I remember Christopher Hitchens describing North Korea as the most religious place he’d ever been. People invested insane levels of religious devotion to the Great Leader and observance of ritual because the punishment could be death or the death camps for 3 generations of your family. Liberals have learned to harness religious devotion and call for their “believers” to treat their political dogma as sacred, hate the unbelievers, hunt out infidels and disbelievers even in their ranks.

They’re even bringing back shaming, shunning and public humiliations more akin to 1700s Puritanism than modern Christianity. Thou shalt not question transgender dogma or whatever else the high priests proclaim today, and we’ll send a lynch mob to kill the blasphemer if you dissent. They’re harnessing powerful human emotions, but they’re undermining the ability to have rational debates in public because they don’t WANT those debates to occur and undermine their side.

Hate speech laws are the new blasphemy laws, since one side says they’re love, so anyone else must be silenced at haters. They’ve even appropriated Islam’s logic that criticism of the faith is equal to a physical attack on all the believers. That’s how Islam justifies executing atheists and those who question Islam or any aspect of the society. You hear it on a more basic level when someone responds to criticism with “You’re attacking me, you’re invalidating me, you’re erasing my existence.” Their sacred selves are too good to ever be told they’re wrong, hate facts that contradict their narrative are attacking them, if you persist in disagreeing with them, you don’t disagree - you want them dead and gone.

The liberal merger of political ideology and faith is understandable when you realize they elevated the State to the level of God two generations ago. And as they embedded their world view via “education” at all levels and silenced all contrary views from the public sphere, the next generations became more religiously invested in the political ideology because that IS their supposed source of purpose, moral direction and all that is good in the world. Because it is a literal matter of faith for them, it isn’t something that’s going to be corrected in a few years of Trump. We’re in a culture war that has taken generations to get here and will take generations to solve.