Fury’s version of things is the opposite of Lilla’s tolerant liberalism: To be the right sort of people, we must be feminists, and to be feminists, we must have opinions on . . . everything, and assign to the entirety of the universe moral gradations based upon the feminist position that all of the right sort of people must assume.
A regime of political correctness is a moral signaling equilibrium in which people who don’t want to be thought of as being on the wrong side of history will suppress an honest expression of what they believe about some controversial issue because people who are known to be on the wrong side of history are prominently saying the same things.
It’s facile, and usually misleading, to say that “Such-and-such-phenomenon is like a religion.” But it does seem clear that the strongest motivation behind the phenomenon we call political correctness is a desire to classify humans as either the saved or the damned, even, or especially, at the expense of making practical political improvements. Perhaps Joseph Bottum was on to something.