--- Tara Isabella Burton, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World (2020), p. 177
Quote in context: after citing critiques by Andrew Sullivan in New York magazine and David French in the National Review:
Yet social justice's most fervent critics, in their knee-jerk derisions of it as a ridiculous cult, fail to realize quite how right they are. Social justice is a religion, and—as with any other religion—its potency as a source of meaning and its potential for zealotry are naturally correlated. Which is to say, as a religion, social justice works. It works not merely in the sense that a lot of people take it very seriously and react angrily when people misuse its sacred terms (as Sullivan and French imply), but also in a much more fundamental and potentially constructive way. It has done what so much of anodyne, classical liberalism has failed to do. It has imbued the secular sphere with meaning. It has reenchanted a godless world.
