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

by Andrew Doyle

Anything that contradicts the alternative reality of the Counter-Enlightenment faces the possibility of being purged. In 2020, the new puritans took to the streets in the form of mobs who toppled statues of historical figures if they were deemed to be ‘problematic’. Academic allies were posting advice on how safely to pull down monuments; after the Lincoln Memorial had been vandalised in Washington, Sarah Parcak, a professor of Egyptology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, tweeted instructions on how to demolish obelisks, implying strongly that the Washington Monument ought to be next. Madeline Odent, curator of the Royston Museum in Hertfordshire, singled out the statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square as a potential target, suggesting certain corrosive chemicals that were easy to obtain and could cause permanent damage. More recently, a golden coach used to transport the Dutch royal family on ceremonial outings has come under fire because of an illustration of slaves on one of its panels. That it was built in the late 1800s is considered irrelevant. One of the activists said that ‘they should chop it up and burn it’