Memo to self : try harder.

It's obvious that the writer is buying into Sullivan's (Sullivan's!) framing. And by your choice to meta-analyse Sullivan via a review of his rambling, trivial article, you are buying into it too, by considering the whole shambles to be worthy of comment. Frankly, it isn't.

To indulge you, I have read the first few paragraphs of Sullivan's drivel :

Everyone has a religion. It is, in fact, impossible not to have a religion if you are a human being.
[SNIP]

And we have the cult of social justice on the left, a religion whose followers show the same zeal as any born-again Evangelical. They are filling the void that Christianity once owned, without any of the wisdom and culture and restraint that Christianity once provided.

It doesn't seem to ever occur to anyone in this chain of commentary -- you at the top, down to Sullivan at the bottom -- that people can believe in things, and fight for them, because they are good in themselves, according to a self-defined system of values, without any need of tribal or religious validation.

That there are vast numbers of humans who have not achieved emancipation from their anthropoid need of tribal value systems, is self-evident, and the hardest political problem there is.

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}