Not long ago, I attended an event where a black man spoke of him and his black colleagues dressing in suits at work even on Casual Fridays, out of a sense that whites would look down on black men dressed down.

  The mostly white audience laughed and applauded warmly—at a story accusing people precisely like them of being racists.

  This brand of self-flagellation has become the new form of enlightenment on race issues. It qualifies as a kind of worship; the parallels with Christianity are almost uncannily rich. White privilege is the secular white person’s Original Sin, present at birth and ultimately ineradicable.

  One does one’s penance by endlessly attesting to this privilege in hope of some kind of forgiveness.

-John McWhorter

"Outrage is a substitute for religion: It convinces us that our existence has some kind of meaning or significance beyond itself, that is to say beyond the paltry flux of day-to-day existence, especially when that existence is a securely comfortable one.

  Therefore we go looking for things to be outraged about as anteaters look for ants. Of all emotions, outrage is not only one of the most pleasurable but also one of the most reliable."

A God-Shaped Hole...

  Just because conventional religious practice is on the decline doesn't mean Americans will have no need to fill what the journalist Murtaza Hussain calls the country's "God-shaped hole."...

  As religion decreasingly becomes something Americans practice, it may instead become another identity, subsumed into the ongoing culture wars.