There’s no such thing as a truly secular politics. It’s one of my iron rules, and it has proved essential to understanding the supposedly secularist political currents, mostly on the Left, that have sought to fill the public square in post-Christian America.
There’s plenty of room to fill. According to a major 2014 Pew Research Center study chronicling the rise of the “nones,” which Pew defines as “people who self-identify as atheists or agnostics, as well as those who say their religion is ‘nothing in particular,’” nearly a quarter of American adults fell into this category.
So it’s no surprise that the ostensibly secular Left’s response was to establish a political religion. Yet what we fail to talk about is just how strikingly primitive progressive religion is. For all the complaints that religious folks are doctrinaire and superstitious, we tend to see this behavior modeled much more obviously by leftists.
At first, liberals loved “fact-checkers,” who were really just leftists who appealed to their own authority rather than inquiry. But now they seek to strip them of that very authority because they have taken to correcting the infallible popes of progressivism. Freshman phenom Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., has a habit of saying absurdly untrue things, and when fact-checkers corrected her, repeatedly, she grew frustrated and sniped, “There’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right.”
More concerning, though, is progressivism’s dependence on superstition. When a group of Catholic high school boys stood accused of surrounding and bullying a Native American activist in Washington, D.C., before a fuller video of the encounter emerged and exonerated them, one of the memes going around on lefty Twitter was that of the teen at the center of the video smiling juxtaposed with Justice Brett Kavanaugh smiling similarly. Democrats painted Kavanaugh as a violent threat to women, so the point of the meme was to show that the way this teenager smiled proved him to be a proto-rapist.
This is “Minority Report”-style divination of future crimes. When employers Google this kid, leftists want his teenage “smirk” to crop up, branding him in perpetuity.
Let’s be clear about what this is: It’s human sacrifice. There can be a constructive purpose to societal shaming if there is absolution and redemption on the other side. But many people in America increasingly reject the idea of forgiving and forgetting, which means the ruining of lives is for no purpose other than to destroy someone and demonstrate to other people of the wrong party, color, sex, and worldview that they should keep their mouths shut. In the case of efforts to destroy the Catholic teenager, the hue and cry was for child sacrifice.
What it absolutely isn’t, however, is secular.
