According to tradition, Hillel the Elder was asked to summarize the Torah in the time a person could stand on one foot. His reply is well known as a version of the Golden Rule. However, the Torah didn’t represent the entirety of holy scripture in Hillel’s time, for it had been expanded to include prophetic writings—the Law and the Prophets had become the name for Jewish scripture.

If Jesus had been asked to summarize the Prophets, as Hillel had done for the Torah, his reply would probably have been something like this: “Wake up, open your eyes and ears, repent, and start treating others with compassion and justice!”

Jesus affirmed the Torah but centered his message on the prophetic spirituality found in Amos, Jeremiah, and other prophets who spoke against the mistreatment of common people by the elitist leaders of the government and temple. The message of the Kingdom of God required dignitaries in that society to wake up to their egotism and power hunger as offensive to a just and compassionate God.

Evangelical Christianity set its mark on American history with the Great Awakening in frontier areas around 1730 that brought tent revival meetings, “hell fire and damnation” preaching, and emotional conversions as a perennial feature of evangelical movements. An ongoing sequence of these movements also brought resistance to social injustices like slavery and domestic abuses arising from alcoholism.

The tradition of serial Great Awakenings has been taken over by openly political groups like the Faith and Freedom Coalition that held its annual “Road to Majority Conference” in Washington, D.C. on June 22-24. This was a venue for Republican presidential contenders to make their case to evangelical conservatives. This year speakers took eager evangelicals through Alice’s looking glass by making “wokeness” their enemy. The representatives of multiple Great Awakenings are now attacking their historical roots.

What are they opposing when they attack wokeness? The list keeps growing, but everything on it rejects human rights, environmental responsibility, equal justice, and even the basics of democracy.

Although “wokeness” is a new term in the Oxford and Cambridge English Dictionaries, it has a long history in the African American spiritual experience and an even older connection to biblical Judaism and Christianity. According to the Cambridge English Dictionary, woke means to be “aware, especially of social problems such as racism and inequality.” The Merriam-Webster definition is “aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice).” Together these definitions highlight both insight and action targeting injustices traditionally found in the African American experience of racism. The music and lore of enslaved Africans was inspired by the biblical stories of marginalized groups. It makes sense, therefore, that other minorities “become woke” when their experiences parallel formerly enslaved citizens and use the same vocabulary to fight oppression.

Another way of seeing the emergence of “wokeness” is to recognize it as expanding the American habit of Great Awakenings beyond the white evangelical base found in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American history. Largely white evangelical representatives of the frontier tradition can’t tolerate its expansion to a formerly enslaved population or other traditions of mixed colors.

The term wokeness is being used in a new phase of the culture wars that religious and political conservatives claim are against the evils of liberalism. This new wave of hatred and divisiveness is especially disturbing because it denies the existence of racism, human-generated climate change, social and economic injustice, and blatant corruption driving the conservative political agenda. Rather than stand outside political parties and demand higher standards of behavior, these evangelicals have embraced a single party and its victory at all costs. They have become the blind following demagogues who oppose opening one’s eyes to clear evidence of how division and hatred are undermining everything they claim to support.

There is another way, the road of prophetic spirituality that stands outside all political parties and insists on facing up to ongoing racial, gender, environmental, economic, and social inequities afflicting increasing numbers of people. This way doesn’t promise easy or quick solutions, rather it demands following the hard path of compassion and personal sacrifice for the welfare of others and our planet.

The way has been pointed in scripture by Amos, Jeremiah, Jesus, Paul, and the book of James. Evangelical groups like Sojourners, the New Baptist Covenant, Christians for Social Action, and the Episcopal Church under the leadership of Bishop Michael Curry are speaking from the same set of values, along with Unitarian Universalists, Congregationalists, Progressive Christians, and Karen Armstrong’s Charter for Compassion. Many charitable organizations also join this approach as they seek to advance the Beloved Community.

Prophetic spirituality applauds the courage to wake up and come to oneself, as the parable tells us the Prodigal Son did, and to act on new insight by taking bold, courageous steps to demonstrate new behaviors.

Genuine wokeness can be seen as part of an ongoing American spiritual heritage. It is something to celebrate—something to unite us—not something to oppose.

Edward G. Simmons is a Vanderbilt Ph.D. who teaches history at Georgia Gwinnett College. He is a Bible scholar, Unitarian Christian, and veteran Sunday School teacher in Presbyterian Churches. He is the author of Talking Back to the Bible and two chapters in The Spiritual Danger of Donald Trump: 30 Christian Evangelicals on Justice, Truth, and Moral Integrity edited by Ronald J. Sider. His latest book is Values, Truth, and Spiritual Danger: Progressive Christianity in the Age of Trump. Dr. Simmons is an energetic speaker for education, religious, and civic groups of all ages. He may be contacted at the following email address: egsimmons6@gmail.com.