THE NEW RELIGIONS

Make no mistake, the new political ideologies are manifesting many of the same symptoms as those 'old time religions', or as Merv Bendle so eloquently puts it:

At the most profound level the answer lies in the realm of metapolitics, and in the nature of political religions, such as older versions like fascism and contemporary versions like progressivism. Metapolitics concerns itself with the underlying themes and assumptions about the nature of humanity and the world that drives political movements. In this case, the core tendency is a fierce desire to destroy religion and all notions of spirituality and the transcendent and, as Ernst Nolte pointed out fifty years ago in The Three Faces of Fascism, this desire lies at the core of all forms of fascism – of both the right (e.g., Nazism) and the left (e.g., communism). These are political religions, i.e., powerful ideologies whose cultural and political traction is so great that they impact societies like historical mass religious movements (e.g., post-Constantinian Christianity, early Islam, the Protestant Reformation, the French Revolution, the Taiping Rebellion, Communism, Nazism, and Islamism).