On the religious elements of Woke Politics

Andrew Doyle, creator of the satirical Twitter personal Titania McGrath, who is an “activist,” “healer,” and
“radical intersectionalist poet." McGrath is an imaginary amalgam of some excesses in the modern social justice movement, which expresses itself in local Santa Clara County politics in concepts such as equity filters, structural discrimination, and race privilege. In an interview with the American Mind, Doyle discusses what he sees as the religious underpinnings of the Woke Movement.

"In Tom Holland’s last book, Dominion, he makes that point that in the absence of Christianity, there’s something instinctive about finding belief systems. And Social Justice does have the same hallmarks as Christianity: it has the aspect of original sin. The Augustinian concept of original sin which now comes in through whiteness, or being heterosexual—having these immutable characteristics that make you a sinner. And then you’ve got the heresy concept, the idea that anyone who doesn’t think the right things is a heretic who needs to be cancelled, and then you get the metaphor of cancel culture, which is a lot like witch hunting, and burning people at the stake as the Inquisition might have done.

"And of course so much of the theorizing behind woke ideas is based on entirely unsubstantiated, faith-based positions. They believe in unconscious bias, and institutional power structures—things that you can’t quantify or put your finger on that just sort of exist in the ether like spirits. And to ask them to prove any of these positions is to simply get the response that well, they do exist because we know they do. Which is what a religious zealot would say.

"So I think that certainly the best way to understand the social justice movement is to see it as a cult. Because then it all makes sense, and it also makes sense why they’re able to behave so barbarically toward those who don’t subscribe to their belief system. Because the hallmark of many religions is tolerance to a degree. And then where things start going wrong, where witches start getting
burned at the stake and heretics start getting executed is where that tolerance runs out. And I think that’s what happened here: the social justice movement is a fundamentally intolerant movement. And fundamentally illiberal. There’s nothing liberal about it."

Read the whole thing here.

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