From an exchange with a friend who is a pastor. After looking through a list of recommended resources he got from another pastor.

I don’t think Christians have really learned to recognize “social justice” yet as an actual competing religion that’s trying to absorb their faith under its own ideological umbrella. And the danger and proximity is closer than many of them might think. The cultural orgins of Social Justice aren’t just in Marxism or postmodernism or relativism, they’re in Puritanism too.

The people descended from the Puritans stopped being Christians, but they didn’t stop being religious, and they didn’t stop being Puritanical. They just found a new theology. Social Justice has very much grown out of or perhaps infected cultural Puritanism. That’s why it has such a dangerous appeal to American Christians.

It’s a 900 pages, but “Albion’s Seed” is a super interesting look at the cultures that shaped early America. Follow that up with A Conflict of Visions or The Vision of the Annointed by Sowell, then Woke Racism by John MacWhorter, and you can actually see the cultural line straight through, starting from Puritanism. And it helps answer a lot of questions. Why this movement came into our culture through education (Puritans created our educational system, especially the elite universities), why it’s utopian (Puritans were social utopians), the emphasis on moralism and performative appearance, the elitism and social exclusion, the shaming and excommunication, the intellectualism, etc etc. These are all distinct cultural qualities and practices of the Puritans.

But whereas in the past those qualities were wedded to a Christian faith and helped rid the country of slavery and spread education and knowledge and the rule of law, today they’re spreading a far different gospel and indoctrination into a new, graceless, ideological, and balkanized religion. But they still feel like Puritans; they’re still getting the same feeling of self-righteousness, divine confidence, moral authority, and utopian excitement out of it.

Some authors who only focus on the ideology only see the intellectual Marxism and relativism and postmodernism. They don’t know enough social history to recognize the cultural element and see why certain parts of America were so primed to embrace this new religion, and why it found the home and avenues it did. The place had already been prepared for it. That’s why there’s a cultural continuity between the busybody “church ladies” of yesterday and the SJWs of today. They’re the same people.

Technology no doubt played a role too. For women in particular, the invention of birth control disrupted the traditional family structure and opened up new avenues to women, which came with lots of benefits. But people failed to realize that they had just completely redefined the fundamental conditions of existence for half of humanity, which had been stable for tens of thousands of years. Increasingly dislocated from the venues of home and family, those same maternal instincts went looking for something to attach to and found government, administration, and activism.

And it also goes without saying that this also ended up completely altering the fundamental conditions of existence for men as well, and the basis of the relationship between the sexes. As far as transforming the human social landscape goes, it was at least as big a change as the development of agriculture, and happened a thousand times quicker. Those existing instincts weren’t just going to go away. They were cut loose from their previous restraints and uses and set free to search for other places for those interests and abilities to lodge and be used. And some of that excess capacity has been good, and some of it has been problematic.

Women also suffered another major change to the stable structure of their cultural existence. Media technology changed the scope of information gathering and sharing and the way female social structures and power dynamics are conducted. The invention of the “like” and “share” buttons in particular changed the entire social landscape. Women in particular have a habit of wanting to share concerns. Men like to confront them, women like to share them. But the way, the scope, and the means were always limited by proximity.

So what happened? Instincts that were tuned for policing concerns that were “inside the walls” of an intimate community took on a very different character when they were applied to the carefully selected and curated data taken from a nation of 300 million, presented as if it was representative of your intimate surroundings. Data that was inherently distant and abstracted and isolated from context or feedback or nuance hit with the force of the shared lives of intimate and proximate aquaintances.

Social media essentially has taken gossip, which had previously been a more personal and minor (on a social scale), intimate threat, and turned it into an international powerhouse with the strength to level cities and ruin nations. How much of what passes for news these days could more accurately be classified as gossip? Either idle, or the more refined, judgemental, manipulative, social-status jockeying kind?

Anyway, those are some of my personal theories. Puritanism was looking for a new religion, women were looking for a new forum to express their displaced maternal instincts (from the moralistic to the protective to the administrative to the indulgent), and gossip as a social ill was supercharged. At the same time, the loss of anchoring religious beliefs combined with a broad loss of confidence in unifying cultural narratives following WW2 (one function of which is justifying the existence of the culture in the face of the judgment of history). People were looking for something to believe in, and were already suffering from deep doubts and disappointments and disillusionment, which the years only compounded. Douglas Murray explores this a bit in “The Strange Death of Europe”.

I’ve read elsewhere in Camille Paglia and Francis Schaeffer how the degeneration of art reflects the loss of the heroic narratives that drive and empower cultures. Shelby Steele also talks about this in White Guilt, speculating that there was a growing need for a cultural ritual, a mythology, a rite, that would absolve the West of its sins (whose felt presence did not actually diminish with the fading of religion but instead became unregulated and unmanageable and incoherent) and would let America find a way to justify itself before the judgment of history. All great cultures have felt a deep need for religion, ritual, and especially sacrifice. A means for justification, a way to appease some judgment and provide legitimacy and moral authority. Morale.

And philosophy had been through some tough times. All the grand theories and narratives had collapsed. Optimistic enlightenment had given way to cynical existentialism and nihilism, and people very much wanted something to believe in again. And along came postmoderism, promising to make something out of nothing, to make a faith out of skepticism. Throw in a dash of disappointed Marxism, wondering why the predicted future hadn’t panned out as expected and looking for a new dynamic upon which to test its ambitious utopian theories, but the “right way” this time, desperately wondering where to find some proper oppressors to overthrow and some oppressed masses to liberate, and you’ve got a revolution looking for a cause.

And men, as I said, have been thrown into as much confusion as women. The vast social changes in the needs and demands of women, as well as how women can get those needs met, have deconstructed many of the traditional avenues that structured male direction and meaning in life. Women don’t need them as much as protectors or providers, but that doesn’t mean men stopped having those instincts. They’re still kicking around inside them, looking for something to attach to.

Often they get subverted into video games or porn or recreational pharmaceuticals or other pleasantly distracting pasttimes that simulate fulfillment of those instinctual urges. And those men still left standing are wondering what they have to offer any more and what they’re for. They have aggression and competitiveness and a desire to confront and produce that they can’t find a proper home for. And in a mostly peaceful world their traditional role as hunters and warriors seems useless, or even counterproductive. Where are the predators to bring down, the lands to conquer, the enemies to defeat, except somewhere on a digital screen?

Men are looking for a war to fight, and they’re looking for a place to make safe for women that will make them want to share it with them. They’re looking for prey to hunt and bring down, to bring back and win some honor. And lo, a new war and a new enemy arise whose pursuit and scalping will bring them honor, and even better, make a place of safety and provision and justice that women will want to share with them. That’s not just how it is now, that’s how it’s always been.

So you’ve got all these different needs that have been created. You’ve got tools just looking for something to be used on. And by and by there’s a wonderful collision of demand and supply. Someone provides the looked-for answers. Purposes to which to apply cultural, technological, ritualistic, social, political, and sexual abilities and assets. Because an ability, a power, is itself a kind of need. It needs to be used, it needs a reason to be, a way to fulfill itself and justify itself and inhabit itself through application.

As silly as it sounds, Jeff Goldblum was right when he said that “you can’t have a revolution without somebody to overthrow.” The revolution needed an oppressor and a victim, the culture needed a mythology for ritual justification and sacrifice, women needed infants to care for and predatory threats to identify, men needed a enemy to be asked to confront and a cause to take responsibility for, Puritanism needed a faith to serve its piety and socio-religious dreams, America needed a religion, people needed a purpose, powers and instincts unleashed by technology needed somewhere to go and something to be used on, a people drowning in aimlessness and relativism needed a vengeful God to judge and inspire them.

People needed all these things, but they could not or would not look to the solutions of the past. They wanted a new God, a new revolution, a new ritual, a new faith, a new utopia, a new definition of sin, a new identity, a new kind of family, a new child to care for, a new purpose to serve, a new war to fight. And social justice, woke ideology, critical theory, whatever you want to call it, gave it to them.

Maybe the traditional bulkwarks of society were at least somewhat complicit in that, failing to meet the needs as they arose, misidentifying the problems that were arising and how they should be addressed, remaining too secure and insular within their own enclaves, being too willing to cede the discussion and do the important work of articulating the positive vision they had to offer.

A culture that fails to articulate its own positive vision for each generation will almost always fail to regenerate and reproduce itself. The survival value and entrenched nature of the conservative positions maybe made it too easy to take those positions for granted and made generations of parents unable or unwilling in prosperity to communicate what they had learned and been sustained by in poverty and struggle.

Who knows, maybe our apostasy is simply a natural consequence of extreme wealth and decadence distorting our experience. Remaining poor in spirit when you’re ridiculously wealthy and secure and free isn’t as easy as it sounds. And as a natural consequence of your own success and striving, your kids tend to grow up spoiled and entitled and suffering from a skewed idea of what the natural default assumptions and expectations for life should be. Can a church that doesn’t suffer really understand what it means to need and follow Jesus? I don’t know if we really know the answers to these questions.

It is easy to imagine how we can be destroyed by our aggression, our poverty, our selfishness, our licentiousness, our despair, or our ignorance. It’s less easy to imagine how we might be destroyed by our comforts, our security, our piety, our achievements, our earnestness, our idealism, or our learning. Critical social theory isn’t so dangerous because it captured the worst instincts in mankind, it’s dangerous because it captured many of the best.