Transgenderism is clearly a religion. Jesus rose from the dead. A man can become a woman. Both are examples of a kind of magical thinking protected in the US by the First Amendment as is my belief as an atheist that they are religious nonsense.
Marxism has often been compared to a religion. But the original formulation by Marx in the 1840's was as an economic theory that contained testable claims. In the beginning Marx was still working in the mainstream of economic thought, but as time went on, he became increasing irrelevant as economic thought, though very relevant as a political ideology. Already in the 19th century Marxism had evolved from being a social scientific endeavor to an ideology making moral claims. This is a step closer to a political religion, but not all the way yet. As the 20th century proceeded any correspondence between Marxist theory and reality collapsed.
Joseph Heath has a nice take here. Here he describes how a collection of serious Western scholars tried to extract something useful from Marxist thought by removing all the bullshit, and were left with Rawlsian liberalism.
As I would put it, the New Dealers showed how you could get pretty much all that was practically obtainable from socialist/Marxist ideology *within* Capitalism. At the same time, the Soviet and Chinese Marxists showed that trying to *use* Marxism for state building gave simply awful results. There was nothing left to Marxism, but it has mixed with other ideas and become increasingly like the political religion you describe--and irrelevant as I argue here:
As a left of center person this is frustrating to me. Rather than embrace the economic program that actually gave good results for most people (New Deal) and accepting the results of the great work done by the civil rights activists in the mid-20th century (political equality; antidiscrimination) they pursue increasingly religion-like moralistic ideologies. And you have the same stuff on the Right with Trumpism and techno-libertarianism ideologies. I cannot wait for this CPP to come to an end.
These are periods of violence and radical political ideation. They also seem to align with cycles of religious enthusiasm and moralistic sociopolitical movements. McLoughlin and other scholars have noted periodic upticks in religious or spiritual behaviors called “awakenings:” the Reformation, the Puritan Awakening (1610-1640), First Great Awakening (1730-60), Second Great Awakening (1800-30), Third Great Awakening (1890-1920) and the Fourth (1960-90?), see McLoughlin, p 10: https://www.urbanleaders.org/pdf/McLoughlin-Revivals.pdf
I collected events of a spiritual nature over time and calculated their frequency over time. The figure linked below shows this result (in red) and a similar frequency plot of sociopolitical instability effects I got from Peter Turchin. The two frequency plots show some overlap. https://mikebert.neocities.org/SPI%20plot.gif
Based on ideas from Strauss and Howe’s generation cycle I combined the two into a single measure of sociopolitical and cultural instability (SPCI). This is the plot that appears in the first link. The idea here is that episodes of religious revival and political instability arise from a similar mechanism. Every fifty years or so radical ideas in both religion, morality and politics burble up, as explained by Turchin’s social contagion model. In this treatment Political Fundamentalism (as a religion) and more standard-issue Religious Revival are akin, springing from similar mechanisms operating in different groups of people (who over time have become increasing intermixed).
-So what were two distinct phenomena, a mostly religious CPP over 1728-42 (model), 1730-40 (event peak) corresponding to the First Great Awakening and then another mostly political CPP over 1773-87 (model), 1775-80 (event peak) both of which you reference below. As the author notes (in brackets) what was gains in the first CPP was expressed in the second.
[Among their revolution’s ranks, however, were preachers fueled by a passionate brand of religion—in the style of the emotional religious revival of Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield—thundering against the perfidies of Great Britain. Their theology challenged religious authority, and thus the crown, and when the time for revolution came, many foot soldiers carried this zeal with them onto the battlefield.]
The process repeats in the next century. Here there was a CPP over 1818-1833 (model), 1830-35 (peak) roughly corresponding to the Second Great Awakening. There was growing religious activity during the 1795-1835 period, with the events at the beginning being more purely spiritual/religious and the latter events shading into the moralistic political movements (abolition), as the author describes below. I note the spacing between spiritual renewal and political action is closer, both taking place as part of the same CPP.
[Perhaps no example shines brighter than the battle to abolish slavery, fueled by zealous preachers from America’s then-religious-heartland of formerly Puritan New England and connected to the religious revival of the Second Great Awakening. This movement of enthusiastic tent rivals rolled through remote homesteads inspiring personal redemption and national improvement to transform America into God’s Kingdom. It pioneered groundbreaking reforms like temperance from alcohol and women’s suffrage, but it’s greatest cause was abolishing the evil scourge of slavery.]
The next CPP over 1863-78 (model), 1860-75 (events) is centered on the slavery issue. A large-scale political action taken explicitly to address a great moral wrong as revealed in the previous awakening was akin to the Reformation in its extent. It led to a range of more or less permanent reform movements (inspired by religion, but also the experience of the abolition movement and its execution during the Civil War and Reconstruction). We see the temperance movement and the social gospel developing new ideas that would burst forth in the next CPP over 1913-27 (model). 1910-20 (peak), as the author describes here:
[Even America’s most famous movement for national reform—the historical Progressive Movement—was fueled in part by impassioned religious belief. We remember the middle-class movement focused on the plight of the working poor, new immigrants, and those suffering social injustice, fighting to end child labor, eliminate 14-hour workdays, create public schools, and eliminate corruption. We often forget its close and overlapping association with the Social Gospel movement, preaching Christians had a moral duty to socially reform America. Progressive mainstays like Hull House and the Salvation Army were intricately tied to the Social Gospel, just as were reformers like Jane Addams, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucretia Mott.]
Note that much of the religious/spiritual stuff going on is actually unrelated to the political movements, which reflects ideas developed in the ”fallow” period between CPPs (1878-1913), so when the CPP shows up they burst forth. In contrast the religious stuff is new, some of which shows up politically in next CPP. For example, the Fundamentalists, after withdrawing from society after the Progressive CPP, become the Religious Right in the 1963-78 CPP. Another thing that came out of the Progressive CPP was the NAACP/Black Civil Rights movement. They long pushed for civil rights legislation, initially trying to ban lynching in the early 1920’s and then again in the 1930’s. They were unsuccessful, but lynching had fallen to a low level by the late 1940’s and the new strategy was to focus on integration. These were rational programs to achieve pragmatic results, and were successful in the early years of the 1963-78 CPP. But now being a CPP things get radical and you have Black Power, the Black Panthers, and the beginnings of what would become critical race theory. Other moralistic/liberation movements, feminism, gay liberation, libertarianism, hippies, environmentalism, sexual revolution and new financial understandings (go-go years).
And today we are in yet another one of these CPPs (2013-27). Again, a lot of the crazy, and the trend towards religious/moral and the political merging together continues. Now we have all sort of political things that seem like religions. The black power of the sixties that seems purely political has become the antiracism of today that Jon McWorter identified as a religion back in 2015. The idea that companies with no earnings serving as speculations that could pay off first floated during the late 1960’s go-go years, matured into the 1990’s internet stock bubble, which has in this CPP become the permabubble of crypto. I suspect the fever will not break until the end of the CPP in a couple of years. And then bursting on the scene is the sudden appearance of trans people everywhere, like the hippies or the Hare Krishnas last CPP
Transgenderism is clearly a religion. Jesus rose from the dead. A man can become a woman. Both are examples of a kind of magical thinking protected in the US by the First Amendment as is my belief as an atheist that they are religious nonsense.
Marxism has often been compared to a religion. But the original formulation by Marx in the 1840's was as an economic theory that contained testable claims. In the beginning Marx was still working in the mainstream of economic thought, but as time went on, he became increasing irrelevant as economic thought, though very relevant as a political ideology. Already in the 19th century Marxism had evolved from being a social scientific endeavor to an ideology making moral claims. This is a step closer to a political religion, but not all the way yet. As the 20th century proceeded any correspondence between Marxist theory and reality collapsed.
Joseph Heath has a nice take here. Here he describes how a collection of serious Western scholars tried to extract something useful from Marxist thought by removing all the bullshit, and were left with Rawlsian liberalism.
https://josephheath.substack.com/p/john-rawls-and-the-death-of-western
As I would put it, the New Dealers showed how you could get pretty much all that was practically obtainable from socialist/Marxist ideology *within* Capitalism. At the same time, the Soviet and Chinese Marxists showed that trying to *use* Marxism for state building gave simply awful results. There was nothing left to Marxism, but it has mixed with other ideas and become increasingly like the political religion you describe--and irrelevant as I argue here:
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/the-abstract-versus-the-real-in-left
As a left of center person this is frustrating to me. Rather than embrace the economic program that actually gave good results for most people (New Deal) and accepting the results of the great work done by the civil rights activists in the mid-20th century (political equality; antidiscrimination) they pursue increasingly religion-like moralistic ideologies. And you have the same stuff on the Right with Trumpism and techno-libertarianism ideologies. I cannot wait for this CPP to come to an end.
I have previously discussed periodic creedal passion periods (CPPS) to use Sam Huntington’s term:
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/cycles-of-radicalization
These are periods of violence and radical political ideation. They also seem to align with cycles of religious enthusiasm and moralistic sociopolitical movements. McLoughlin and other scholars have noted periodic upticks in religious or spiritual behaviors called “awakenings:” the Reformation, the Puritan Awakening (1610-1640), First Great Awakening (1730-60), Second Great Awakening (1800-30), Third Great Awakening (1890-1920) and the Fourth (1960-90?), see McLoughlin, p 10: https://www.urbanleaders.org/pdf/McLoughlin-Revivals.pdf
I collected events of a spiritual nature over time and calculated their frequency over time. The figure linked below shows this result (in red) and a similar frequency plot of sociopolitical instability effects I got from Peter Turchin. The two frequency plots show some overlap. https://mikebert.neocities.org/SPI%20plot.gif
Based on ideas from Strauss and Howe’s generation cycle I combined the two into a single measure of sociopolitical and cultural instability (SPCI). This is the plot that appears in the first link. The idea here is that episodes of religious revival and political instability arise from a similar mechanism. Every fifty years or so radical ideas in both religion, morality and politics burble up, as explained by Turchin’s social contagion model. In this treatment Political Fundamentalism (as a religion) and more standard-issue Religious Revival are akin, springing from similar mechanisms operating in different groups of people (who over time have become increasing intermixed).
-So what were two distinct phenomena, a mostly religious CPP over 1728-42 (model), 1730-40 (event peak) corresponding to the First Great Awakening and then another mostly political CPP over 1773-87 (model), 1775-80 (event peak) both of which you reference below. As the author notes (in brackets) what was gains in the first CPP was expressed in the second.
https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/aac4c9bb-837b-4e98-abf8-d78981e15f90_881x598.png (881×598)
[Among their revolution’s ranks, however, were preachers fueled by a passionate brand of religion—in the style of the emotional religious revival of Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield—thundering against the perfidies of Great Britain. Their theology challenged religious authority, and thus the crown, and when the time for revolution came, many foot soldiers carried this zeal with them onto the battlefield.]
The process repeats in the next century. Here there was a CPP over 1818-1833 (model), 1830-35 (peak) roughly corresponding to the Second Great Awakening. There was growing religious activity during the 1795-1835 period, with the events at the beginning being more purely spiritual/religious and the latter events shading into the moralistic political movements (abolition), as the author describes below. I note the spacing between spiritual renewal and political action is closer, both taking place as part of the same CPP.
[Perhaps no example shines brighter than the battle to abolish slavery, fueled by zealous preachers from America’s then-religious-heartland of formerly Puritan New England and connected to the religious revival of the Second Great Awakening. This movement of enthusiastic tent rivals rolled through remote homesteads inspiring personal redemption and national improvement to transform America into God’s Kingdom. It pioneered groundbreaking reforms like temperance from alcohol and women’s suffrage, but it’s greatest cause was abolishing the evil scourge of slavery.]
The next CPP over 1863-78 (model), 1860-75 (events) is centered on the slavery issue. A large-scale political action taken explicitly to address a great moral wrong as revealed in the previous awakening was akin to the Reformation in its extent. It led to a range of more or less permanent reform movements (inspired by religion, but also the experience of the abolition movement and its execution during the Civil War and Reconstruction). We see the temperance movement and the social gospel developing new ideas that would burst forth in the next CPP over 1913-27 (model). 1910-20 (peak), as the author describes here:
[Even America’s most famous movement for national reform—the historical Progressive Movement—was fueled in part by impassioned religious belief. We remember the middle-class movement focused on the plight of the working poor, new immigrants, and those suffering social injustice, fighting to end child labor, eliminate 14-hour workdays, create public schools, and eliminate corruption. We often forget its close and overlapping association with the Social Gospel movement, preaching Christians had a moral duty to socially reform America. Progressive mainstays like Hull House and the Salvation Army were intricately tied to the Social Gospel, just as were reformers like Jane Addams, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucretia Mott.]
This time the political and religious stuff happened simultaneously. While the moralist political reform was going with the Progressive era, we had the religious awakening stuff: https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/the-current-crisis-era?utm_source=publication-search#:~:text=Going%20back%20a,Harry%20Houdini. Also there was a new financial understanding that affected how the stock market operates.
Note that much of the religious/spiritual stuff going on is actually unrelated to the political movements, which reflects ideas developed in the ”fallow” period between CPPs (1878-1913), so when the CPP shows up they burst forth. In contrast the religious stuff is new, some of which shows up politically in next CPP. For example, the Fundamentalists, after withdrawing from society after the Progressive CPP, become the Religious Right in the 1963-78 CPP. Another thing that came out of the Progressive CPP was the NAACP/Black Civil Rights movement. They long pushed for civil rights legislation, initially trying to ban lynching in the early 1920’s and then again in the 1930’s. They were unsuccessful, but lynching had fallen to a low level by the late 1940’s and the new strategy was to focus on integration. These were rational programs to achieve pragmatic results, and were successful in the early years of the 1963-78 CPP. But now being a CPP things get radical and you have Black Power, the Black Panthers, and the beginnings of what would become critical race theory. Other moralistic/liberation movements, feminism, gay liberation, libertarianism, hippies, environmentalism, sexual revolution and new financial understandings (go-go years).
And today we are in yet another one of these CPPs (2013-27). Again, a lot of the crazy, and the trend towards religious/moral and the political merging together continues. Now we have all sort of political things that seem like religions. The black power of the sixties that seems purely political has become the antiracism of today that Jon McWorter identified as a religion back in 2015. The idea that companies with no earnings serving as speculations that could pay off first floated during the late 1960’s go-go years, matured into the 1990’s internet stock bubble, which has in this CPP become the permabubble of crypto. I suspect the fever will not break until the end of the CPP in a couple of years. And then bursting on the scene is the sudden appearance of trans people everywhere, like the hippies or the Hare Krishnas last CPP