“It’s about internalizing correct thought. Orwell understood very well the relationship between language and thought and how control of the former permits control of the latter: “[If] thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

He devoted much of “1984” to exploring how the exercise of power over what may be said makes it easier to enjoy dominion over what can be thought, over how individuals understand themselves and their place in society. “Don’t you see,” says Syme, a lexicographer at the Ministry of Truth, “that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end, we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible because there will be no words in which to express it.”

The real-world version of that fictional effort to overhaul man’s inner life through controlling the language he is allowed to use in society is expressed more softly, though no less sinisterly. “New language… can become a useful tool for changing how people deal with each other,” say the Symes of today.

Allowing the subjective beliefs of people in the present to override the objective recording of events in the past would be extraordinary – a testament to the extent to which political correctness had overpowered reality entirely.

We now know the price of not speaking back, of letting others instruct us on what we may utter and how we must think. We now know the cost of allowing incursions into our inner lives. Man must be “master of his own thoughts,” said Spinoza. He must never be “compelled to speak only according to the diktats of the supreme power.” That is the first task of the heretic, then: to resist compulsion. To speak as he sees. To never fear to express the truth.”

———

Brendan O’Neill 𝘈 𝘏𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘵𝘪𝘤'𝘴 𝘔𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘧𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘰: 𝘌𝘴𝘴𝘢𝘺𝘴 𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘜𝘯𝘴𝘢𝘺𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦

To me, what is more interesting, and less discussed, about the entire situation, is the psychology behind how someone could see themselves as an officer of morality while also being complicit in a very morally compromised life (working for a company that helps bomb innocent people across the globe). While the disparity between words and actions in this case was particularly shocking, it was nothing out of the ordinary. Rather, it was simply a sign of this larger phenomenon: people have figured out how to absolve themselves of all responsibility for their lives, while simultaneously presenting themselves as authorities over other people’s. This has been called many things (cancel culture, identity politics, tenderqueerness). I like to call it Secular Puritanism, a quasi-religion in which your adherence to rules and norms endows you with moral authority over others, a religion in which any misstep from these rules and norms is viciously punished.

And, unfortunately, it has become endemic, infecting every space of discourse, and ensuring that actual progress, actual mutual understanding between people and cultures, never happens. We have sacrificed a focus on material betterment for moral purity. 

It should come as no surprise that a country founded on the values of a radical, white, Christian sect would be rife with this kind of purity-minded thinking. But it’s perhaps surprising that these values have found hosts who on the surface seem interested in anti-capitalism, social justice, and anti-racism. A wolf in sheep’s clothing. A Puritan behind a trans flag. 

As some have rightly pointed out, this phenomenon has been mostly talked about by the far-right, and thus we must reclaim it from them, and be specific in our language as we battle it. To only use phrases like “cancel culture”  is to lump in all criticism of people, movements, or ideas with this kind of Puritanical thinking. We are not witnessing a rise of some kind of leftist “wokeism,” but the continuation of a white, hyper-individualized system of identity politics that is primarily conservative in nature. 

There's something important to highlight in regards to how you defend your ideals:

Literally Everyone Thinks They're Right

Being correct, incorrect, or being half-correct, has no bearing on what someone believes about their own ideas. Especially the people you disagree with! The average person doesn't say 'I am going to be bad on purpose', they at most have different life experiences.

So saying something like "I just believe in ethics and being a decent person" doesn't actually mean anything. You may as well just say "I'm right, you're wrong, shut up" for all the validity it lends your argument.

You are not immune to propoganda, and you are not immune to dusguised selfishness.

even A PILGRIM’S PROGRESS hadn’t been published by the time that phillip wittebane came to the demon realm.

what y'all fail to understand is that my school was so puritanical it circled all the way back 'round to being heterophobic X'D X'D

ngl it is kind of funny that despite my trad catholic upbringing i seem to have taken less christian damage than a lot of people who have more secular upbringings. i guess it's more insidious when it's just cultural bg noise compared to when it's right in your face and you can see up close how insane it is. plus despite the religious stuff both my parents had a scientific education and my dad's fam were all socialist atheists so i guess it's not too much of a surprise that wee me just straight up rejected the trad wife messaging and went straight on the feminism instead

Intellectually I understand where people are coming from, but personally I do THE biggest double take every time someone boils down conservative Christian ideology (and/or secularized cultural reflections thereof) to a kind of dour puritanism that proclaims happiness is sin/suffering is a moral good/everyone should be miserable all the time. Like I get it! I do. But also, institutionally, I have never met a group of more passionate worshippers and vicious defenders of their own comfort than evangelical Christians. There is a reason the common thread between my various weird triggers more or less boils down to "toxic positivity." There is a REASON my exvangelical tag is #walking away from omelas.

can you talk a bit more about weber (im refering to a post you made earlier today i think)? i know a bit about the protestant ethic theory but not really the historical context in which it was written nor how it's used today. thanks!

so, weber's argument is essentially that protestant (specifically calvinist and puritan) theology played a major causal role in the development of capitalism in northern europe following the reformation. his position was that protestant ethics, in contrast to catholicism, placed a high moral value on secular, everyday labour, but also discouraged the spending of one's wages on luxury goods, tithing to the church, or giving overmuch to charity. thus, protestants invested their money in business and commercial ventures instead, turning the generation of capital into a moral endeavour and venerating hard work and economic productivity as ways to ensure one's soul was saved (as the buying of indulgences was not an option for protestants).

this is a bad argument. at core it is idealist, subordinating an economic development to religious ideology. weber never explains how the actual, material economic changes he wants to talk about were effected by a set of ideas; he doesn't consider the possibility that the ideas themselves reflected in some way the material and economic context in which they were developed; he doesn't differentiate between protestantism as a causal factor in the development of capitalism, versus the possibility that capitalism and protestant conversion both resulted from some other factor or set of factors. <- these types of problems are endemic to 'history of ideas' aka 'intellectual history' because merely writing a history of the (learned, published) ideas circulating at a given time doesn't tell you jack about how and whether those ideas were actually implemented, how common people reacted to them or resisted them, what sorts of material circumstances the ideas themselves were formulated amidst, and so forth.

in the case of weber, it's very easy to poke holes in this supposed relationship between protestantism and capitalism. even in western europe alone, we could look at a country like france, which was quite catholic, never became predominantly or even significantly protestant, and yet also industrialised not long after, eg, the netherlands and england. we could also look at what historian michael kwass calls "court capitalism" in 18th-century france, which was a largely non-industrial form of capitalism that depended on the catholic king's central authority in order to ensure a return on investment. france at this time had a burgeoning luxury culture and a centralised, absolutist government that was closely entwined with the powerful catholic church—yet it also had economic development that is recognised as early capitalist, along with growing social and economic tensions between the nascent bourgeois and petit-bourgeois classes and the aristocracy. this is not even close to being the earliest example of capitalist or proto-capitalist economic development (some predates the reformation!), and again, this is within western europe alone—we could and should also point out that capitalism is not solely a european phenomenon and can and does coexist with other, radically different, religious ideology (i have problems with jack goody's work but this is something i think it can help elucidate).

weber argued that the 'spirit of capitalism' was no longer dependent on the protestant theology that had initially spawned it—but again, here we see issues with idealist methodologies in history. at what point, and how, does this 'spirit' become autonomous? what is it that has taken hold, if weber is not talking about the 'protestant ethic' itself and is also not interested in analysing the material changes that comprise capitalism except as effects of some underlying ideology? well, it's what he sees as a general shift toward 'rationalisation' and 'disenchantment' of the world, leading to an understanding of late 19th- and early 20th-century capitalism as a kind of spiritually unmoored servitude to mechanism and industry. this in turn relates back to weber's overall understanding of the legacy of the 'scientific revolution', which is another can of (bad) worms. there is a lot to say about these elements of weber's thought, but for starters the idea that europe was the progenitor of all 'scientific advancement', that it then simply disseminated such knowledge to the rest of the world (the apotheosis of the centre-periphery model, lmao), and that europe has become 'disenchanted', ie irreligious, as a result of such scientific advancement... is just patently bad analysis. it's eurocentric, chauvinistic, and simply demonstrably untrue in like twelve different ways.

anyway, when i see conservatives and reactionaries cite weber, i'm not surprised. his arguments are conservative (his entire intellectual paradigm in this text was part of his critique of marx and the premises of materialist / contextualist history). but when i see ostensible leftists doing it, often as some kind of dunk on protestantism (or christianity more generally, which is not even a good reading of weber's own understanding of catholicism), it's more irritating to me. i am not interested in 'leftisms' that are not materialist. weber's analysis is a bad explanation of how and why capitalism took hold; it doesn't even work for the limited northern european case studies he starts with because, again, idealist history fundamentally fails to explain how ideology itself creates material change. like, "some guy writes something down -> ??? -> everyone just agrees with him -> ??? -> stuff happens somehow" is not a good explanation of any phenomenon, lmao. if we are stuck on the idea that capitalism, a set of economic phenomena and real relations of production, is the result of ideology, then we will also be stuck trying to 'combat' capitalism on the ideological level. it's unserious and counterproductive. weber's analysis has retained an outsize position in the sociological historiography because it's an attractively simplistic, top-down, idealist explanation of both capitalism and protestantism that makes centuries worth of material changes to production forms into a kind of ideological coup ushering in an age of 'rationalism'. this is just not a text that tells us, leftists, anything politically useful. at best it is an explication of the internal psychological logics of (some) forms of protestantism in (some) places and contexts.

@alightingdove

I'm fully aware of the weirdness. I'm very aware of the world's religions and their differences. My point is that the virtues of Buddhism are, generally, well-intentioned and sustainable from a secular perspective. We know why the Buddha became an ascetic - he witnessed sickness, aging, and death, and he decided to leave his luxurious life in pursuit of meaning.

Had to break this discussion out of the comments section because I think you're making a number of serious errors in your assumptions.

One--Buddhism is not an especially noble or enlightened religion. As this Buddhist and scholar of Buddhism points out, traditional Buddhist morality is deeply medieval, and very out of step with modern values. It is patriarchal, puritanical, and authoritarian. See also this post and this one.

Two--we have narratives about the Buddha, composed centuries after his death. As scholars of religion like Stephen Shoemaker and the cognitive scientists they have based their work on have pointed out, oral traditions are very bad at preserving authentic historical detail. They very quickly become adapted to serve the politics of later eras, and later traditions get written back onto the founders of movements to justify themselves. This is certainly true of Christianity, which had developed elaborate ahistorical traditions about Jesus within a hundred years of his death; it is even more true of Buddhism, whose oldest texts date to something like four hundred years after the Buddha's death. Islam, Zoroastrianism, Taoism, and many other traditions centered on a single founder figure (even one who was certainly historical, like Muhammad) have similar problems.

Three--religions catch on for many reasons. "Disillusionment" seems to be only one factor out of many. People adopt new traditions because of politics, identity, millennarian fervor (very big in early Islam and Christianity), hope of strategic benefit (knowledge or power from the gods), because they're forced to under threat of violence, and so forth.

So I think it is a bad idea to ascribe particular generosity or wisdom to (or to be excessively deferential to) people who, even if the traditions surrounding them are entirely authentic, made claims about the world which are unprovable or outright false, and whose morality was repugnant. And it's especially a bad idea to do so just because they have proven historically successful, given that the reasons they have proven to be thus may be pretty arbitrary.

someone: "that person is an [x], so all their opinions are invalid"

me: so how come they're right on this subject that has nothing to do with [x]

Religious fundamentalism: The process of isolating out a religion’s core doctrine and investing it with ultimate authority while rejecting all later developments as superfluous or heretical; e.g. Salafi Islam, Karaite Judaism, fundamentalist Christianity.

Religious conservatism: The preservation of a religion and its customs as they have been passed down over the centuries by the clergy and wider society; e.g. traditional Catholicism, Orthodox Judaism, Hindu traditionalism.

Religious modernism: Altering a religious tradition to adapt it to new social, political, cultural, and scientific developments; e.g. modernist Christianity, Reform Judaism, ‘neo-Hinduism’, Islamic modernism.

Fundamentalism and conservatism do not have anything inherently to do with religious politics and likewise modernism does not necessarily mean the removal of religion from public life. I will get to politics soon.

A better way to visualize these than discrete categories might be something like this, sorry for the image quality:

They are processes and tendencies, things you do to your religion, which can absolutely bleed together and coexist.

Today the official position of many religious institutions (e.g. the mainstream Catholic Church or LDS Church) falls somewhere between conservatism and modernism. Conservative and Modern Orthodox Judaism are also good examples – of being willing to bend significantly in some areas while upholding tradition in others.

The Islam of Muammar Gaddafi, the Hinduism of Dayanand Saraswati, and arguably the State Shintō of the Meiji Restoration (though Shintō isn’t scriptural) exemplify a different trend: that sometimes the most effective way to modernize is to fundamentalize. If your goal is to radically reshape the tradition, then stripping it down to the fundamentals can give you more latitude to innovate, and delegitimizes the conservative clergy who have a stake in keeping the tradition the way it is, all while framing your project as in fact the most orthodox.

More commonly though, fundamentalists will make common cause with conservatives. Christian fundamentalists in the U.S., with a few radical exceptions like Reconstructionism, have more or less always considered themselves a type of conservative, and there is a strong resonance between fundamentalists and conservatives in Islam – Saudi Wahhabism takes a fundamentalizing approach in law and culture while upholding ecclesiastical and monarchical power, and was instrumental in the rise of more categorical fundamentalisms like al-Qaeda (though even bin Laden cited medieval scholarship when it suited him). In a similar sense some on the Jewish Orthodox right, especially Kahanists, have a fundamentalizing emphasis on returning to the Torah given at Sinai but remain bound to the later rabbinic tradition – “aspiring fundamentalists within a framework that poses challenges to achieving such a thing” in @boffin-in-training’s words.

I would also mention the tendency for an old fundamentalism to calcify into a new conservatism, almost cyclically. The Protestant Reformation was in many ways a radical fundamentalization of Christianity, but today Protestantism is its own religious tradition with its own conservatives. Again, see Saudi Wahhabi Islam for what Michael Cook calls an “eighteenth-century fundamentalism” that evolved into a “puritanical conservatism”.

Religious politics: Any use of religion for the purposes of modern politics, e.g. political Catholicism, Islamism, Hindu nationalism.

Religious nationalism or ‘religio-nationalism’: Religious politics with primarily nationalist, ethno-territorial concerns linking religious identity with national identity; e.g. most Balkan nationalisms, Hindu nationalism, Buddhist nationalism, the Muslim League, Zionism. There’s a subtle difference between religious identity as national identity, such as in the examples above, versus a national church playing a strong role in cementing an existing secular nationality, e.g. Anglicanism in England or Catholicism in Spain and Poland.

Fascisms which define the ingroup religiously belong here. They are still technically secular and prioritize national and cultural identity above all: the Sangh Parivar has a Muslim wing and the Ustaše even tried to set up their own Orthodox Church.

Religious dominionism or clericalism: Religious politics trying to expand religious control over the government to impose certain values on society, whether in a fundamentalist or conservative (or even modernist) spirit; e.g. Islamism, the Christian right, integral Catholicism, Israel’s Orthodox right. These could be divided, on the model of Salafism, into ‘activist’ or ‘political’ movements which try to win elections within the existing system, and ‘insurgents’ who want to overthrow godless governments and install ones of their own.

Both names have drawbacks: dominionism suggests fully-fledged theocratic rule whereas I mean it much more broadly, while clericalism implies the role of a clergy even though many fundamentalists and modernists are explicitly anti-clerical. Certainly it would seem odd to describe Hassan al-Turabi or Muammar Gaddafi as ‘clericalists’.

Clerical fascism: Given what I just said it might be most accurate to use ‘clerical fascism’ as Roger Griffin does, to refer specifically to the collaboration of clergy with fascist movements (e.g. the stance of the Catholic Church in Italy, Croatia, Brazil, etc), especially through genuine ideological fusion like in the work of Emanuel Hirsch. Theoretically this is distinct from (quasi)fascist movements which incorporate dominionism on their own, like the Kahanist ‘halachic state’ or the League of the South’s intention to run independent Dixie on Biblical law. None of the original clericofascisti or Deutsche Christen had such extreme goals.

This post brought to you by:

Ancient Religions, Modern Politics: The Islamic Case in Comparative Perspective, Michael Cook

“The appeal of Islamic fundamentalism,” Michael Cook

“The New Religious Politics and Women Worldwide: A Comparative Study,” Nikki Keddie

Salafi movement – Wikipedia

“The ‘Holy Storm’: ‘Clerical Fascism’ Through the Lens of Modernism,” Roger Griffin

My attempt at a typology of fascist religious discourse with @anarchotolkienist’s helpful addition, and a later one which sort of anticipated this post although with some different terminology.

And a very interesting conversation about Cook’s work with @ boffin-in-training in the fash study Discord.

The influence of Twitter on online culture made me angry, the influence of TikTok on online culture kinda scares me. The amount of misinformation, censorship, media illiteracy, secular puritanism, revisionism, moral dogmatism… it just horrifies me.

Twitter made online culture into a sphere of perpetually pointless discourse, filled to the brim with pedantry, cynicism, performative outrage, gleeful abuse, bad faith arguments etc. It’s a world where everyone is an intellectual, an activist and a critic, no matter how incurious, inaccurate and demonstrably absurd their arguments.

TikTok is creating a world where everyone feels themselves to be historians, educators, politicians, community leaders, moral guides, experts etc. Like that woman who says the Roman Empire didn’t exist said: “some people just know more than you.” (Or something similar)

‘Just know’ is critical here: lots of TikTok influencers just confidently presume to know things without doing any real research, fact-checking and due diligence. They just act as if they are experts and will say whatever without citing anything. More than anything, they act as if their words and intuitions hold universal moral weight.

This is inevitably leading us to a path where the worst impulses of people who love attention and love to feel right no matter the cost are steering discourse standards for young people.

The result is this kind of secular dogmatism, puritanism and moral absolutism. What is problematic is immoral, what is uncomfortable is abusive, all authoritative information is untrue… People propagating all kinds of misinformation and historical revisionism, people spreading the attitude that all “problematic” media should be wiped from existence, that any expression that doesn’t meet their criteria doesn’t have a right to exist publicly, that morality is not concerned with actual interpersonal behaviour but with personal taste, preference and media consumption instead… At the centre of it is the bane of much online media “analysis”, the attitude that ‘I am the universal I. My taste corresponds with the bounds of what should exist and what shouldn’t. If I can’t relate to it, it’s irrelevant, if I dislike it, it must be morally reprehensible and should be erased.’

This will lead to more alienation, fragmentation and polarisation, but that’s not all. A lot of these misguided attitudes come clad in the language of progressive values and radical politics, but deliberately or not, they are smoothing the path for reactionary gain. People forget that reactionary ideas and attitudes don’t always have to come with explicitly right-wing conservative, neoliberal signifiers, they can just as easily be clad in the language of socialism or revolutionary values as well (just look at the Sovjet-Union or modern day China).

I do sincerely hope that the online left does something to counter this because this trend will make it incredibly easy for the right-wing to enflame the culture war and turn offline people against social progressivism and/or for red-brown goons and reactionary “socialists” to infiltrate the online left and increasingly make it more conservative and more culturally restrictive.

This finger-wagging, prudish and proudly ignorant version of progressivism will not protect anyone from anything. It will just open up online communities to more harassment, thought-policing, gatekeeping, public shaming and open the door for many cynical and unscrupulous people to gain prominence and violently enforce cultural conformity.

I’ve just saw a someone calling the Palestinian cause “the one remnant of true secular arab decoloniality left”.

Like “we should kill the Jews first” isn’t something Christianity and Islam agree on.

Like the Pan-Arab ideology isn’t rooted in idealization of historical Arab imperialism (look at the flag colors)

I know people make fun of Americans of being unconsciously puritan and imperialist in their “leftist” activism, but unfortunately it’s not a unique phenomenon….

Nick Land on democracy

Democracy might begin as a defensible procedural mechanism for limiting government power, but it quickly and inexorably develops into something quite different: a culture of systematic thievery. As soon as politicians have learnt to buy political support from the ‘public purse’, and conditioned electorates to embrace looting and bribery, the democratic process reduces itself to the formation of (Mancur Olson’s) ‘distributional coalitions’ – electoral majorities mortared together by common interest in a collectively advantageous pattern of theft. Worse still, since people are, on average, not very bright, the scale of depredation available to the political establishment far exceeds even the demented sacking that is open to public scrutiny. Looting the future, through currency debauchment, debt accumulation, growth destruction, and techno-industrial retardation is especially easy to conceal, and thus reliably popular. Democracy is essentially tragic because it provides the populace with a weapon to destroy itself, one that is always eagerly seized, and used. Nobody ever says ‘no’ to free stuff. Scarcely anybody even sees that there is no free stuff. Utter cultural ruination is the necessary conclusion.

Within the final phase of Modernity 1.0, American history becomes the master narrative of the world. It is there that the great Abrahamic cultural conveyor culminates in the secularized neo-puritanism of the Cathedral, as it establishes the New Jerusalem in Washington DC. The apparatus of Messianic-revolutionary purpose is consolidated in the evangelical state, which is authorized by any means necessary to install a new world order of universal fraternity, in the name of equality, human rights, social justice, and – above all – democracy. The absolute moral confidence of the Cathedral underwrites the enthusiastic pursuit of unrestrained centralized power, optimally unlimited in its intensive penetration and its extensive scope.

With an irony altogether hidden from the witch-burners’ spawn themselves, the ascent of this squinting cohort of grim moral fanatics to previously unscaled heights of global power coincides with the descent of mass-democracy to previously unimagined depths of gluttonous corruption. Every five years America steals itself from itself again, and fences itself back in exchange for political support. This democracy thing is easy – you just vote for the guy who promises you the most stuff. An idiot could do it. Actually, it likes idiots, treats them with apparent kindness, and does everything it can to manufacture more of them.

by Rosaria Butterfield

Dear Mr. False Teacher,

Permit me to write boldly to you. You have repeated your shallow shibboleths in sermons, blogs, and conferences, and you have tried very hard to pretend that secular society is a neutral playground, a marketplace of ideas where Christianity is welcome to flourish.

You punt for nuance every time and have made every clear teaching of the law and gospel a grey area of ambiguity…

It’s probably meaningful that you rarely find an example of, say, a woke electrician or plumber or truck driver. This is not an ideology that infects people at random. It’s clearly a class phenomenon.

- Malcom Kyeyune

One of the more disconcerting things in life for a Burkean conservative is finding oneself agreeing with a true and original Marxist thinker like the Swedish Malcom Kyeyune who has persistently called out white bourgeois educated classes for their faux liberalism and skin deep concern for the vast majority of the working class. According to Kyeyune, Wokeism has nothing to do with social justice or changing the world other than to entrench existing class privilege for the so-called ‘email caste’.

When I look around what I see going on it’s hard not to fault such a social observation, especially in the corporate world where I work. I know from my own experience that woke is used to distract attention away from what companies really get up to - they make profit at any cost which is the bottom line for any share holder - which is for society to not look too closely at the social price for that profit. Get a glowing rubber stamped rating from Stonewall’s own diversity champion scheme (a grift in itself) and colour in a rainbow flag in your corporate logo and you’ll be fine.

But I still tend to lean on the view of historians Tom Holland and David Starkey as well as British satirist Andrew Doyle that Woke has its origins in a perversion of Christian puritanism and has morphed into a deadly neo-religion.

If you fancy a Christmas gift to a family member or someone you know is woke, you can do him/her/they a service by gifting them a copy of Doyle’s fantastic new book:  The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World (2022). Doyle is a gay left winger and did his PhD in English at Oxford before he went into comedy (the writer behind Jonathan Pie).

Because he studied English he was exposed to the theories that underpin the woke and realised how intoxicating they were within the academic seminar rooms but made no sense when in first contact with reality outside the ivory towers. He became increasingly alarmed how woke ideas captured the traditional left.

The one minor criticism I would have is that Doyle’s book is so articulate, so on point, that perhaps it’s slightly bit too intellectual to reach any decent sized mass audience.

I think what we may sometimes forget is that the so-called intellectual elites - who went to a top tier university and were at the top of the food chain in their so-called ‘education’ - uncritically accepted the largely incomprehensible, self ejaculating intellectual French theorists whose work has essentially betrayed the intellect and strayed into the realm of the irrational. The effect of which has been, unfortunately, that people have taken it - and themselves - far too seriously.

But where else was there to go but to take the intellectual arena of the abstracted, nihilist western mind, except into the surreal, absurd and historically illiterate? The intellectual mind itself doesn’t go anywhere inherently meaningful, and these ‘secular’ New puritans clearly have the buttoned up arrogance and pseudo-morality of the old style religionists. But worse. They actually give the original Puritans a bad name. The original Puritans often get a bad press but they were terribly aware of their own human flaws and had no illusions how fallen we all were. This is why they emphasised grace and forgiveness at every turn. Good luck trying that with the New Puritans of woke.