The Elect and the Exiled: Wokeness, Calvinism, and the Search for Grace

I once watched a colleague pause before speaking—then go quiet. “I just don’t want to say the wrong thing,” she said, half-joking, eyes darting around the room. And I’ve felt it too: the fear that even with good intentions, one misstep might mark you forever.

I’ve been in a lot of spaces like that. Not because people don’t care, but because they care so much—and are scared they’ll get it wrong.

And I’ve been thinking lately about how many of our cultural arguments aren’t really about what we say they’re about.

Take “wokeness.” Depending on who’s talking, it might mean basic human empathy, or it might mean the decline of civilization. But even when it’s deployed with the most venom, it still clings to a moral structure. People aren’t just annoyed by “wokeness”—they’re afraid of being found morally wanting, of not knowing the script, of getting cast out for failing a test they didn’t know they were taking.

That fear doesn’t come out of nowhere. It comes, I think, from the way wokeness has tried to answer some of the same questions that religion once did: What makes a good life? How do we live with one another? Who belongs?

In the absence of formal religion, particularly among progressives, something had to rush in to fill that spiritual vacuum. What we call wokeness is, in part, a well-intentioned effort to construct meaning, belonging, and moral clarity in a world where traditional sources of those things—church, extended family, shared ritual—have faded.

And because so much of American culture is still shaped by Protestantism—whether we notice it or not—it’s not surprising that this new secular moral framework echoes some very old religious ones. Especially Calvinism.

In Calvinist theology, there were two kinds of people: the elect and the damned. God had already made His decision; your job was to look for signs of which group you belonged to. A good work ethic, a hatred of sin, a pious heart—these weren’t just virtues. They were evidence that you’d been chosen. And if your neighbors fell short, well—maybe they were never chosen to begin with.

That logic sounds familiar. It shows up in the way some progressive spaces treat pain and identity as credentials. The more you’ve suffered—or the more fluently you can name your suffering—the closer you are to moral authority. Pain becomes a passport to the elect—proof of insight, a badge of moral authority. And the people who haven’t suffered enough, or haven’t suffered in the right ways, often end up feeling like outsiders.

Don’t get me wrong. A politics that listens to the voices of the marginalized is a good thing. But when pain becomes the only way to prove you belong, what happens to those who are healing? What happens to those who are trying to build something gentler? What happens to the people looking not for judgment, but for grace?

Wokeness, like Calvinism, splits the world into insiders and outsiders. It creates anxiety about saying the wrong thing, wanting the wrong thing, being on the wrong side. And like Calvinism, it often struggles to imagine redemption.

But what if we didn’t have to stay stuck in that moral binary? What if we could reclaim some other parts of the Protestant tradition—not the fire and brimstone, but the grace?

Grace says that people are not the sum of their worst mistakes. Grace makes room for the clumsy, the unsure, the ones who are still learning. Grace offers people a way back in. And grace, crucially, is a practice. It might look like gently correcting a friend instead of blasting them on Twitter. It might mean assuming someone’s trying, even if they fumble the words. It’s less about who’s right and more about how we stay in relationship when we’re wrong.

There are other inheritances we could take from the faith traditions that shaped this country, too. The Quaker practice of listening before speaking. The Methodist call to service. The radical hospitality of churches that throw their doors wide open, not just in spite of difference, but because of it.

You don’t need to believe in God to believe in grace. You don’t need to go to church to be part of a community that forgives. And you don’t need to perform your pain to be worthy of love.

We don’t need to build a new moral order out of anxiety. We can build it out of care. That means leaving space for joy and contradiction. It means making room for people who are still figuring things out—not as a liability, but as the whole point. If we’re serious about justice, then we should also be serious about creating a world people want to belong to. One where you don’t have to be elect to be welcome.

Grace isn’t something you earn. It’s something you give.
It’s how we make space for each other—tired, imperfect, still trying.

Scheduling note: tomorrow I am having an elective surgery that I’ve put off for many years now. As a result, I will be taking a brief pause from publishing further free content. I have scheduled some paid content, as well as continued installments of The Fall Line. You can read Chapter 1 for free if you haven’t already! Thanks as always for supporting what I do — I’ve been a writer my whole life, but I haven’t always had an audience, and it’s something I will never take for granted.