Not Your Grandfather's Faith: America's New Civil Religion

There is a new religion in America. It’s not Christianity, though it mimics the cadence. It borrows the lingo, echoes the rituals, and slaps a fish sticker on the bumper of practically every sanitized leftist cause.

It’s the faith of the professionally aggrieved, the piously progressive, the gospel-according-to-CNN crowd—and it has its own prophets, its own high priests, and yes, even its own sacraments.

Welcome to the Church of American Civil Religion. And if you’ve ever heard David French wax poetic about pluralism or watched Russell Moore smile his way through another passive-aggressive betrayal of biblical clarity, you’ve already stepped into its cathedral.

This isn’t your grandfather’s civil religion—the kind that, for all its flaws, at least had the decency to acknowledge God in public life. This is the second-wave strain, mutated beyond recognition and baptized in the fetid waters of moral relativism and institutional rot.

Today’s version doesn’t preach Christ crucified. It preaches compliance. Compliance with every fashionable dogma that slithers out of the academic swamp and into the mouths of clerical elites who think "loving your neighbor" means wearing a mask and bowing to Fauci like he’s the fourth person of the Trinity.

You’ve seen it. The cultish chant of "diversity, equity, and inclusion" being treated as though Moses brought it down from Mount Sinai.