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I think what we're seeing here is modern woke secularism is a religion that has adapted to American law around the separation of church and state, such that it is able to infest the perquisites of religion without being expunged by the court's religious protection pesticides. Wokeness is a religion in the sense of acknowledging an ultimate reality and seeking to answer metaphysical questions about life, the universe, and everything; but it avoids the legal American definition of religion and thus can seek to be enforced by laws and taught in schools and discussed directly in the workplace. It satisfies the need for religion without being a religion.
The separation of church and state fundamentally, but silently, assumed that we all had a church we were leaving behind when interacting with the state. The Founders assumed that each man had religious beliefs, likely a formal denomination, which answered questions about life, the universe, and everything and that we would all lay those disputes aside when interacting within government structures. The assumption was that our public schools would be secular, but that was ok because nobody in the room fully believed in what was being taught in that school, we were all setting aside and sacrificing some separate religious belief and finding common ground in the secular.
Wokies have in essence hacked the system, where Hindus and Jews and Christians and Buddhists and Muslims and prots and Catholics and Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons* all need to set aside their identity at the door and learn to accept secular stuff they don't actually believe, Wokies seek to impose their metaphysical understandings within the classroom and the office as orthodoxy. "Just being a decent person." Yeah, we're all trying to do that, and we all have different definitions.
This will ultimately require reworking the concept of freedom of religion.
*the Overton window of religious acceptability varied with the Founder in question and the era of the American Republic, Jefferson certainly in his writings at least fantasized about including hindoos and Mohamedans in the range of religions accepted in the land, but Missouri only rescinded the Mormon Extermination Order 50 years ago.
Reminds me of my old post on adversarial establishment of religion https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/i2r8qo/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_august_03_2020/
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Thanks, this was helpful for me to understand the problem better.
It seems that I didn't approach the subject in the right way. I should reformulate it after reading you.
We have religions and ideologies (like Wokeness) that are rival worldviews/moral orders.
Since the Church and State are separate, ideologies can use the state to enforce their worldview but religions cannot. Religions are disarmed by the law but ideologies are not because they can successfully rebrand moral demands as "anti-discrimination" and "public health."
Most people don't understand that these ideologies have morals and even metaphysics, and actually work like a religion, except that they use taboos and loyalty tests. But taboos enforced by the State work differently than theology, because theology can be debated; a State taboo just gets you fired.
So the Separation of Church and State is a lie, it doesn't separate worldviews from the State. It only separates supernatural religion from the State. Ideologies can take over the State and force morals from childhood (schools). It seems new worldviews have an advantage, since they haven't been framed as religion yet.
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I think this is an under-appreciated insight and it reminds me of @BarnabyCajones' old post on tolerance vs denial of sin. He argued that there was a qualitative difference between acknowledging the existence of a sin and choosing to tolerate it and denying the existence of a sin entirely even if the policy outcomes were ultimately the same.
I think that a fundamental limitation of secular/materialist ideologies is that they don't really allow for anything resembling traditional western notions of "right", "virtue" or "sin". See the famous Terry Pratchett bit from Hogfather about grinding down the universe to find a single particle of "mercy". Justice is a metaphysical construct, liberty is a metaphysical construct, rights (inalienable or otherwise) are metaphysical constructs and there is no place for the metaphysical in a strictly secular worldview.
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