Leftism as religion

The far left is just as religious as the far right, just expressed differently

Great scene from the movie Dogma

One of the least appreciated but most illuminating ways to understand extreme progressivism or "wokeness" in its most uncompromising form is as a kind of religion. Not in the lazy, pejorative sense some conservatives use to dismiss it, but in a serious, structural way. If you want to understand why debates on certain cultural issues feel so impossible, why someone can lay out an argument with rigor and precision only to find the points won’t even be considered, you have to consider you're not dealing with political disagreement in the normal sense. You're dealing with a theological dispute.

What does this mean? Think about how a devout religious person reacts to a perceived blasphemy. A Catholic doesn’t feel merely inconvenienced by the suggestion that the Eucharist is just bread, they feel a deep and profound wrongness, an existential affront. A Muslim is not merely annoyed if someone suggests the Quran was written by men rather than revealed by God, it’s sacrilegious. The emotional response is not the frustration of a rational disagreement over facts, it’s the horror of witnessing desecration.

This is the best explanation why certain political issues feel non-negotiable for extreme progressives. When they hear about a trans kid being forced to play on their biological sports team, they do not experience this as a neutral issue to be weighed against other considerations (fairness in competition, genetic differences, etc). The response is visceral, religious in its intensity. It is a category violation, a transgression of something sacred. And of course, no one wants to negotiate over sacred things. Use any example you like in this paragraph, and note I’m not even personally commenting what I think here and yet still some commenters will likely reply telling me to “stick to sports” or how dare I highlight any example at all. Wouldn’t happen if not a religious debate (if it doesn’t today, I’m proud of some of you that we can have a discussion like adults). Anyway, it feels most illiberal if we cannot calmly discuss contentious things.

Once you understand this, you should have clarity on why compromise is so difficult on many issues here. It's not just that extreme progressives disagree with conservatives (or even moderates). They see them as not merely wrong but morally diseased. When you argue against a point of doctrine in a religious system, you aren’t just an opponent. You are, on some level, a heretic. It’s actually really interesting because it used to be just a brand of conservatives who were this way, about issues like abortion, which is classically tied to religion. It’s striking to me it’s become similar on the left, just on different things, because politics has taken the place of religion for them.

This has profound consequences for political negotiation. In a normal political dispute, for ex, how high to set the corporate tax rate, both sides can haggle because they recognize the trade-offs involved and find a reasonable center position. But when a dispute is religious in nature, compromise looks like moral failure. If you vehemently believe that history will look back on opponents of a progressive social policy the way we now look back on segregationists, then making any kind of deal is not just a tactical mistake, it endangers their very soul.

Religious fervor is the great underrated factor in contemporary political dysfunction. We tend to assume people act out of material interest or mere commitment to a side, but what if they're acting out of something more primal? What if they’re not just protecting policy preferences, but their purity, their righteousness? If that’s the case, then argument alone will never be enough. You don’t win theological debates with reason. You win them with conversions - or with schisms.