Americans with no church affiliation are sometimes called “nones,” but in a recent essay in The Atlantic, Helen Lewis suggests that some of them have actually found a “new religion” in the social justice movement. She writes: “Many common social-justice phrases have echoes of a catechism: announcing your pronouns or performing a land acknowledgment shows allegiance to a common belief, reassuring a group that everyone present shares the same values.” Ms. Lewis also notes that dating across political lines has become much more of a taboo (especially among Democrats) than dating someone with different religious beliefs.
The idea that politics has replaced religion is not new. In another story in The Atlantic, from April 2021, Shadi Hamid writes, “American faith, it turns out, is as fervent as ever; it’s just that what was once religious belief has now been channeled into political belief.”
Mr. Hamid describes this phenomenon on both ends of the political spectrum, but I think that for many conservatives, it is more of a fusion of political and religious beliefs. A Trump rally may seem like “a tent revival stripped of Christian witness,” as Mr. Hamid puts it, but most attendees would probably take offense at the idea that they have abandoned religion for politics. By contrast, I think the left is likely to take offense at the idea that they are imitating religion.
Here in deep-blue Manhattan, I know a lot of people who would indeed see “religion” as a slur.
Alan Levinovitz, a professor of religion at James Madison University, expresses this offense well in a Boston Globe column from last fall: “The word ‘religion’ in ‘X is a religion’ statements usually connotes closed-mindedness, intolerance, irrationality, exclusivity, and refusal to change one’s mind when presented with empirical evidence.” The word, he writes, “is meant to function as a slur.”
Here in deep-blue Manhattan, I know a lot of people who would indeed see “religion” as a slur. They insist that their political beliefs come from logic and a careful weighing of costs and benefits, and so are antithetical to religious faith. They “trust the science” on everything from Covid-19 to climate change, and they have the numbers to prove that crime is not as bad as it seems to less enlightened voters. Many of my New York neighbors, especially those who work in journalism, rail at “bothsidesism” (that is, the suggestion that there is any political issue without a clearly correct view), and they scold people on Twitter who mourn those who were on the wrong side of the political divide.
Their protests notwithstanding, all of this behavior suggests a rigidity and intolerance associated with the worst stereotypes about religious belief. John McWhorter, a Black writer who covers social justice issues, says there is “an Elect” in the movement who see themselves as “bearers of a Good News” (religious connotations intended) and feel empowered to punish anyone for heresy.
But I would not call the social justice movement, at least as it found in the urban upper class, a religion. The simple reason is that it does not offer the paths to forgiveness or redemption that most religions do, nor does it ask its adherents to engage in self-examination so as to avoid the sins of quick judgment and self-righteousness.
Social media seems incompatible with the very idea of absolution.
Ms. Lewis raised this point in an interview after her Atlantic article, saying “I think what we have now with social-justice movements is a range of sins, but we don’t yet have a good idea of what the mechanism is for confessing, repenting, and being absolved.”
We certainly do not. For one thing, social media seems incompatible with the very idea of absolution. I admit to defriending and blocking people forever because of statements I find abhorrent (mostly because I don’t want the temptation of engaging with them), and that means I will probably never know whether they show remorse or repentance. But even this is not enough for those who see a moral imperative to cut off all contact with family members who have offensive political views. (I see individuals recommending this zero-tolerance approach on Facebook and Twitter but don’t want to single them out for fear that anti-intolerance people—or are they anti-anti-intolerance people?—will attack them.)
Can there be a mechanism for being absolved in this kind of atmosphere? Right now the best outcome for those found guilty of heresy seems to be public self-flagellation, with no guarantee of readmission to polite society. A recent example is James Sweet, president of the American Historical Society, who wrote an article for the August issue of the journal Perspectives on History in which he cautioned against “presentism,” or the judging of historical figures by contemporary moral standards, and criticized The 1619 Project, a New York Times series that recontextualized U.S. history as an outcome of the slave trade and institutional racism. (“As journalism, the project is powerful and effective,” Mr. Sweet wrote, “but is it history?”)
After an outcry on social media, Mr. Sweet added an introduction to his own article that first confessed to a “clumsy” presentation of his arguments but concluded with a tacit admission that he was wrong to present the arguments at all: “I apologize for the damage I have caused to my fellow historians, the discipline, and the AHA. I hope to redeem myself in future conversations with you all. I’m listening and learning.” But this act of humiliation can only slow down the public outrage (or redirect it to someone new). Mr. Sweet may be known for the rest of his life as the historian who essentially signed a confession of racism.
There is a popular saying that I will modify slightly here as “He fooled around and found out.” I hear New Yorkers applying it to people who say the wrong thing and are subsequently fired or canceled or worse. (I think it’s mostly still applied to Salman Rushdie as a sick joke, but then again…) When someone makes the argument that the social justice movement has become a religion, I try to imagine the equivalent of Confession in the Catholic sense, and I can only think of a priest ending the sacrament with, “Well, you fooled around and found out. Now please never come back to this church.”
No, not quite a religion as I know it.
