Puritan perfectionism has, in fact, survived its pluralization into faiths other than Calvinism, and it has survived its pluralization into faiths other than Calvinism, and it has survived its secularization into movements that are self-consciously nonreligious.
That ethos endures and proliferates today within identity groups, both on the left and on the right. Here too, morality merges with ontology, producing competing factions that are animated by a vision of moral purity. They too have sought to establish their own righteous communities organized around fundamentally different versions of reality and fundamentally different visions of justice. And, of course, these righteous communities insist that their own is the only correct one. In these worlds, a sharp line is drawn between the righteous and the unrighteous, the saved and the damned, those included and those excluded. It only follows that their votaries are not bashful about doing the boundary work necessary, in Winthrop’s delicate words, to “moderate and restrain the wicked”–though in our day, such boundary work is called cancellation, doxing, scapegoating, and negation. These performative acts of purification often betray a moral certainty that can be as severe, cruel, unforgiving, and authoritarian as any of the caricatures of the gray, gaunt, and graceless Puritan divines.
James Davison Hunter, Democracy and Solidarity, 357-358.