Religious analogies are indeed pervasive nowadays. Some new examples:
https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/is-it-racist-to-expect-black-kids
In which John McWhorter argues that a document called “A Pathway to Equitable Maths Instruction: Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction” is a piece of “bigotry”, “not science but scripture:”
It claims to be about teaching math while founded on shielding students from the requirement to actually do it. This is unempirical. It does so with an implication that only a moral transgressor numb to some larger point would question the contradiction. This is, as such, a religious document, telling you to accept that Jesus walked on water. Humans may grievously sacrifice the 9-year-old, the virgin, or the widow upon the pyre in worship of a God. Too, humans may sacrifice the black kid from the work of mastering the gift of math, in favor of showing that they are enlightened enough to understand that her life may be affected by racism and that therefore she should be shielded from anything that is a genuine challenge. This is not pedagogy; it is preaching. And in this country, religious propositions have no place in the public square.
Which is simply wrong, for they’ve always had, from the Declaration of Independence to the Pledge of Allegiance, from President Lincoln to Martin Luther King, and I could cite more recent examples from President Obama to Joe Biden. But this is not the main point here. What I find more interesting is the way how the religious analogy (that is almost always a Christian analogy, as if no religions other than Christianity had ever existed) is once again used as a defamation. I’m really starting to wonder whether any contemporary comparisons of so-called “secular” and so-called “religious” views will ever return to a more balanced, analytical approach.
Probably not, especially if authors like McWorther themselves admit that they don’t know what religion is and don’t even care:
Some think it’s just that I don’t like religion and haven’t studied it. And they’re right. But that doesn’t mean we haven’t watched a religion emerge since last year.
And this is already from the discussion of another “religion”, that of “electism“. So much for the secularization of the public sphere.