The left is a cult — and parents can fight it, with Supreme Court’s blessing

In a landmark ruling last month, the Supreme Court slapped down a public-school district’s mandatory lessons on sexual topics for young children — and gave parents the power to push back against leftist indoctrination in school.

In Mahmoud v. Taylor, parents in Montgomery County, Md., argued that mandatory teaching of LGBT-themed books violated their families’ religious beliefs.

They didn’t seek to remove the books — only the right to opt their children out of lessons that used them. The court backed them.

The district’s instruction promoted the idea that gender is fluid and interchangeable, a notion that runs against the teachings of every major monotheistic religion: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Its LGBT teachings are part of a secular belief system that deliberately aims to supplant those traditional faiths with a new one.

Leftism today increasingly functions not merely as a political ideology but as a full-fledged secular religion, complete with its own moral code, dogmas, rituals and rules of excommunication.

Like traditional religion, it offers a comprehensive worldview, one centered not on God or transcendent truth but on the sacredness of personal autonomy, identity and self-expression.

Its doctrines — absolute tolerance, sexual liberation and equity over equality — are treated as unquestionable axioms, enforced with the fervor of religious orthodoxy.

Public rituals like pronoun declarations, land acknowledgments and DEI trainings serve as liturgical acts of belonging and penance.

Sacred symbols like the pride flag or protest slogans function as talismans of moral clarity, and dissent from the liberal consensus results in a kind of modern heresy trial: cancellation, professional ruin or public shaming.

The leftist “priesthood” comprises media elites, academics and HR professionals, who act as interpreters and enforcers of the faith.

Even its eschatology is religious in tone, offering visions of a utopian future once all bigotry is eradicated.

By giving its adherents meaning, identity and moral purpose, leftism fulfills the role organized religion once did.

And the progressive religion isn’t just a belief system — it’s a doomsday cult.

Consider any discussion of climate change.

Suddenly, leftists become apocalyptic preachers warning of imminent destruction: rising seas, burning forests, uninhabitable cities  — all brought on by sinful human consumption.

The rhetoric is absolutist: Salvation can only be achieved through strict adherence to new commandments — no meat, no plastic, no air travel and total obedience to technocratic elites.

Like all cults, dissent is forbidden and skepticism is blasphemy.

Climate anxiety drives the young to speak about the future with a mix of fatalism and fanaticism.

It’s not science but a deeply moral narrative of sin and penance driving this hysteria, dressed in the language of reason but pulsing with religious fervor.

The Montgomery County parents fought for the freedom to protect their children from the gender-ideology components of this progressive belief system, but that’s just one facet of this new secular faith.

They were right: The public-school system has become a vehicle for all kinds of indoctrination, preaching a broad secular orthodoxy that runs counter to the beliefs of families of faith. The LGBT content at issue in Mahmoud is just one chapter in that gospel.

In his majority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that Montgomery County school board “requires teachers to instruct young children using storybooks that explicitly contradict their parents’ religious views, and it encourages the teachers to correct the children . . . when they express a degree of religious confusion.”

That same dynamic is at play across the curriculum, as public schools push all forms of progressivism on impressionable kids.

It’s time to fight back against the whole of the leftist religion, not just its more outrageous tenets — by confronting the cult’s fire-and-brimstone, end-of-days theology too.

That means demanding that science education in our schools must be grounded in reason, not fear.

Public schools have no business sermonizing to children about the apocalypse. Leave that to the actual religions.

Armed with the Mahmoud ruling, public-school parents now have a legal foundation to resist when schools impose teachings that violate their most deeply held beliefs.

They don’t have to accept every lesson as mandatory — they can demand opt-outs, request transparency and challenge curriculum choices that cross the line from education into ideology.

Parents can start by asserting their right to review lesson plans, attending school-board meetings and organizing locally to resist a broader secular agenda dressed up as neutral instruction.

The Supreme Court made it clear: The state can’t force kids to absorb beliefs that conflict with their family’s faith.

Now it’s up to parents to make their schools abide by that principle.

Bethany Mandel writes and podcasts at The Mom Wars.