Part 4: Do Social Justice Sects Match New Religious Movements

The first post in this series dealt with the behavioural categorization of new religious movements.  This was then validated against a multi-factored behavioural definition of religion based on Scott Atran’s work from “In God’s We Trust”. This satisfied me that there is a rough change point where things become religious. Classical religions are highly refined new religious movements which are optimized for a specific gene-cultural cognitive landscape. As James Lindsay has said, this landscape has changed as of late. Supernaturalism is now counter-fit (in the biological sense). Memes are optimized via slightly counter-intuitiveness (mixed with some behavioural and adaptive group factors). Supernaturalism is just too unbelievable now. Social Justice seems, at first blush, to fit a religious categorization, and has stumbled upon ways to optimize its memetic fitness within a modern landscape.

The second post in this series looked at Social Justice sects. Not all sects were equally as viable (as determined by adaptive group biology).  Access to resources really determined long term sect viability. The only fully adaptive group were Antifa-like protest cults. Other sects which showed near adaptiveness had one or two adaptive issues to fix.  Interestingly enough, some mutualistic support between sects solved most of the viable sect’s adaptive issues.

The third post explored Social Justice Sect Co-orindation. Co-option of state institutions via some sort of pyramid scheme was a possible solution to the challenge of group-provided benefits. This group-benefit solution enables sects to remain loosely-coupled via a vague underling ideological thread but with mutually supportive roles. A ritualized “coming of age” phase was an easy, and empirically validateable, solution to the mutualism issue.

This fourth post gets back comparing the sect types new religious movements usually operate within to those I’ve inferred occur within activist social justice.

Posts in this series

• Part 1: Trajectories of new religious movements
• Part 2: Social Justice sects
• Part 3: Social Justice sect coherence
• Part 4: Do social justice sects match new religious counterparts
• Part 5: Grand conclusions
• Part 6: Further validation testing

Part 4: Do Social Justice Sects Match New Religious Movements

Here are the sect categorizations my armchair theorizing produced

New Religious Movements

• Millennial
• Luddites
• Cults
• Evangelicals
• Gnostics/Mystics
• Revelatory

Activist Social Justice

• Theorists
• Protestors
• Online mobsters
• Puritans
• Activist organizers
• Structuralists
• Equity at any cost’ers
• Chosen people
• Allies

Here is the pairing

Activist Social Justice Sect	Closest Religious Sect Equivalent	Degree of Fit
Theorists	Evangelicals	moderate  but varies based upon zealousness
(antifa-like) Protestors	Cults	strong
Online Mobsters	Cults or Evangelicals	weak
Puritans	Luddites	extremely weak
Activist Organizers	Millenials Cult (of personality)	weak Activists aren’t ushering in a utopia, but they are adjusting the environment to produce more utopian-like pockets They aren’t based around any single cult of personality
Structuralists	none
Equity at any Cost’ers	Luddites	strong in theory, weak in practice Few equity at any cost’ers are extreme enough or articulate enough in their theory to even approach a Luddite behavioural transition
Chosen People	Revelatory Gnostics/Mystics Millenial	moderate fit is slightly stronger when taken together
Allies	Gnostics/Mystics Revelatory	moderate

ANALYSIS

After I had finished detailing religious sect categorization while writing the first post in this series, I expected the millennial categorization to most closely match Social Justice. Looks like I was wrong. It has the worst fit.

Cultish sects have the best fit. Clearly antifa-like protest groups are cult like. But that is low hanging fruit. Social Justice is not characterized by its most extreme affiliates. Antifa is also a negative not positive based organization (i.e. in theory it's based on a rejection of things rather than the support of things...)

Ludditism has a good theoretical fit but poor actual fit. I’d guess it is a potential avenue some radicals could take but most won’t. There are major scale issues. How can you get a group of people to reproduce nation state level organizations? You can’t. This pairing seems practically impossible (even though I am still really intrigued by the parallels!!!)

Let’s compare the rest of the sects to their previously inferred adaptiveness over time (see part 3)

Activist Social Justice Sect	Closest Religious Sect Equivalent	Degree of Fit	Social Justice Adaptiveness Over Time
Theorists	Evangelicals	moderate	strong potential Missing: sacred values, common ritual, and costly commitments
Online Mobsters	Cults or Evangelicals	weak	Weak Missing: freeloader detection & punishment, costly commitments and steep in-group out-group gradients.
Activist Organizers	Millenial Cult of personality	weak	Strong Missing: Freeloader detection & punishment
Chosen People	Revelatory Gnostics/Mystics Millenial	moderate	Strong
Allies	Gnostics/Mystics Revelatory	moderate	Lots of potential, but weak in practice

Activist Organizers represent the most interesting row of information. 

• Millennialism tends to work as a short-term solution for new religious movements, but not as a long-term solution.  
• Activist Organizing is strongly adaptive over time, but has no equivalent religious solution. 
• Activist Organizing isn’t based on millenialistic principles.
• It is based on a unique formulation of personality cults. Rather than being based on single personalities, it is based on a system of personalities generated by formal post-secondary departments and quasi-religious political organizations. In this sense it is very much like non-denominational Evangelical landscape where people support preachers based upon their appeal.  This is a robust solution which is not characteristic of New Religious Movements (it induces too much splitting)

The alignment between Theorists and Evangelicals seems sensical. 

The Gnostic / Revelatory thread between Chosen People and Allies is also interesting. Are the intersectional insights various “People of Colour” produce sufficiently mystical to sustain orientation toward them? I doubt it, but this might explain why we’re seeing moves to ever finer grained and more obtuse identity celebrations. Is this an implicit response to psychological resonances toward certain level of quasi-factual /mysteriousness? Is it a way of signalling diversity’s (unfathomable) epistemological depth? I’m not sure. But, it’s an intriguing thought.

The strong potential adaptiveness of Chosen People and Allies suggest these groups have the potential to provide fitness enhancing benefits to their members. The rough religious connection suggests this might involve specialized knowledge (or specialized/hard-to-fake in-group signalling). Could this come about with resume filtering diversity statements? Via mystic probing "are you also in awe of native spirituality's amazing insights"? I’m not sure. I suspect so.

CONCLUSION

Matching Social Justice sects with New Religious Movement sects suggests there are a number of moderate fits between the two. This weakly supports the possibility that Social Justice is a modern incarnation of religion, or that it is a major evolutionary transition in religion itself. Social Justice can be considered a non-supernatural religion via multi-factored behaviour/dynamical analysis.

Sect matching also helps reveal which Social Justice sects have growth potential and which don’t.  While it may be coincidental, it seems like the Social Justice sects with the greatest growth potential (via adaptive group analysis) are those which also largely reside or are generated by post-secondary institutions. This includes

• Theorist sects
• Activist organizer sects
• Chosen people sects
• Ally sects

This certainly doesn’t hinder mutualism between these sects. This weakly supports the conclusions of the third post in this series - that social justice sects can mutually support each other via some “coming of age” protest ritual which then supports a pyramid like advancements and expansions within the overall movement itself.