There’s a pretty striking family resemblance between modern “woke” moral-political culture and early Puritan Calvinism. Not the theology, obviously—but the moral style and social dynamics. A few parallels:

• Moral absolutism and social discipline: Both treat everyday behavior as subject to rigorous moral scrutiny, with strong communal pressure to conform to norms.
• Purification and heresy-policing: Boundary maintenance via denunciations, excommunications, and rituals of orthodoxy—today it’s call-outs and deplatforming; then it was church courts and shunning.
• Austere seriousness: A shared ethos that prioritizes rectitude over levity; suspicion of frivolity as complicity in vice or injustice.
• Confession and penance: Formal repentance and re-education after transgression—think struggle sessions or DEI remediation echoing Protestant public discipline (different metaphysics, similar mechanics).
• Predestination-adjacent status anxiety: Puritans looked for “signs of election”; today’s activists signal moral standing through continual self-examination and public proofs of rectitude.
• Early moral socialization: Instruction impressing sin/privilege, depravity/complicity, duty/allyship—pedagogies aimed at shaping conscience from a young age.
• Political-theological fusion: Morality fused with a program for social order—using policy and discipline to engineer a righteous commonwealth.
• Apocalyptic register: Eschatology then, existential crisis now; urgency amplifies intolerance for deviance in the face of perceived catastrophe.
• American genealogy: Much of U.S. moral culture (across factions) still runs on Puritan software, so the resemblance is part continuity, part convergence.

Important caveat: they diverge on metaphysics (grace, God, salvation), institutions (church vs. HR/academia/media), and telos (otherworldly vs. this-worldly). But as a civic religion—with catechisms, rituals, sacraments of confession, and excommunication—the parallels are hard to miss.