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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 3, 2025

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This does not make their arguments somehow more "valid" in a political context than people of faith.

According to much 1st Amendment jurisprudence, and the popular understanding thereof, it absolutely does.

If that were the case, we'd have a weird situation where everyone would be in a rush to prove how atheist they are while also borrowing heavily from moral theology. It's actually kind of comical to think about - "Look at how excellent my purely rational reasoning is. DON'T LOOK AT THE GOD SHAPED HOLE"

As I see it, this perfectly describes the post-Puritan offshoot that is Wokism the Ideology That Will Not Let Itself Be Named, and how it rose to prominence. America, as a predominantly-Protestant country, developed a legal tradition of treating "religion" as being defined first and foremost by one's beliefs about God(s) and the supernatural, and in the doctrines derived therefrom; and so developed "antibodies" against religious "establishment" along these lines. Thus, the first dogmatic, crusading faith to ditch all that, make all their metaphysical priors as implicit and unspoken as possible, (yes, even with the glaring "God-shaped hole") was able to to get it's moral doctrines established without tripping the metaphorical immune response (like a virus mutating to shed a critical antigen), and become our unofficial official religion.