The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

by Andrew Doyle

By contrast, in its ongoing efforts to unravel the achievements of the civil rights campaigns, the religion of Critical Social Justice is reactionary in the truest sense of the word. Drawing from the implications of postmodernism, it seeks to abjure the very notion of objective truth. It believes that there is no reality beyond the constructions of language by which we make sense of our lives. According to this mindset, the lessons we have learned from our ancestors are just camouflage for tyrannous power structures. This is now the predominant orthodoxy in higher education throughout the Western world. It is the reason why the writer and philosopher Peter Boghossian resigned from his post at Portland State University. ‘Students at Portland State are not being taught to think,’ he wrote to his former employers. ‘Rather, they are being trained to mimic the moral certainty of ideologues.’