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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 21, 2023

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I'll echo what others have said, in that I suspect you are self-congratulating here. My experience has been religious folks very much identifying the religious features of woke-values.

Is it because they recognize the conflict of like-kind epistemic demands or is it because they are more likely to be on the right and see the progressives as a mirror from the left? Not sure.

Overall, i think it is not necessarily being religious or even on the right that makes one recognize wokism as a proto-religion, but overinvestment in idealized liberalism that makes one miss it. Part of this is because progressivism intentionally very much uses the langauge of frank liberalism to hide from the social and often legal barriers to forced ideological commitments. I don't personally care about the sociological implications of wokism being like a religion nearly as much as the socio-legal gerrymandering of what counts as 'neutral human decency' and what counts as imposed ideology.

Take for example the idea of using preferred pronouns. The liberal understands it as a acknowledgement of liberal desire to define oneself autonomously and sees undermining it as on a spectrum from a competing right to liberal self-expression or an affront to secular decency all the way to an invalidation of the other person's freedom. Meanwhile the religious person recognizes it as expression of an ontologolical truth in line with "Muhammad is the true prophet" or John 3:16, and understands it on those terms.