Perhaps all social reform movements in the Contemporary Puritan Diaspora are essentially religious and political. “The personal, is the political, is the religious” This is the truth of Cultural Feminism, The Tea Party, Burning Man, Afrocentrism, The Open Source Singularity and the Religious Right. We have never been secular and we have always been modern.
Marxian and Liberal intellectuals agreed to purge history of religion and embrace a teleology of progress away from religion and towards modernity. Puritan Modernity is millenarian. Millenarian social movements create print-mediated Utopian and dystopian social imaginaries based on fantasies of radical change. These social imaginaries then create a massive self fulfilling prophecy. In America Heaven on Earth lies just around one corner and the Apocalypse is just around the other.
Just as Bruno Latour tells us to use the same frame of reference to examine the computer and the computer user, I say use one framework to understand the agency of the political movement and the religious social reform movement. Down with the Secular/Religious Dualism.
