There is no longer any doubt that the phenomenon sometimes identified as “Social Justice,” and the identity politics at the center of it, have taken on a certain religious quality. This thesis has seen much development in the present feature, and it has also come from frequently luminary minds like Jonathan Haidt, Andrew Sullivan, and John McWhorter, among now countless others. I have given the topic considerable treatment myself—at some length, potential readers be warned—ultimately concluding that the only thing disqualifying Social Justice from being a new religion—in fact, the fundamentalist religion of progressive activists—is a technicality.
Religions are, strictly speaking, complex phenomena reliant upon premodern mythologies, usually but not always involving deities or other spiritual forces. Social Justice is a similar complex phenomenon reliant upon a postmodern mythology. That's it. That's the only difference—a premodernist view of the universe versus a postmodernist one. In the sociological sense and most others, Social Justice can be considered a (fundamentalist) faith system, and in place of mysterious spiritual forces in a dualistic spirit-and-material world, it offers us mysterious “systemic” and “structural” forces in a purely material one. That's my conclusion, anyway.
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