Back in my seminary days a professor cautioned us against becoming puritanical with this witty description of a puritan: ‘a person who loses sleep at night obsessed with sinners violating the village’s edicts against unlawful carnal knowledge.’ (Recall here the ‘For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge’ acronym that, according to urban legend, affixed a label to people caught in the sex act and pilloried them in the public square.)

How remarkable it is that our culture wars in the United States today feature a similar temperament. All alike we’re captive to contemporary versions of puritanical excess. On the left and on the right we are obsessed with compulsive sin mongering among our political opponents. Nowadays our civic discourse features crimes alleged with vituperative glee: pedophilia is one accusation now hurled by one faction against its opposite other, while subverting democracy and western values of freedom are routine accusations trumpeted back.

So the puritanical impulse favors no single ideological allegiance among us. Altogether we prove ourselves collective heirs to the Puritans’ evangelical fervor, now turned secular and ideological in ironic competition with our theocratic predecessors. Now we all become equal opportunity puritans, willy-nilly wielding our political positions with a righteous indignation befitting our founding forebears.

Thus Puritan America rises resurgent in our national village. Across the spectrum it rules us, from the most fundamentalist Christians to the most atheistic libertarians and anarchists. Mixed metaphors here: our intemperate civil religiosity beckons both secular and religious moderates to be sucked into its slavering maw.

How did we get here? How are we collectively undergoing this crucible of mutual mudslinging and chronic muckraking? Among these descriptors I privilege the term ‘crucible’–deliberately of course. That classic of literary Americana, The Crucible, exposes to clear view the Salem witchcraft trials but also befits our time as well as any other historical depiction. Alongside its indictment of Puritanism’s dark side I commend David D. Hall’s scholarly work, Witch Hunting in 17th century New England (2005).

But I have a more utopian purpose here than to rehearse the troublesome features of our country’s at-risk ethos. Rather I aspire to a more deconstructive aim: to free us all alike from this mad dog epidemic caught by each other’s biting wit and fevered distemper.

As a point of departure for my efforts, consider how it happens that the word ‘woke’ need no longer appear in quotation marks. Rather, in the recent period ‘wokeness’ has now entered the popular lingo of our ongoing culture wars. So effective has the pushback against woke culture become, in bringing the word into common parlance, that we can now begin to rely on its recognition as a familiar term in U.S. slang. Precisely because of that development, however, disputes in meaning have proliferated. Indeed, the term has devolved to mean nearly the opposite of its original import or intent.

Particularly as a Black American social justice advocate, this deterioration in meaning greatly disturbs me. Echoes of the dystopian novels, Brave New World and 1984, bear particular relevance when words are deployed to achieve their opposite meanings. But until we can reclaim the term we will be captive to the culture wars where spellbound verses prevail: ‘One word to rule them all, and in the village bind them.’

One Ring to rule them all, 
One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all 
and in the darkness bind them.

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (The Lord of the Rings)