The progressive orthodoxy, which now prevails throughout the establishment, does not involve any attachment to a spiritual deity. But it resembles a zealous religious cult, complete with purity tests, witchhunts and heresy trials.
Despite their rhetoric about "inclusion", the social justice warriors inhabit a culture obsessed with punishing any transgressions of its rules and view everything through the prism of its warped ideology.
Much of civic Britain increasingly lives under the influence of a bigoted minority that has no respect for history, tolerance, freedom or humanity.
A classic instance is the extraordinary decision of the Wellcome Trust, Britain's largest medical research charity, to ditch its 15-year-old "Medicine Man" exhibition in London, which featured a range of curiosities from the past, including Napoleon's toothbrush and Florence Nightingale's slippers.
But, in the current censorious atmosphere, this collection has not only been denounced by the Woke Commissars within the Trust as "racist, sexist and ableist", but has also been attacked for its failure to tell any stories "about colonial structures of violence".
This sort of destructive nonsense can be found throughout academia, the arts, the public sector and voluntary organisations. Staff are ordered on training courses in "Unconscious bias" and "Critical Race Theory", where guilt-tripping about "white privilege" is common. Universities, museums and schools are instructed to "decolonise" their material.
New rituals are adopted to ensure compliance, as epitomised by the revelation at the weekend that the Citizens Advice Bureaux have ordered staff and volunteers to wear pronoun badges so there is no danger of "misgendering" colleagues. "Pronouns are an important way of affirming gender identity," says Dame Clare Moriaity, the Chief Executive of the CAB.
Her organisation's "pronoun resource" features as examples of gender neutrality such incomprehensible terms as "Ze/ Zir/Zirs" and "Ey/Em/Eirs".
This kind of lunacy is upheld by a growing army of bureaucrats, who might be described as the Woke priesthood. Yesterday, a report by the Conservative Way Forward campaign group claimed that at a cost of £30million local government - always bleating about underfunding - now employs almost 800 officials in positions focused on equality, diversity and inclusion.
Indeed, the state sector is riddled with this kind of ideological empire-building. At Newcastle University there is a Dean of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI), three faculty directors of EDI, three faculty officers of EDI, and a central EDI team comprising a Head of EDI, a race adviser, an EDI trainer, an EDI adviser and an EDI "people's administrator."
There is nothing benevolent about the advance of the Woke cultists. On the contrary, they bring intimidation, fear and division in their wake.
Within their citadels of groupthink such as university campuses, it takes real courage to challenge them, as the distinguished philosopher Professor Kathleen Stock found at Sussex.
When she questioned some of the shibboleths of transgenderism, she was subjected to death threats, had to be given security protection and was eventually hounded out of her job, with her own trade union, in thrall to the woke creed, refusing to back her.
The Woke think they have righteousness on their side. They are even willing to dismiss scientific realities and historical evidence, as highlighted by the outburst from senior Labour MP Dawn Butler, who said in a TV discussion on trans biology that babies are born "without sex."
This is a recipe for creeping totalitarianism, something which freedom-loving, Christian-led Britain used to oppose with vigour and pride.
