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This is one of the best post in a while. I’ve long thought wokeism was a proto-religion. I had not yet quite put together how it has these advantages over traditional religion in the public square and this broke the compromise that public schools were mostly neutral grounds.
The other is with freedom of religion and to requote:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; -- First Amendment to the US Constitution”
The power to tax is the power to destroy. Public schools have always been a problem for the “free exercise thereof” because public schools require tax dollars to fund them. Being that people do not have unlimited funds the taxes limit the ability of people to fund religious schools instead of public schools. As the US state has grown more areas have become “public” and their funding has come from the power to destroy. The extreme would be like communism where everything is “public” and all funding is thru the state and taxes are 100%. At that point there would be no private life to practice religion.
I started noticing that wokeism (or rather, SJW as it was called back then) was a religion back around 2015-2016, and since then I came to realize that its great innovation over other religions was in convincing its followers and proponents that it wasn't a religion. An Evangelical Christian might be just as passionate and devout in her beliefs as any idpol activist, but she would almost certainly not deny that she is religious and fighting for her religious beliefs, and acknowledging that fact necessarily places certain boundaries around her arguments. But a devout follower of idpol would likely refuse to acknowledge the religious nature of her beliefs and arguments and thus she would have no compunction about running roughshod over boundaries placed around religion in our society.
It's really an ingenious adaptation to an environment that has placed restrictions around how religious beliefs can affect public policy. By laundering religious beliefs this way, they get to enjoy the dogmatic fervor that religion is known for and the overt sociopolitical influence that religion is at least ostensibly restricted away from. It's having your cake and eating it too, and even though I didn't see progressivism going this way back in the 90s and 2000s, in retrospect, it's almost obvious.
This is new but it isn't an innovation. Scientology did the same, early on. They still tell their newcomers that it doesn't make transcendental claims and it is completely fine to be christian and a scientologist. I think one of their big mistakes was to claim to be a religion for tax exemption, they would have made more money if they had kept paying taxes.
If you include strong ideologies, then communism did the same more than a century ago.
I think the great innovation of SJWs is to deny its own existence, it doesn't give itself a name and any name that is ascribed to it gets rejected as inaccurate or as a slur.
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