Abstract
Contemporary commentators, primarily on the broad right, tend to critique their opponents as being ‘just like a religion’, invoking figures of zealots, dogma, mantras, high priests and so forth. While openness to debate is often a key value of these commentators, this discursive manoeuvre tends to position the other as an unthinking ideologue or a duplicitous manipulator, not worth engagement. This critique has become commonplace from books to social media, disfiguring opponents as ‘post-modernists’, ‘critical social justice’ or ‘woke’ in a negative valance. These ‘iconoclastic critics’ position themselves as reasonable, dedicated to debate, and describe opponents via a dichotomy of ideology and critique, employing metaphors of depth. Crucially, they tend to distort or disfigure their opponents’ claims, redescribing them through religious metaphors. This analysis informs a reflexive consideration of critical discourse generally and considers the extent to which characteristics of this ‘iconoclastic critique’ are shared across political divides.
Iconoclasm is a classic critical gesture, literally meaning the ‘breaking of images’. Many contemporary critics are described as iconoclasts, often by their reviewers, although rarely by their critics. Of course, the term ‘critic’ has a range of meanings (Koselleck & Richter, 2006): A critic can be a judge of quality – usually an art, music or literary critic, but a critic can also be an unmasker (Baehr, 2019). Iconoclasts fit the latter category, taking a stand against received wisdom, exposing injustice, debunking ideologies and so forth. This article examines critical iconoclasts who declare that their opponents’ beliefs are ‘just like a religion’. This dismissive gesture is distinct from theories which seek to understand social phenomena as quasi-religious, from capitalism to fandom, or identifying the persistence of theological strands in contemporary thought, in the style of Nietzsche, Weber, Benjamin and many more in the contemporary field of ‘economic theology’ (Schwarzkopf, 2020).
The phrase of ‘iconoclastic critique’ is used here to describe those who critique their opponents as being ‘like a religion’, with socialism, humanism, social justice, post-modernism, ‘Cultural Marxism’, feminism and suchlike most often portrayed as ‘new religions’. Similar critical manoeuvres are employed by most parties to these debates, but the negative metaphor of religion is more used by the iconoclasts of the right than the left. Understanding the play of critique, how it discursively displaces other's claims, describes the world dichotomously and accords a special status to its author is my aim here – not in order to ‘unmask critique’, but to understand it better, to reflect on critical practice in general. Centrally, the iconoclastic gesture of describing the other as being ‘religious’ serves to discursively disfigure opponents’ thoughts, opinions and theories as being unthinking dogma, myth or superstition. Furthermore, this ‘iconoclastic critique’ positions its author as somehow superior, whose discourse is qualitatively different, somehow speaking from a special vantage point. In particular, the iconoclasts examined here claim to speak as secularists who somehow have a special understanding of debates and are willing to tolerate their opponents’ views, but suggest that these should remain private beliefs, debarred from influencing society, policy, law or the state.
This article offers two contributions. Firstly, this analysis expands the empirical study of critique. Others have examined the critiques of the alt-right (Nagle, 2017), the ‘intellectual dark-web’ (Finlayson, 2021), the critical term ‘mainstream media’ (Phelan & Maeseele, 2023), the ‘anti-woke’ (Postill, 2024) and so forth. Understanding the dynamics of these discourses without reverting to the simple dichotomy of critique and ideology is important: Despite good political intentions of challenging power or enlightening others, critique often provokes counter-critique, entrenchment and polarisation (Sahar, 2023; Samuels, 2024).
Secondly, this article reflects on contemporary critical practices. While individual critics tend to strongly distinguish themselves in terms of their political commitments, this does not lead to a clear distinction between ‘genuine critique’ and ‘pseudo-critique’. Rather, critical discourses are deployed to different purposes by antagonistic political commentators. Frequently, the sociology of critique has pointed out how critique is co-opted (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005) or imitated across the cleavages of the ‘culture wars’ (Nash & Browne, 2020). Rather than dismissing others’ critiques as ‘pale imitations’ or ‘mere co-option’ of real critique, the possibility that critical discourse might be redeployed for other political purposes needs to be taken seriously. Thus, following the pessimistic, yet generative anxiety about critique within Critical Theory since at least The Dialectic of Enlightenment, critique is considered as a problem to be examined rather than an unproblematic practice.
Before setting out a theoretical position and examining examples of the ‘just like a religion’ discourse, it is worth clarifying my position and intent. Suspending the question of whether particular discourses are accurate or justifiable is useful for the purposes of this article as a theoretical gambit, but beyond it, I pursue left-wing, social justice politics. Yet, while this article focuses primarily on authors with whom I disagree, its conclusions about critique are relevant to many critics, perhaps especially those ‘on my side’. This article aims to understand critique better as a contribution to the pursuit of effective politics, by recognising the excesses of critique amongst these iconoclastic critics, reflexively acknowledging that these occur across political divides, and trying to imagine less disfiguring or distorting forms of critique.
The problem of a critical theoretical framework
There is probably no critic who has not been critiqued. Perhaps critique does not always react directly to social situations of inequity, oppression or ideology, but oftentimes can arise as a response to prior criticism, adopting and adapting the very discourses with which one has been criticised. Explaining critique and counter-critique is akin to the problem of the chicken and the egg, a puzzle approached herein through the Sociology of Critique and Post-Critique. This approach is less a Critical Theory of society (O’Mahony, 2023), than an analysis of a society animated by a plethora of ‘critiques’ rather than a singular, capital C ‘Critique’. Broadly, this entails a post-structuralist or nominalist position (Bachi, 2015; Hansen & Triantafillou, 2022), wherein we suspend the question of whether a critique is accurate, tells the truth, or suchlike political considerations, and focus pragmatically on understanding critique as a discourse. This leads to a particular conundrum; how can we analyse critique without criticising it? Furthermore, reflexively, when we critique other's criticisms, what can this tell us about our critical discourses?
My approach to this conundrum is a Foucauldian analysis of critique as a discourse which produces ‘truth’ about the situations and relationships which it describes: ‘Discourses systematically create the objects of which they speak’ (1972, p. 53). Here, critique is displaced from its self-representation as revealing or unmasking the truth, and taken as a particular discourse – perhaps a special discourse, but a discourse nonetheless. Rather than drawing on the contemporary scholarship around ‘parrhesia’ as a vital genealogical inheritance for politics or scholarship (Folkers, 2016), this is a post-structuralist approach to how discourses pose problems, how words and symbols define the world they describe (Bachi, 2015). Attention is drawn to how critique(s) pose the problem of ideology, power or oppression, with questions about the accuracy and relevance of such critical pronouncements bracketed. Effectively, this is a nominalist approach to critique, following the ‘good Foucauldian’ method of withdrawing temporarily from any normative commitments (Hansen & Triantafillou, 2022). Partially, this is akin to Latour's approach (2009), where all discourses are taken as accounts, localised, particularised and shorn of their grander claims.
Paradoxically, this entails something of a critique of critique: the very discourse which destabilises, historicises and challenges contemporary critique is itself a critical discourse (Anker & Felski, 2017). For Foucault, especially in his last lecture series on parrhesia (2013), critique was not simply one discourse among many, and certainly not a governmentalizing discourse which shaped the ‘conduct of conduct’. Rather, critique was central to his theoretical practice. For many commentators on Foucault, critique is at the heart of politics and even the oftentimes arid methods of genealogy should be considered as a political pursuit (Harcourt, 2024). Yet, there is considerable ambivalence in Foucault's final discussion of parrhesia; for instance, his discussion of the cynics poses them as antecedents of the philosophical militancy of Marxists among others, who he considered ambivalently, to say the least (2013, pp. 177–190), or even more openly in his account of ordo and neo-liberalism as a critique of the state (2008). Effectively, Foucault's genealogical reflections on his own critical practice, howsoever they affirm critique as a special discourse, nonetheless position critique as a contingent historical discourse, as multiple, changeable and worth empirical investigation (Stypinka, 2020). Following Hacking's classic ‘The Social Construction of What?’ (1999), that something can be criticised as contingent does not automatically translate into a political orientation to transforming it.
Following Butler (2004), critique tends to be secondary and relational, challenging existing power relations or political performances. Almost inevitably, critique is a discourse about other discourses, which serves to translate or modify existing definitions or accepted statements in a critical tone, displacing or even disfiguring them – rendering ‘truth’ as ‘ideology’, for instance, or ‘nature’ into ‘social construct’. Often critique operates via a metaphor of depth, implying that there are hidden or obscured powers or interests at work, which it brings to the surface by unmasking (Baehr, 2019). Alternatively, critique positions some discourses as illusory or mythic coverings over the reality – the economy, social structure, power – which are attributed to causative power, even generating the very ideologies which are critiqued (Latour, 2004). While constructing other discourses in this manner, critique often positions itself and its author as either exterior to the discourse or situation being described, to some extent, perhaps a form of immanent transcendence (Strydom, 2011). Of course, critique is plural, so versions of political parrhesia where the speaker identifies themselves as part of the polis contrasts strongly with poses of detached unmasking of the illusions of the other. However, given our fragmented and polarised public sphere (Davies, 2021), there is a very generalised tendency for critique to be articulated across a distance, from a position of oppositional exteriority.
Approaching critique as a discourse which modifies other discourses informs a methodological nominalism, which temporarily suspends both critical claims and counter claims (Bachi, 2015). For instance, consider the case of feminism, post-feminism and the backlash (Faludi, 1991): Critiques of sexism within institutions and socialisation are contingent truth-claims, with notions such as patriarchy or heteronormativity and so forth as metanarratives. This might appear as an unpalatable critique which denies the truth of both experience and research. However, this approach similarly suspends critiques of feminism as a guilt-trip or a myth and depictions of ‘feminazis’ or disparaging of ‘social justice warriors’ can equally be considered as mere discourses. Along the way, all truth-claims about the character of gendered relationships or subjectivities and value claims about equality, freedom, care and so on are bracketed and considered as discourses. This approach temporarily suspends opinions or personal political commitments and makes no claims whatsoever about sex, gender, men, women or anything else, except to suggest that matters are decisively shaped by the discourses which construct them. Eventually, various political claims might be addressed by research and evidence, although conditions within the public sphere mitigate against any easy resolution (Davies, 2021). Paradoxically, critique both reacts to the indifference of the public, but also generates ‘the surplus of indifference created by endless criticism’ (MacKenzie, 2022, p. 58).
Evidently, this theoretical approach is somewhat critical, a critique of critique, insofar as that one central characteristic of critique is that it displaces the truth claims of other (critical) discourses and supplies an alternative explanation (Boland, 2019). However, such post-structuralism does not necessarily distort, disfigure or disparage the claims of other critics. Furthermore, my approach only displaces the claims of critique with the simple assertion that discourses are real and consequential, decisively shaping the interpretations given to events or experiences. So, rather than a form of Critical Realism which insists that certain forces or factors are actually real, consequential or even causal, the approach here flattens all ‘reality claims’ so that all claims are inescapably discursive, a ‘flat ontology’ in Latour's terms (2009). Indeed, the signature manoeuvres of critique; the metaphor of depth and the distinction between reality and surface, dichotomising ideology and critique and positioning the critic as somehow exterior or special are all taken here as discursive effects, constituted within critical discourse.
In the previous example, both the ‘feminist’ and ‘backlash’ positions deploy discursively similar, yet politically opposed claims. Of course, there are considerable differences between these opposed positions and among varied allies, an array of nuance simplified here. While as political subjects beyond our academic studies, we may articulate critical positions and oppose others as ideological (Laclau, 2014), this does not necessarily advance our understanding of the criticality of those we disagree with. Nor is it sufficient to simply posit others’ claims as mere opinions or claims, as this ignores how they are critically inflected. Indeed, there are important reflexive insights to be drawn from recognising the criticality of others, which might serve to refine our own critical practice.
This may appear circular: Yet, critique of critique, by virtue of being reflexive about its discursive gestures and open about its procedures, makes it possible to re-think critique. While bracketing the truth claims of critique, the character of these claims is traced and recognised. Despite the paradox that critics of critique practice what they seek to describe, critique becomes a visible discourse, something to be empirically investigated, moving from particular examples to an outline of its general characteristics. Critique becomes less something to be emulated or perfected, but to be studied, traced genealogically, and assembled through an anthropology of diverse practices. There is no monopoly over critique: Whoever is currently speaking, writing, defining, whoever is displacing others’ truth-claims, is involved in critical politics. Furthermore, this draws attention to the power of critique: If all positions can be critically inflected, what matters is who is speaking, to whom, with what effects (Porter & MacKenzie, 2023). Thus, what unfolds here is a conversation about critique, rather than an attempt to convert others to a critical position.
Iconoclastic critics?
It would be contradictory to dismiss critics who disfigure their opponents’ beliefs as being ‘just like a religion’ on the grounds that they are iconoclastic and therefore ‘just like a religion’. Genealogically recognising that some of the multiple cultural threads within critique include religious sources is not a warrant for dismissing critique, but an opportunity to understand it better. Ironically, iconoclasm is initially a religiously inflected criticism of religion, yet, for Enlightenment thinkers and Marx in particular, the critique of religion was a necessary precursor to political critique of society, precisely because religious discourse generally presented a justification of the status quo (Sloterdijk, 1988). Contemporary critics, from New Atheists (Postill, 2024) to queer critics (Butler, 2024), carry on a lively critique of religion. Yet, the genealogical inter-twining of critique and religion is undeniable, from the parrhesiastic critiques of power in the Old Testament (Boland, 2019) to religious forms of ‘counter-conduct’ (Foucault, 2007).
Iconoclasm evokes Exodus, where Moses descended from Mount Sinai with a tablet which forbade ‘the making of graven images’ and then destroyed the Golden Calf which his followers had made as an image of God. Prior critique of religion can be found within Zoroastrianism, which appears to arise in tension with the ‘traditional’ religion within Mesopotamia (Cohn, 1993). Old Testament prophets are full of invective against graven idols (Boland, 2019). Protestants and Puritans destroyed images and icons in Catholic churches. Thus, critical revelations of opponents being ‘like a religion’, replete with descriptions of dogma and zealotry reflects religious thought and metaphors. The category of ‘religion’ itself is tricky, as the contrast of ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ spheres reflects Christian theology (Schwarzkopf, 2020). Here, what matters is how ‘religion’ becomes inflected through critique, displacing the discourses of opponents from being claims about truth, values or reality, and exposing them as lies, ideology and delusion.
Generally, the iconoclast generates a difference and a distance between themselves and the target of their critique. Sometimes this is justified by claims of divine inspiration, as with prophecy, but in more modern cases, such as Luther or Calvin, it is a position of tension, embodied through the very act of condemning and denouncing (Baehr, 2019). For religious reformers, the critique of the institutional church was largely authorised by claims to adhere more closely to scripture, revealing rituals and images as illusory myths which obscured the truth and fooled the masses. Such iconoclastic moments, from Moses through Ezekiel to the Gospels and St. Paul are religious critiques of religion. Arguably, the secularist critique which banishes religion to the realm of the private continues this tendency, replacing religious humanism with human rights, equality before God with equality before the law. Crucially, the secularist critic positions themselves as exterior to the beliefs of the faithful.
Etymologically, iconoclasm is the breaking of images, effectively it denies the beliefs of others: faith in rituals of appeasement, reward for worship of graven idols or ceremonial sacraments of salvation are discredited by historical iconoclasts. This is a sceptical or cynical critique, a refusal to believe what others do, or to accept the meaning they attribute to events or their actions. In discursive terms, it is the refusal of the truth-claims of others, which are translated into critically inflected terms – recast as myth, delusion and false prophecy.
This comparison with iconoclasm is intended as illustrative, a means of bringing out the key characteristics of the ‘just like a religion’ critique. None of these critics claim to be divinely inspired nor return to ancient authoritative texts. However, they do tend to re-describe the claims, words, experiences and even the data of their opponents through a critical disfigurement – as dogmas, mantras and articles of faith. They address their opponents through critical exonyms: ‘social justice warriors’, ‘woke brigade’ or negatively inflected descriptions like ‘Post-modernists’ or ‘Cultural Marxists’ levelled as accusations. This critical disfigurement encodes a strong distinction between appearance and reality, considered as obfuscated and confused by the opponents, but revealed by the embattled iconoclasts. This dichotomy also extends to describing political cleavages, tending towards distinctions between good and evil rather than a diverse plurality. And the iconoclast speaks across this distance, immune to the illusions of their opponent, exhorting others not to follow them, and even seeks to banish their opponents’ political conviction to the realm of private belief.
Iconoclasm in the ‘Culture wars’
Versions of the ‘just like a religion’ critique are long-standing staples of the so-called ‘culture wars’. For instance, in 1983, Tim LaHaye's The Battle for Public Schools sought to present secular humanism as a competitor religion: ‘Christian conservatives argued that secular humanism – the philosophy that they believed informed the public-school curriculum – was more than an ideology. Secular humanism was a religion in its own right’ (Hartman, 2019, p. 203). This maps onto articulations of political antagonism during McCarthyism when popular preacher Billy Graham described Communism as a tyrannical spiritual power, with freedom only possible under Christianity (Balbier, 2021). In the early 21st century, widely popular radio host Denis Praeger frequently argued that socialism and political correctness were forms of religion. Today, gender critical thinkers compare trans-rights thinkers to a cult who believe in contemporary versions of transubstantiation.
Contemporary iterations of the ‘just like a religion’ critique should be understood in the context of ‘New Atheist’ thinkers, partly in their ‘iconoclastic critique’ of institutional religion promogulated in the decades on either side of the millennium, but also in their recent critique of the left or feminism as irrational, akin to a new religion (Postill, 2024) – as argued by Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker. Indeed, critique of institutional religion has become comparatively muted in recent years, implicitly in alignment with conservative or right-wing political stances, yet with ‘iconoclasts’ figured as rational, sceptical, centrist secularists. Arguably, these figures give a respectable, scientific or evidence-based hue to political positions which are otherwise unpalatable when expressed by those further on the right wing – for instance, positions on migration, Islam, feminism, transgender rights, race or income distribution. Such critics generally position themselves as independent, free-thinkers, courageously standing up against mass-conformity or state interference on behalf of ‘ordinary people’ – a long-standing critical stance.
To cite a prominent example, recycled frequently on social media, in 2016 at the ‘Battle of Ideas’ event in London Camille Paglia compared feminism to a religion: … the new religion of political correctness. […] It's the same kind of fanaticism. I mean, I’ve found that the second-wave feminists, it's like the Spanish Inquisition. I’m not kidding. Like anything with any form of dissent, even within feminism, is treated as heresy … and they actually try to destroy you. (Limbaugh, 2018)
In recent years, phrases akin to ‘just like a religion’ or representing opposing views as ‘dogma’ or even ‘cults’ has become widespread and elaborated at length in books, blogs and radio programmes which we will examine here. This critique has become widespread in social media posts, but such a vast skein of examples cannot be traced here. Arguably, books or BBC documentaries are of a higher quality, presumably more thorough and well developed, and it is important to engage with the best versions of these critiques – to avoid distorting or disfiguring their claims.
Doyle's (2022) New Puritans criticises left, feminist, anti-racist and other perspectives, typified in his phrase ‘Critical Social justice’ (CSJ). Unsurprisingly, these perspectives, which ordinarily consider themselves critical or radical, do not appear here as insight or revelation, but as illogical absurdities, histrionic tantrums with no connection to reality. To make sense of others’ apparent irrationality, Doyle insists that CSJ is not just stupidity or insanity, but a form of religious dogma – something he has managed to resist and critically oppose, a response he models for the reader, hoping to prevent them from being overwhelmed by guilt-trips, blackmail or social pressure.
Doyle acknowledges the term ‘religion’ is metaphorical and insists that the historical puritans were far more reflective, humble and intelligent than the contemporary ‘puritans’. Religiosity and puritanism serve as critical metaphors for the purpose of unmasking and denouncing, with Doyle describing his opponents as obsessed with absurd forms of morality, possessed by an arrogant assumption of special insight, filled with delusions about their capacity to transform society in accordance with their idiosyncratic vision. This critique proceeds through metaphors like ‘high priests’ or ‘acolytes’ with occasional reference to Christian theologies, for instance, positing ‘privilege’ as the ‘original sin’ of social justice. The inability or refusal to engage in rational debate, the repetition of mantras and so forth are presented as religious zealotry which cannot tolerate dissent or heretics. These are extremes within the history of Christianity, painting a cartoonish picture of both religion and his opponents.
Primarily, the metaphor of religion modifies how Doyle represents ‘belief’. His book does not represent carefully considered, actively questioned, collectively discussed ideas, but unthinking orthodoxies, ideologies produced, circulated and reiterated without thinking. As an advocate of free speech and debate, for Doyle, the ‘cardinal sin’ of his opponents is to refuse to engage in arguments about key elements of their theory – for instance, in ‘no-platforming’ or ‘cancel-culture’ or refusal to engage with opponents. This claim is anchored to the deliberate stance by some trans activists to refuse to debate certain issues with ‘gender critical’ thinkers, on the basis that what is at stake is a matter of debate for some but an existential issue for others, with stark asymmetries of power and risk. From this limited case, Doyle asserts that ‘critical social justice’ in general is unwilling to debate and therefore unwilling to think. This exaggerated antinomy between those open and closed to debate is mapped onto religious dogma and orthodoxy by contrast to enlightened, rational, pluralistic secularism. Opponents are accused of being like an ‘inquisition’ or witch-hunters, and Doyle evokes the Salem Witch trials and their shaky evidence based on ‘lived experience’ at length. The intimidatory force of CSJ is also depicted, with the suggestion that the state and many public bodies have been ‘captured’ by this way of thinking.
Doyle draws attention to the complex formulations of certain theorists, for instance, Foucault or Butler, and suggests that adherents do not actually understand the point of view they espouse but regurgitate it unquestioningly. For Doyle, this is akin to the opacity of religious texts and mysteries, recalling the inaccessibility of the Latin Bible rather than the Puritan practice of discussing scripture in the vernacular – echoing historical Protestant critics. Effectively, he argues that his opponents are not just talking nonsense, with fallacious assumptions throughout their discourse, but incapable of understanding what they are saying or recognising the erroneousness of their own discourse. In short, his opponents are delusional, in thrall to mysteries, accepting absurdities on blind faith.
Doyle clearly advocates free speech, referring to J.S. Mill's On Liberty and various contemporary commentators. Evidently, he doubts the commitment of his opponents to free speech. However, by positioning his opponents as dogmatists, fruitful debate is ruled out in many cases: … in order to reinvigorate social liberalism we need to be more selective. There is little point in attempting to engage with zealots who have abandoned reason in favour of insults and mindless platitudes… (Doyle, 2022, p. 286)
McWhorter's Woke Racism offers a list of ten pairs of contradictory demands which he derives from ‘anti-racist’ discourse – which he considers racist. These range from principles to very specific admonishments: 4. You must strive eternally to understand the experiences of black people. You can never understand what it is to be black and if you think you do you're a racist… 8. If you're white and date only white people, you're a racist. If you're white and date a black person, you are, if only deep down, exotifying an ‘other’ (McWhorter, 2021, p. 21, 23, italics in original).
For McWhorter, these paradoxical formulations are found widely in contemporary ‘anti-racist’ culture, and his list of ten could be expanded considerably. This narrates his encounters with the supposed absurdities of anti-racism and stages this encounter for readers. Of course, for readers committed to ‘anti-racism’ or well-versed in Critical Race Theory, this disfigures or distorts the ideas involved. Implicitly, for his expected readers, McWhorter narrates a familiar bewilderment, the experience of being criticised and accused in a manner that is nonsensical yet difficult to answer. Indeed, McWhorter spends a good deal of time imagining his reader, either as a white progressive who reads certain media but is unconvinced by contemporary ‘woke racism’ or Black readers who are dismayed by radicals claiming to represent them.
Having staged this encounter with ‘woke-racism’ for the reader, McWhorter then provides a diagnosis of the source of this absurdity – the veiled religion of anti-racism. For McWhorter, the supposed irrationality of anti-racism cannot be explained as mere error or insanity, rather it reflects a religious character – which for him is not an analogy or a metaphor, but an anthropological fact. Several elements are highlighted: anti-racism is considered to deal with invisible forces; it has a clergy who preach sermons and give their followers mantras to repeat; it imagines privilege as an original sin which cannot be absolved – provoking perpetual guilt and confession; it is evangelical and all conversations are attempts to convert others; it is apocalyptic, predicting a ‘reckoning’, rendering the present a catastrophe; it seeks a glorious future, and bans all heretics who blaspheme its dictates and demands completed adherence to dogma and ardent zealotry from its adherents. Evidently, this version of ‘religion’ largely draws from the imaginary of medieval Christianity and early modern Puritanism.
Unsurprisingly, McWhorter positions himself as resolutely against racism – real racism as he sees it – in the form of discrimination, abuse and violence. His critique inverts ‘anti-racism’ and denounces it as a new form of racism, which reduces Black people to ‘curated persona, as eternally victimised souls’. He objects to what he sees as essentialism, wherein Black people must have ‘Black’ perspectives, and views the supposed exemption of Black people from universal logic and standards as another insidious form of racism. The book also contains three simple policies for combating racism. But more centrally it insists that woke racism as a new religion is widespread far beyond universities, impacting real life, a political threat more significant than resurgent right-wing racism, despite even the insurrection of 6 January 2021.
McWhorter advises his reader on how to deal with woke anti-racism: Firstly, because it is religious zealotry, there is no point in debate or engagement, as the opponents are totally dogmatic. Secondly, to ignore accusations such as ‘victim blaming’ and so on. Thirdly, to refuse new definitions and distinctions offered by woke racism, for instance, the idea that the racist impact of behaviour matters beyond personal intent, or the subjectivist idea that what is felt is somehow subjectively true. To conclude, he suggests people stand up to Woke Racism, get used to being called racist in public and get on with real political work. Effectively, McWhorter offers his reader ways of reading others’ discourses critically, disfigured as religion, justifications for non-engagement in debate, fortification against further accusation, and refusal to countenance alternative arguments about racism. Implicitly, he hopes others will follow his stance, which appears to emerge from sustained encounters with other critical versions of anti-racism. In effect, McWhorter is modelling reading practices of refuting other's critiques, or the critique of critique, and in this case, explicitly preferring counter-critique to a respectful debate.
More moderately, Helen Lewis’ 2022 BBC radio documentary entitled ‘The Church of Social Justice’ interviews a wide variety of individuals, some involved in religions, others committed to social justice causes, and prominent commentators who are critical of social justice. Within this documentary, those who are conventionally religious generally emerge as very tolerant and open, while social justice advocates appear as having taken over some of the positive characteristics of religion, like commitment to causes. However, this spills over into zealotry, fundamentalism, crusades, exclusion of the other, worship of leaders and irrationalities: the idea that ‘transwomen are women’ is described as a sort of newfangled transubstantiation. The supposed lack of absolution, atonement and forgiveness in social justice circles is criticised; the religious appear as more virtuous, even according to the principles espoused by social justice.
Concurrently, this radio programme, and accompanying article in The Atlantic, narrate a lifetime of encounters with critical discourses: Helen Lewis grew up catholic and describes a biographical narrative wherein she lost or rejected this religious faith, in a typical arc of teenage rebellion. However, having been engaged in journalism and embroiled in the culture wars for several years – for instance, accused of many supposed ‘sins’ online (Lewis, 2022), she begins to perceive peculiar characteristics within social justice movements, demands for acceptance of certain sorts of dogma, the requirement to endorse certain ideas, even make particular affirmations using specific verbal formulae. This is then critically positioned as akin to a religion, in the negative sense, as a form of intolerance and closedness which stands in stark comparison to the openness she finds among the religious – including an interview with her parents. Judaic commitment to argument and Christian willingness to forgive and be reconciled are positioned as ethical stances implicitly lacking in social justice.
Moving from books to blogs, purportedly the ‘first’ comparison of social justice and religion is made in 2016 by Boghossian and Lindsay (see Doyle, 2022, fn. 17). Within a short piece of 600 words, they claim that ‘privilege is the “original sin” of social justice’, a straightforward analogy, with the proviso that Christianity and (post-modern) social justice exist in two radically different moral universes. This claim is expanded in a 16,000-word piece by Lindsay and Nayna in 2018 entitled ‘Post-modern religion and the faith of social justice’. The argument here is pursued via academic references, but with a largely circular definition of religion, wherein religion fulfils certain psychological needs, essentialised, and humans and society, in general, are considered to have religious impulses. The authors hedge their claims, saying Post-modern Social Justice (PoMoSJ) is not a religion, but ‘religion-like’, and in the conclusion assert that it is not as good as traditional religions.
Centrally, Lindsay and Nayna recommend that PoMoSJ should be treated as a religion, because it tends to take its beliefs as truth, and this overreach – untested by ‘epistemological rigour’ – is problematic. For the authors, in modern secularism religions are required to take their beliefs as mere beliefs, and therefore be pluralist, rather than attempting to shape society and the state. By comparison, PoMoSJ is equally ‘mythical’ in its beliefs but does not respect these bounds of secularism. The authors do not consider the alternative possibility that the so-called PoMoSJ is a political project, that like neo-liberalism, social democracy and many others attempts to critique and redirect state and society. That other social movements have non-falsifiable theoretical tenets and seek to change the world is similarly ignored.
After some initial academic distinctions, most of this article proceeds by way of analogy – in a highly critical key. The equation of ‘privilege’ with ‘original sin’ is mentioned again, and a comparison of the Christian cosmology of the ‘fall’ and the problem of ‘power-relations’ in history as described by social justice is offered. These speculative comparisons lead to a trenchant critique of PoMoSJ as preventing people from thinking or questioning, asserting that its main theorists are gurus, its canon mythological and obscure, and asserting that it exercises control over important institutions, especially universities. Effectively, others’ ideas are reduced to unthinking, blind belief. Lindsay and Nayna conclude that PoMoSJ is not quite a religion, but ‘religion-like’ and that in writing they wish to sensitise the public at large, so that when they hear its discourse, they recognise its zealotry and irrationality. They accept that many people believe this ‘new religion’ but argue it should not shape state or society.
Kaufman's Taboo (2024) is presented as an evidence-based book which proves that ‘cultural socialism’ is a religion. He notes that ‘Some claim this is just an empty epithet, but I believe it can be defined narrowly and forensically to delimit the religious aspects of cultural socialism’ (ibid, p. 30). The book employs familiar vocabulary: ideological orthodoxy, myth, intolerance, dogma, presenting the author as a critical iconoclast who will not ‘…genuflect in front of sanctimonious moralisers’ (ibid, p. 3). As a latecomer to this genre, Kaufman attempts to contribute as a professional, data-driven sociologist, but all his evidence are proxies, whereby explicit social orientations are analogically reduced to religious indoctrination. Troublingly, these iconoclastic allegories are similar to critiques of the lack of ‘academic freedom’ in the UK which shaped the Conservative governments intervention in universities until the elections of 2024. The ‘just like a religion’ critique is not merely rhetorical but seeks institutional influence – akin to the effect of Chris Rufo's critique of Critical Race Theory and ‘wokeism’ on education in the US (Postill, 2024).
Many blogs deploy the same argument, for instance, Bodenner's ‘When Feminism Becomes a Religion’ (2015), Deresiewicz's ‘On Political Correctness: Power, class and the new campus religion’ (2017), O'Sullivan's ‘America's New Religions’ (2018), Pluckrose's ‘How secularism can save us from the social justice movement’ (2020) or Kao's ‘Is Gender Wokeism the New Religion of the West?’ (2021) or Haworth's ‘How trans activism became the new religion of the left’ (2023). 1 Examples could be multiplied – there are internal differences in attitudes to religion itself, the target of the critique, but the analogy is always disfiguring. There are more complex versions: Zizek deploys much the same idea in a 2023 article but upcycles the accusation of cultish-ness with the Lacanian idea of the super-ego, so that wokeness expresses contradictory commands whose dual imperatives position the subject in continuous anxious guilt. There are a range of analogies yet it is highly repetitive. Much nuance is lost in the transfer of the ‘like a religion’ critique to social media, where it is routinely used as a dismissive critique of whatever the iconoclast disagrees with.
The critique of iconoclasts
Describing these authors as ‘iconoclasts’ is a rhetorical gambit, positioning them within the religious terminology which they deploy copiously and indiscriminately to critique others. Since the aim of this article is to understand these critics, this metaphor can only be pursued so far, but it is initially useful.
Iconoclasm is always already an account. According to Biblical iconoclasts, there are those who worship images, false Gods or idols – hence the Mosaic law against ‘graven-images’. Not only are idolaters in error, but they appear as morally sinful, not just in the sense of transgressing cultic rules, but being liars, oppressors and exploitative, even violent – according to Old Testament prophets like Ezekiel and Isaiah. By contrast, the iconoclast has special access to the truth, through divine revelation, which gives an accurate picture of reality, even including an explanation for the existence of idolaters, and a guarantee that their beliefs are erroneous. Indeed, the First Commandment; ‘you shall have no other God before me’, makes icon-worship a betrayal or apostasy, echoed by Puritan critiques of Catholicism.
Turning from Biblical and Christian iconoclasm to the present, there are certain parallels. The iconoclasts reviewed above certainly position the targets of their critique as icon-worshipers, who mumble mantras they do not understand, hold objects like Pride flags sacred or believe in supernatural entities, like gender identity. For iconoclasts, science, biology, economics, psychology and even sociology stand as quasi-divine guarantors of truth, different to ‘revelation’ but critically deployed to displace others’ claims. Strikingly, each of these authors not only describes something as ‘just like a religion’ but also invents special terms or categories; CSJ, PoMoSJ or ‘cultural socialism’. The creative capacities of critique become apparent here, not limited to negatively dismissing the claims of others, these critics reinscribe discourses in a distorting manner, disfiguring other's ideas.
My aim is to understand rather than just dismiss these authors as pseudo-critics or declare them ideological, and certainly to avoid imitatively redeploying their discourse against them. This means recognising them as critics and acknowledging that they deploy forms of critical discourse but also asserting that critique is plural. Indeed, Critical Theory has long recognised the diversity of critiques and their historical lineage: The doctrine of innate delusion, a piece of secularized theology, still appears even today in the arsenal of vulgar theories of ideology: insofar as false consciousness is considered as people's fundamental state, or insofar as it is generally ascribed to their socialization. (Adorno, 2022, p. 21)
Critical discourse produces the subject position of the critic, positioning a speaker as possessing special ‘critical capital’ (Holm, 2020). Iconoclastic critics generally present themselves as competent judges, relatively objective, exterior to political antagonisms. They expound a strong dichotomy between ideological and critical perspectives which involves a metaphor of depth, as the critic's keen mind penetrates the play of surfaces, images or illusions. Of course, many of the foregoing critics present themselves as pluralists and pride themselves on being open to debate, but only after banishing the ‘woke’ or whatever to the realm of ideology, as such opponents supposedly are impossible to engage in reasonable dialogue. This supposedly ‘secularist’ argument that the other is a dogmatic zealot creates a very uneven dichotomy, not between equals, but drifting towards demonisation, whereby the other is suspected of mass blackmail, state capture and ambitions for totalitarian tyranny (Samuels, 2024). The words and actions of the other are disfigured as not just error, but propaganda which overwhelms, as smokescreen, guilt-trip and calumny which need to be dispelled lest they overwhelm the reason of ordinary people.
Indeed, the discursive relationship of critique and ideology might be considered as a dialectic process: Only by being unmasked by critique are ideas configured as ideology – the critic only becomes exterior to the culture they confront through criticism, which divides the world dichotomously usually via a metaphor of depth. Paradoxically, critique is reliant upon ideology for its standing, or at least critique and ideology exist in a symbiotic discursive relationship. This is evident in the structure of the iconoclastic critiques explored above – they principally describe the errors and idiocy of those they purport to unmask. Of course, in a plural public sphere with a complex critical culture, there are innumerable approaches to critique, but it seems that the discursive disfiguring or distorting of opponents’ claims is central to iconoclastic critique.
To critique ‘iconoclastic critique’ a variety of claims can be considered as discursive conceits and refuted: There is no exteriority or ‘God-move’ for critique, rather, all social and political critique is situated, contingent and interior to debate. There is no space of pure conversation outside of material conditions where communication could be pristine and transparent (Peters, 1999). There is no clear dichotomy between critical and ideological perspectives, only a vast variety of discourses, which should be approached in a pluralist fashion, but this does not cancel their antagonisms or irreconcilability. Similarly, the metaphor of depth, which has long been subject to Derridean critique, recently renewed by Felski (2015), can be jettisoned alongside any simplistic distinctions between reality and appearance, perhaps turning to Latour's ‘flat ontology’ (2009). Most centrally, critique tends to distort and disfigure the claims of its opponents, and this negative critical translation is a dubious practice – certainly failing any test of pluralism or respectful debate.
What can we do as critics to avoid these tendencies? It is possible to imagine an immanent critique which acknowledges its own positioning and politics, refuses dichotomies, recognises a plurality of discourses and avoids the metaphor of depth. Critical Theory has been engaging in such reflexive self-interrogation for decades (Strydom, 2011). However, critiquing the claims of one's opponents without distortion is more challenging. Merely disputing the accuracy or truthfulness, the relevance or validity of opponents’ claims can be carried out within the discursive register of evidence and empirical claims testing (Foucault, 2001). Restricting critique to mere differences of opinion or perspective drifts towards relativism, a debate with disparate assertions with no means of testing ideas or resolving disagreements (Davies, 2021). Within critical discourse generally, the other's position is not just considered as incorrect, but as generating false belief, or ideology, which in turn is taken to create actual harms, including justifying inequality and oppression. Leftist, feminist, post-colonial, queer and other critiques cannot easily jettison this perspective, yet, something closely equivalent to this ‘ideology critique’ is evidently mobilised by those on the ‘other side’. Of course, generally, the critiques of the ‘other’ – whomsoever that is for whomsoever is speaking, is generally discounted as ‘pseudo-critique’, itself a disfiguring critique.
At the risk of simplifications which address just ‘two sides’, it is interesting to note that many left-wing commentators tend to emphasise how the right has imitated or co-opted critique (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005). There is certainly critical back-and-forth within the ‘culture wars’ (Nash & Browne, 2020). For instance, anti-racist thought proceeds by displacing ordinary claims to ‘not see race’ and repositioning these as ‘colour-blind’ ideologies (DiAngelo, 2021). Such anti-racist thought is repositioned as a ‘woke religion’ by McWhorter (2021), which produces a mythic image of Black suffering and white culpability. Reaching further back, claims of colour-blindness are historical responses to critiques articulated in the Civil Rights movement (Hartman, 2019).
At risk of drifting into ‘both-sides’ thinking – though both sides blame and critique the other (Sahar, 2023) – we might consider the extent to which our own critical discourses occasionally tend to imitate the counter-critiques we encounter; perhaps positioning ourselves as iconoclasts, as revealing the truth of our opponents’ ideologies, displacing and disfiguring their claims via a metaphor of depth which divides dichotomously. Of course, the long durée of critical antagonisms, traced back from the contemporary culture wars through class warfare to revolutions and enlightenment, through millenarian revolts and counter-conduct and back to parrhesia and iconoclasm gives centuries for various critical factions to adopt each other's typical strategies, and so, differentiating between these sides in terms of tactics or discourse may be difficult or impossible.
Perhaps the challenge is to recognise the excesses of our own critiques in the mirror of our critical opposites, the ‘doppelganger effect’ explored by Klein (2023). Are our contemporary critiques much better than calling opponents ‘dogmatic zealots’, who do not think for themselves but follow ‘mantras and gurus’? For instance, Butler's (2024) critique of ‘anti-gender ideology’ is highly illuminating in its detailed diagnosis of the ideologies it opposes, yet it leans heavily on an implausible psychoanalytic metaphor, wherein ‘gender’ is a ‘phantasm’ which haunts a great diversity of critics, from the Pope to Putin to conservative scientists and ‘gender-critical feminists’. While religious metaphors are less frequently deployed by leftists, feminists, anti-racists and so forth, similar discursive effects are produced by a wide variety of disfiguring terms.
Consider, for instance, the range of critiques of neo-liberalism, a quotidian figure within leftist critiques. Without offering any defence of neo-liberal thought and practice, liberal thought must be recognised as itself a critical discourse (Foucault, 2008). Frequently, critiques of neo-liberal discourses and practices involve distorting or disfiguring the claims of actual thinkers – positioning it as an ideology to be unmasked rather than a political position to be debated. It is of course possible to critique something like ‘neo-liberalism’ in terms of its harmful effects or in disagreement with its truth-claims. Yet the extent and frequency with which our own critical practices achieve this without distorting or disfiguring our opponent's ideas is an open question.
Conclusion
Reviewing the vast range of current critical perspectives is beyond the current scope (see Delanty, 2011): While the primary contribution of this article is an analysis of the ‘iconoclastic critique’ deployed by right-wing authors to declare that ‘woke’ or ‘post-modern’ or ‘social justice’ is ‘just like a religion’, the reflexive implications for the practice of critique are also important, if more equivocal. While it is tempting to simply categorise the authors analysed above as ideological, they cannot be coherently understood unless they are recognised as critics. Dismissing them as pseudo-critics, as imitators and co-opters of ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ critique may be tempting, and there are a variety of ways in which their iconoclastic critique is faulty. Yet, that risks distorting and disfiguring their critique in turn, another repetition of the endless round of critique and counter-critique in the culture war. Thus, perhaps the challenge for critique today is to recognise the diversity of critical discourses, the widely divergent purposes it is put to, and to engage with opponents as critics, acknowledging how they disfigure our discourses as ideologies, and acknowledging that they genuinely consider this as a critical revelation – much as we do to them in turn.
Whether critique can avoid distorting or disfiguring the claims of others is debatable, indeed, if we follow Laclau's insistence (2014) that all politics is the articulation of antagonism, then disfiguring the other's position might appear inescapable. Perhaps critique is inherently political and positional, therefore discursively dodging this through appeals to exteriority should be challenged. Recalling Foucault's (2013) genealogical reflexion on his own critical practice, it is worth noting that political parrhesia is participative, delivered directly to an antagonistic agora where the speaker is situated, so that iconoclastic posturing is implausible. Historically, sophists and rhetoricians who were detached from the political situation were identified as a problem by Plato and others.
When oppositional critics offer disfiguring critiques of the left, social justice and the woke, should we react with an equivalently distorting critique? For several decades, thinkers in the sociology of critique have highlighted how critique is ‘co-opted’ across political cleavages, most prominently by capitalism or neo-liberalism (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005) and having spread widely into other areas like race and gender. However, consider the converse possibility; that leftist critique might occasionally tend to mirror or imitate the discourses encountered among their opposites in the ‘culture war’. Since critique is culturally and historically variable, it may be transformed by opposing counter-critics. Perhaps, rather than disfiguring or distorting our opponents through critique, we should endeavour to respectfully displace their claims – we certainly cannot simply ‘agree to differ’, but we need not disfigure our opponents. This is not a re-iteration of the perennial demand for free speech or respectful debate, but a call for careful criticism which pays close attention to the actual discourse of opponents and refrains from disfiguring critique.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
My thanks to colleagues who responded to an earlier version of this argument presented at a seminar in Cork and to those who responded to an Op-ed version of this article published in April 2024.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
