I think religion is a poor analogy, because except in a few extreme cases like Iran, religion doesn't seek to create a totalitarian framework for every personal thought or action. And I don't view the Iranian revolution as much as a religious revival as a movement in the sense that a totalitarian movement must stay "in motion". The motion is the point. The revolution carries on, eating its own.

To me as a liberal it took a long time to realize that "wokism" has no fixed goal; it's more like a millenarian cult or a utopian movement that is willing to constantly redefine language in the service of forever one-upping its own followers. The winner is whoever can create the most visceral mob anger at last month's winner. It survives without an articulable final goal precisely because each iteration of the dogma pushes the last under a bus. Power comes from staying ahead of the permanent motion of the movement, an impossible task.

Similar phenomena can be observed in right wing movements, of course. But the far right is open about its hate, so anyone who demures can ultimately fall back on personal conscience. The far left uses love, not hate, as the grindstone for its acolytes. Thus any dissent leaves the dissenter questioning whether she was insufficiently loving. This kind of "love", detached from its real world object or any true objective, used as a measure of fealty, is one of the key hallmarks of totalitarianism, because it requires absolute obeisance in thought and action, while totally atomizing each member of the community into a fearful, self-censoring follower of whoever claims the mantle of radicalism and motion today.