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

by Andrew Doyle

The rise of the religion of Critical Social Justice has been termed the ‘Great Awokening’ because it maintains that a more authentic understanding of reality is attainable from the perception of the marginalised rather than the myopia of the privileged. Worse still, this view has spread to the realm of journalism, an industry in which a commitment to the truth is surely paramount. Bari Weiss powerfully expressed this point in her resignation letter from the New York Times, writing that ‘a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else’. Yet this assault on objective truth does little to improve the lives of the powerless. Rather, it substitutes a flattering claim of superior insight which can only ever be based on faith. It is only through reckoning with the truth that we might seek to ameliorate the many inequalities of our world. For all the emphasis on ‘lived experience’, objective truth still matters. We should be wary of those who tell us otherwise in order to preserve the delicate scaffolding of their pseudo-reality.