woke culture.

In fact, there may be something like an evolutionary heritage between wokeism and the radically democratic and individualist ethic encoded in the American civil religion. It is disheartening in the extreme to consider the possibility that America may have been doomed to develop the cultural cancer of wokeism by elements of its own original cultural nature. If that is so, we do well to acknowledge that truth as we set about trying to find ways to mitigate or cure the disease.