Thread by @kevinnbass

The modern Western political ideologies LIBERALISM, PROGRESSIVISM, and MARXISM should be understood as fundamentalist secularized denominations of Protestant Christianity.

All three descend from the same post-Reformation religious/moral structure:

PROTESTANTISM's faith alone became moral agency.

Inner conscience guided by God became secular trust in Reason, Science, or Justice.

Salvation became Progress.

Priesthood of all believers became moral equality.

Without God though, moral worth became performance to others.

Notably, all three ideologies inherit the DISTINCTIVE Protestant anthropology: a) the conviction that the individual conscience is the supreme authority, b) the suspicion that hierarchy is inherently corrupt, and c) a belief in history as a story of redemption from bondage.

LIBERALISM is the first secularization of Protestantism.

It retains the individual conscience and freedom of belief from Protestantism, but relocates salvation into the political and moral sphere:

The State of Grace becomes freedom under law.

The Elect becomes rational, self-determining liberal citizen (believes in science, etc.)

The Kingdom of God becomes the free and open society.

LIBERALISM is the "mainline" denomination: cautious, procedural, focused on tolerance and coexistence rather than conversion.

It's the modern equivalent of a moderate Protestant church and sprang from it: moral but respectable, individualist but institutional.

PROGRESSIVISM radicalizes liberalism’s moral impulse.

It retains the Protestant moral psychology--the urgent need for inner purity and social sanctification--but directs it away from individual toward collective redemption through politics.

Where LIBERALISM said "let each follow conscience," PROGRESSIVISM says "we must reform the conscience of society."

It treats sin as structural injustice, and conversion as awakening to privilege or oppression.

It becomes in practice moralizing bureaucracy, whose function is continual purification of the social body.

PROGRESSIVISM is the revivalist sect of secular Protestantism.

It is always chasing new Great Awakenings (abolition, suffrage, civil rights, climate, DEI, etc.).

MARXISM emerges from the same millenarian impulse but actively rejects God entirely and is hostile to it, but leaving the ideological structure precisely intact:

Fall: Alienation through private property.

Sin: Exploitation

Prophets: Revolutionary theorists.

Elect: The proletariat, morally pure because oppressed.

Church: The Party.

Authority: History.

Apocalypse: The revolution.

Kingdom: Classless society, the secular New Jerusalem.

MARXISM is thus the eschatological sect: a radical offshoot that keeps the Protestant sense of history as redemptive drama but replaces the divine with dialectical materialism. It’s an atheist Puritanism.

Once God is replaced by Man, the core Protestant religious concepts do not disappear.

They simply shift from God to Man/Society:

Sin/Fall:

LIBERALISM sees sin primarily in moral fault (prejudice, irrationality).

PROGRESSIVISM reads sin in structural systems (racism, patriarchy, inequality).

MARXISM sees sin as rooted in economic relations (exploitation, alienation).

Soteriology/Redemption:

Man is redeemed, not through God, but through Progress through History.

LIBERALISM's redemption is realized within existing structures via reform, tolerance, rights.

PROGRESSIVISM is more aggressive: restructuring institutions, redistributive justice.

MARXISM demands revolution, overthrow, total reconfiguration of power.

Conversion/Justification:

LIBERALISM: virtue is publicly affirmed by conformity with norms (diversity statements, apologizing for bias, etc.).

PROGRESSIVISM demands moral awakening: recognizing complicity, converting identity, decolonizing habits.

MARXISM emphasizes "awakening" to see oneself as the actor of revolution, rejecting false consciousness.

Sacrament/Liturgy:

LIBERALISM's liturgies: public apologies, awards, statements, memorials, pronouncements of inclusion, language policing.

PROGRESSIVISM: ritual protests, symbolic repudiations, curriculum overhauls, "deadnaming" ceremonies, deplatforming, etc.

MARXISM's rituals include revolutionary festivals, anniversaries of martyrs, mass mobilizations, symbolic destruction of old monuments, party congresses.

Eschatology/End-Time:

LIBERALISM: progress is linear and irreversible; the liberal world must always expand its domain. Regression is unthinkable, horrifying (think Trump).

PROGRESSIVISM: there is a promised future of justice, full equality, ecological harmony, etc.

MARXISM: the coming of the communist society is the definitive eschaton: classless, stateless, free persons.

Enemies/Heresy:

LIBERALISM's heretics are reactionaries, illiberals, bigotry, "backsliders."

PROGRESSIVISM's heretics are structures of oppression, institutions that resist moral change, etc.

MARXISM's heretics are bourgeois class, state, capitalists, counterrevolutionaries.

Community/Church:

LIBERALISM disperses church into NGOs, universities, civil society, state apparatus.

PROGRESSIVISM: movement organizations, advocacy NGOs, bureaucracy as priesthood.

MARXISM: party or vanguard is ordained community of the redeemed, hierarchical discipline.

However, when God is gone:

GRACE is gone.
FORGIVENESS is gone.
HUMILITY BEFORE GOD is gone (replaced by "self-esteem").

Divine relationship between man and God is replaced by moral competition between people.

"I'm A Good Person. Pls notice me lmao."

The modern West is the secular unfolding of Protestant metaphysics:

Salvation -> Liberation
Sin -> Oppression
Priest -> Expert or activist
Church -> State or NGO
Heresy -> Hate speech or misinformation

The logic is the same. Only symbols have changed.

MARXISM, LIBERALISM, and PROGRESSIVISM are not distinct species so much as denominations of one great, evangelical, fundamentalist, universalizing post-Protestant Church:

A religion of moral self-justification and world-redemption, long after it stopped believing in God.