Here’s how it works: By listening to professors, or following peer pressure, a student discovers that the world is deeply wrong. Permeated by evil. Its evil is inequality. And that evil has an author: straight white males. Realizing the depth and extent of this all-pervading evil comes as a kind of conversion. One wakes up. Then one is “woke.” That’s SJW-speak for “saved.” Hence the first moment of faith. “I once was lost but now am found. Was blind but now I see.”

Alan Jacobs has written a really important essay for anyone who cares about free speech or higher education. It’s in highly academic prose. I earned a Ph.D. in English, which entailed studying abstruse “critical theory.” But I found Jacobs’ essay slow going. That’s fine. He was speaking to his fellow professors. Because his message is so crucial, let me translate it. If you have college-age kids, you need to know what they’re in for. (I edited a book-shaped vaccine against college-based insanity, Disorientation, which many have told me proved useful to their students.)

There’s a reason why so many college students don’t care about “free expression,” “open debate,” and rational discussion. Not when the views presented offend them. For centuries, we thought of most colleges — apart maybe from seminaries — as places where students would have to encounter such views. The liberal arts, which depend on open debate and dispute, were born in medieval universities. They carried on in deeply Christian colleges after the Reformation on both sides of the Tiber.

A New Gospel

Nationwide, with some exceptions, students, professors, and administrators have turned their backs on this tradition. The reason? As Jacobs shows, it is religious. Before him, Andrew Sullivan proposed the provocative thesis that the movement uniting radical students and teachers today, “Intersectionality,” is really a whole new creed. And an intolerant one. As Sullivan wrote:

“Intersectionality” is the latest academic craze sweeping the American academy. On the surface, it’s a recent neo-Marxist theory that argues that social oppression does not simply apply to single categories of identity — such as race, gender, sexual orientation, class, etc. — but to all of them in an interlocking system of hierarchy and power. …

It is operating, in Orwell’s words, as a “smelly little orthodoxy,” and it manifests itself, it seems to me, almost as a religion. It posits a classic orthodoxy through which all of human experience is explained — and through which all speech must be filtered. Its version of original sin is the power of some identity groups over others. To overcome this sin, you need first to confess, i.e., “check your privilege,” and subsequently live your life and order your thoughts in a way that keeps this sin at bay. The sin goes so deep into your psyche, especially if you are white or male or straight, that a profound conversion is required.

Like the Puritanism once familiar in New England, intersectionality controls language and the very terms of discourse. It enforces manners. It has an idea of virtue — and is obsessed with upholding it. The saints are the most oppressed who nonetheless resist. The sinners are categorized in various ascending categories of demographic damnation, like something out of Dante. The only thing this religion lacks, of course, is salvation. Life is simply an interlocking drama of oppression and power and resistance, ending only in death. It’s Marx without the final total liberation.

The New Road to Faith

Jacobs builds on Sullivan’s insight and goes into much further depth. He shows how the social justice movement on campus does much of the work that a real religion would do. It offers some of the same psychic rewards.

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