Religious-like Thinking is Innate to Human Psychology
How Modern Secularism Replaces Faith with Ideology
Humans are naturally meaning-seeking creatures. Across cultures and history, people have created religions, myths, rituals, and moral codes. Religious thinking is not merely learned but deeply rooted in human psychology.
Cognitive scientists, neurologists, and anthropologists observe that the brain is wired to find patterns, attribute agency, and search for meaning. These are traits that helped early humans navigate social life and survive. These tendencies underpin religious thought, from imagining unseen forces to constructing moral narratives.
Religion also fulfills emotional and social needs. It offers identity, belonging, moral guidance, and purpose in the face of suffering. Even nonreligious people often report a “spiritual hunger,” seeking transcendence through nature, art, or social causes.
Secularism and the Rise of Ideological Faiths
As organized religion declines in the West, the religious instinct hasn’t vanished. It has found new outlets. Many now turn to political ideologies and activist movements for meaning, moral clarity, and community. These secular faiths often mirror religion in structure and emotional fervor.
Politics and social justice movements increasingly provide sacred values, totalizing worldviews, and clear moral binaries. People form tight-knit communities of like-thinkers, adopt shared moral language, and engage in symbolic rituals. Disagreement with the groups’ orthodoxy is often met not with debate but moral condemnation and social banishment.
This pattern has been noted by thinkers across disciplines.
Columbia University linguist and social critic John McWhorter argues that progressive identity politics movements have adopted Abrahamic religious traits, complete with original sin (whiteness), confession (apologies), ingroup language (intersectionality, cultural appropriation, microaggression, privilege), and excommunication (cancellation). Sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning describe activist cultures that elevate victimhood and moral purity, and have “embraced something very much like a religion.”
Islamic studies scholar Shadi Hamid writes, “American faith, it turns out, is as fervent as ever; it’s just that what was once religious belief has now been channeled into political belief. Political debates over what America is supposed to mean have taken on the character of theological disputations. This is what religion without religion looks like.”
Clinical psychologist and former evangelical Christian Valerie Tarico compares today's progressive social justice movement to the evangelical Christianity she left, writing, “To a former Evangelical, something feels too familiar—or better said, a bunch of somethings feel too familiar.” Decades earlier, social philosopher Eric Hoffer observed in The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements that, whether religious, political, or social, mass movements are often interchangeable in their structure and mindset.
Old Dogmatism in New Clothes
Secular ideologies frequently replicate the same pitfalls as traditional religious dogma. Chief among them is binary thinking: enlightened versus ignorant, moral versus immoral, ally versus enemy. Disagreement isn’t seen as merely incorrect but immoral.
Bruce Riley Ashford, Senior Fellow at the Kirby Laing Centre for Public Theology, notes that replacing religion with politics has fueled tribalism in American society. He writes that group identity can override empathy and reason. Echoing the dynamics of historical heredity, conformity is enforced, and dissent is punished.
These belief systems often prioritize emotional conviction and moral certainty over evidence. Doubt is suppressed for the sake of group belonging. Hoffer wrote, “Mass movements aggressively promote the use of doctrines that elevate faith over reason and serve as fact-proof screens between the faithful and the realities of the world. The doctrine of the mass movement must not be questioned under any circumstances.”
Modern symbolic rituals, such as hashtags, slogans, and ideological badges, mirror religious rites. Complex issues are flattened into binaries such as oppressed versus oppressor, and good versus evil, leaving little to no room for nuance and debate.
An exemplification of these dynamics is the Unitarian Universalist (UU) church. Traditionally a pluralistic and classically liberal denomination that welcomed free inquiry, open dialogue, and respect for diverse beliefs, the UU Church has in recent years allowed progressive identity politics to assume the role of religious orthodoxy. Former UU minister Rev. Dr. Davidson Loehr and ex-UU author Jim Aikin warned that the church’s political homogeneity and lack of theological core make it especially prone to ideological dogma.
In the national Unitarian Universalist church and many congregations, political alignment with specific social justice frameworks, especially regarding race, gender, and sexuality, is treated not as one valid perspective among many but as dogma. Dissent and even the suggestion of alternate viewpoints is increasingly regarded as moral failure, if not outright bigotry. What was once a church committed to questioning dogma has, in many places, replaced theological orthodoxy with political and ideological orthodoxy.
When my independent-thinking late mother quit the church and her congregation, she remarked, “UU is no longer UU. It has become like other religions.”
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Whether one is religious or not, the dangers of dogmatic thinking, such as moral absolutism, tribalism, close-mindedness, and intolerance, are universal. Secular ideologies can be just as rigid, illiberal, and toxic as the religious institutions they critique.
References
How Politics Has Replaced Religion in America by Bruce Ashford
America Without God by Shadi Hamid
Why Politics Became a ‘Replacement Religion’ (Public Affairs Council)
Politics has become the new religion in America by Prentiss Smith
Another excellent overview.
We're what I call homoreligiosis, the meaning-seeking creatures. We want to feel we know, "Oh, so that's how it is and why." We're prone to adhere to a faith or ideology along with their claim to authority and common group dynamics. (Religion being from the word's roots, "to bind back to the root and become whole again.") That root might be God or Nature or some ideology, or belief.
I had some unease with describing Original Sin as Whiteness. I know that charge is rife these days, but that feeling or accusation is deeper and much more varied than that. It's the typical sense of remorse misdirected by Paul and Augustine in their misreading of Genesis Two/Three. People have regrets and are prone to shame. Various authority figures exploit that.
As to UU and similar leftist woke dogmatism, I agree with your deconstructing it. It's off-putting and divisive. Hounding others to believe in a cause has long been the fault of fundamentalists (Christian, Islamic, Political, even scientific, etc.), but in this anti-enlightenment era of loud egotistic opinions, it fits right in, badly.
I’m not sure about “religious instinct”. My view is that organized religion hijacked more primitive instincts such as obedience to the big guy (hierarchy), favoring group norms (social cohesion) and perhaps others. Religion provides a hierarchical high point and rituals and other behaviors to reinforce group identity. Together these features of a religious community reach deep into primitive psychological structures. I am aware that UU lacks a personified hierarchical high point and it is more of an idealized view of the appropriate believer.