Political ideology has become a religion and religion has turned into political ideology

I realised quite a few years ago that left-wing ideology was a religion. There seemed no other way to make sense of it.

The same was true of the anti-discrimination ideology.

I wasn't the first, of course, but I had the insight a couple of years or more before I read the idea anywhere, though I read about politics voraciously. 

Now I think anyone with eyes to see can see it. Left-wing politics has become a religion and religion has been turned into left-wing politics.

Back in the 1960s, people thought religion was on the way out altogether. By the late 1970s, it looked like it would continue to linger on. 

In the 1980s, some aphorist said hypochondria was the only religious enthusiasm of our times. 

It was funny, like most jokes, because it was partly true. 

No-one would make that joke after September 11th 2001.

People from then on learnt what the British, French, Spanish, Italians and Dutch of the colonial age knew about the nature of Muslim religious enthusiasm. 

It was clear by then that Marxism had been as much a religion as Islam.

What was not clear was that Marxism was a malignant religion that had not died but morphed.

Professor Paul Gottfried, in an article this week, talks more interestingly than anyone I recall reading about politics as  religion. He says,

'The priesthood of political religions demand that we punish those who express unsanctioned views as morally wicked—in the contemporary vernacular, these are “racists,” “sexists” and “homophobes.” 

'The concept of political religion is especially pressing because in the West, the struggle of intersectional, antiwhite politics takes on the elements of religion. The now-dominant woke political religion has permeated Christian confessions, which often seem unable to resist ideological invasion. Complicating the matter is that the so-called liberal democratic opposition to the left’s political religion often resembles what it claims to be resisting.

'Both sides exalt equality and universalism and view the end of human history in a similar fashion. Each sees history as culminating in triumph of their progressive doctrines, the effect of which will be the disappearance of human prejudice and the increasing indistinguishability or interchangeability of humankind.

 

'Fascist political religions were much more ham-handed... Leftist political religions by contrast are entirely systematic in how they change society. They will not stop their work until every mind has been reshaped.

'The left does well in attracting adherents for a reason given by religious anthropologist Mircea Eliade: It wields myths that fit into a culture that has long been Christian. The fascist vision of warrior nations locked in perpetual struggle pales next to the leftist dream of the suffering just triumphing in the fullness of time and creating Heaven on Earth. Unlike the right, the left has been able to harness moral guilt on behalf of its transformative vision. Even more significantly, it has weaponized hatred by recasting it as moral indignation in the face of injustice or prejudice.'