Elon Musk, in a recent conversation with Jordan Peterson, suggested that he was ‘probably a cultural Christian.’ Without being particularly religious, he claimed he was a ‘big believer in the principles of Christianity’, among which he named forgiveness. He also said that the Christian pronatalist presumption would probably ‘lead to a better society.’ Richard Dawkins, who is famous for being notoriously anti-religious, recently suggested that he does not wish for an end to Christian traditions in England because ‘I love hymns and Christmas carols and I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos.’

In this article, I want to explain why I am a ‘cultural non-Christian.’ This does not necessarily mean that I am a non-Christian. It just means that, culturally, I am a non-Christian. Furthermore, though I can understand why somebody would see their embeddedness in a historic Christian culture as a fact, I understand much less why this cultural experience should be transformed into a political movement or an ideology.

The term ‘cultural Christian’ is shorthand for an attitude that rejects the supernatural claims of Christianity but still admits to being culturally determined by a historical context shaped by Christianity. Many people have embraced what Christian critics call ‘Christianity lite’, that is, Christian culture without miracles and divinity. Some people value moral ideas like humility or the sanctity of the individual, which they believe makes them ‘somewhat’ Christian in a cultural way. This leads to paradoxical labels. Slavoj Žižek has called his most recent book Christian Atheism, and French President Emmanuel Macron identifies himself as an ‘agnostic Catholic.’ Jordan Peterson adhered to a similar line when he said on television ‘I act as if God exists’ (emphasis added).

First, I wonder how deeply these people have actually examined their cultural contexts. In my own cultural environment, I find little that can really be identified as Christian. Instead, I notice that it is replete with almost anti-Christian elements. I might find a few secularized cultural components that were formerly Christian, but there is nothing powerful enough there to lead me to conclude that I am a cultural Christian. As a European or as a Westerner, I am culturally determined by secularism, the Enlightenment, the freedom to speak up against religion, and the overcoming of religion.

Cultural Christians tend to list qualities like respect for the individual, loyalty, or self-control as core Christian values that they still believe in. However, beyond the fact that such values can be found in practically any religion, these cultural principles have reached most of us in already highly secularized forms. Human rights and equality are secular ideas. Why should one insist on their Christian origins (a highly debatable proposition, anyway)? Many such principles could just as well be traced back to the ancient Greeks, and I could thus declare myself a cultural Greek. A kneejerk reaction might suggest that it is simply a difference in temporal distance that makes such an idea less feasible, but is the legacy of Greek philosophy really that much more distant than the Biblical origins of Christianity?

In my opinion, many non-practicing Christians are not as culturally influenced by Christianity as they think. They might imagine they are, and they may even want it to be true; but often, it is a highly secularized form of ‘Christian culture’ that they have experienced. The libidinal and subliminal reasons why these people attribute secular phenomena to Christianity might be interesting for their own sake, but they are irrelevant here.

We appreciate European culture, but to what extent is this culture actually Christian? Churches and their distinctive architecture can be used to illustrate a broader point here. When the Notre Dame of Paris burned in 2019, plenty of non-religious people were sincerely struck by this cultural loss and expressed a desire to have this monument quickly repaired. But this outpouring of emotion cannot simply be attributed to some kind of latent religiosity. It is more likely that the structure as a historical monument and a great example of Gothic architecture were what mattered to many, rather than its religious significance.

I appreciate much of the architecture that has been built by Christians, but I do not appreciate it as ‘Christian architecture.’ I appreciate it in the same secular way in which one might appreciate any architecture. The same goes for ideas and concepts that might once have been the preserve of Christian theologians but are no longer used in a Christian sense. Perhaps one of the most obvious examples is Christmas, which many celebrate without celebrating it as a Christian event. One could even go to Mass and enjoy it as a spectacle without it meaning that one is Christian in any way.

Theoretically, one could build a new Gothic cathedral and make it non-denominational, that is, build one that can be used by Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and Christians alike. Many who think of themselves as ‘cultural Christians’ might not be dissatisfied with such a monument in their city and might even view it as an example of foreign ideas being well integrated into their own culture. They are cultural Europeans rather than cultural Christians. In a similar vein, Dawkins mentioned that he enjoys listening to Christian hymns, and I believe that it is rather the music than the religious lyrics that he appreciates. He too is arguably a cultural European more so than a cultural Christian. How many people who enjoy Bach can actually relate to the lyrics of the St. Matthew Passion?

What we are really influenced by as Europeans and what really gives us an identity as Westerners is not religion but the liberty to act against obscurantism and religion. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, in a recent speech, suggested that Europeans should look to Christianity in order to reinstall meaning and purpose in a European society that has lost its moral compass. He does not seem to be aware that he suggests something that is deeply alien to a European culture that was born out of a revolution against religious authoritarianism. Unknowingly, by insisting on archaic Christian roots, Orbán, Peterson, and Musk push the West towards a worldview with which Christianity bears strong similarities: Islam.

Islamic societies continue to be much more strongly influenced by religion, and the idea of a ‘cultural Muslim’ is unnecessary because Islam is the only cultural reference point available: religion and culture almost entirely overlap, or are at least perceived to. Simultaneously and paradoxically, when the religious reference point is so strong that non-religious cultural aspects quasi-disappear, the idea of a ‘cultural Muslim’ becomes nonsensical and practically synonymous with the notion of a ‘cultural non-Muslim.’ A cultural Muslim is de facto a non-Muslim.

This is also the case for Christians, but for them, this paradox is less obvious. Westerners tend to have many more non-religious reference points, with the result that the concept of ‘cultural Christianity’ assumes a stronger connection to the religion than would exist if one identified more strongly with other cultural referents. Because one could choose another identity, the choice of Christianity holds more weight. Typically, when a Muslim says that they are only ‘culturally’ Muslim, the assumption is that they are in fact no longer Muslim. When a Christian says that they are ‘culturally’ Christian, the emphasis is that they are still somehow Christian. In Western societies, culture and religion can be more naturally perceived as two distinct things, and Musk et al plead not for a distinction but for a further confusion of cultural and religious aspects. It remains a strange choice. For example, Musk could simply talk about family policy boosting birth rates; why does he need Christianity to make his point?

I concede that the idea of being a ‘cultural Christian’, with which I personally cannot empathise, might be genuinely felt by some. However, there is no reason to turn this vague feeling into a movement or an ideology. This is precisely what Musk et al are doing. And when Dawkins values cultural Christianity as a ‘bulwark against Islam’ he is clearly missing the point. The only bulwark against Islam would be secularism.

I feel that you want to ask me now if I am a Christian or a non-Christian without the prefix ‘cultural.’ But this is not the topic of the article. Here I merely wanted to explain why, in cultural terms, I cannot be a Christian.

Related reading

Do we need God to defend civilisation? by Adam Wakeling

The Enlightenment and the making of modernity, by Piers Benn

The case of Richard Dawkins: cultural affiliation with a religious community does not contradict atheism, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

New Atheism, New Theism, and a defence of cultural Christianity, by Jack Stacey

Against the ‘New Theism’, by Daniel James Sharp

Can the ‘New Theists’ save the West? by Matt Johnson

A reading list against the ‘New Theism’ (and an offer to debate), by Daniel James Sharp

The post Why I am a ‘cultural non-Christian’ appeared first on The Freethinker.

Lately, there has been much talk of a Christian revival and the rise of a so-called ‘New Theism’, whose chief tenets seem to be that Christianity underpins everything good and fluffy in the world and that we need it to combat ‘wokeism’, China, Russia, and sundry other threats. New Theism is epitomised by the likes of Jordan Peterson and Tom Holland and was most dramatically illustrated by the conversion of former New Atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali to Christianity last year.

I am, to understate matters, unconvinced by all this, as are many of this magazine’s contributors. I imagine that we shall be hearing a lot more about the New Theism in the future, so I thought it would be worthwhile to compile a list of Freethinker articles which deal with, or are in some way relevant to, the subject. When and if we publish new pieces about New Theism, this list will be updated.

I would also like to take this opportunity to echo G.W. Foote’s offer to debate his opponents. As he wrote in 1881, in the first edition of the Freethinker:

‘Any competent Christian will be allowed reasonable space in which to contest our views; and if fuller opportunity is desired, the editor will always be ready to hold a public debate with any clergyman, minister, or accredited representative of the other side.’

Similarly, I would be happy to discuss or debate New Theism and all related questions with anyone, whether from ‘the other side’ or not. Just get in touch via our contact form. (More generally, I am open to discussion and debate on all matters that I have written about, in the Freethinker and elsewhere, both as the editor of this magazine and as an individual. In the latter capacity, you can contact me through my website.)

For now, and in chronological order, a reading list against the New Theism:

• ‘The Greek mind was something special’: interview with Charles Freeman, by Daniel James Sharp (17 November 2023)

• Consciousness, free will and meaning in a Darwinian universe: interview with Daniel C. Dennett, by Daniel James Sharp (18 December 2023)

• ‘We are at a threshold right now’: Lawrence Krauss on science, atheism, religion, and the crisis of ‘wokeism’ in science, by Daniel James Sharp (10 January 2024)

• What has Christianity to do with Western values? by Nick Cohen (12 January 2024)

• Do we need God to defend civilisation? by Adam Wakeling (30 January 2024)

• The Enlightenment and the making of modernity, by Piers Benn (23 February 2024)

• The case of Richard Dawkins: cultural affiliation with a religious community does not contradict atheism, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid (8 April 2024)

• ‘Nature is super enough, thank you very much!’: interview with Frank Turner, by Daniel James Sharp (9 April 2024)

• New Atheism, New Theism, and a defence of cultural Christianity, by Jack Stacey (16 April 2024)

• Against the ‘New Theism’ by Daniel James Sharp (19 April 2024)

• The need for a new Enlightenment, by Christopher Hitchens (26 April 2024)

• Can the ‘New Theists’ save the West? by Matt Johnson (30 April 2024)

• White Christian Nationalism is rising in America. Separation of church and state is the antidote. By Rachel Laser (6 May 2024)

• Donald Trump, political violence, and the future of America, by Daniel James Sharp (15 July 2024)

• Can Religion Save Humanity? Part One, by Brian Victoria (19 July 2024)

• How the Roman Empire became Christian: Catherine Nixey’s ‘The Darkening Age’ and ‘Heresy’ reviewed, by Charles Freeman (22 July 2024)

• The Enlightenment paradox: review of ‘Dark Brilliance’ by Paul Strathern, by Adam Wakeling (30 July 2024)

• Can Religion Save Humanity? Part Two: Killing Commies for Christ, by Brian Victoria (2 August 2024)

• ‘Project 2025 is about accelerating the demise of a functioning democracy’: interview with US Representative Jared Huffman, by Daniel James Sharp (3 August 2024)

• Russian history, Russian myths: review of ‘The Story of Russia’ by Orlando Figes, by Mathew Giagnorio (13 August 2024)

• Why I am a ‘cultural non-Christian’, by Thorsten Botz-Bornstein (18 September 2024)

List last updated 18 September 2024.

The post A reading list against the ‘New Theism’ (and an offer to debate) appeared first on The Freethinker.

Vladimir Putin is one of the last defenders of Christian civilisation from an onslaught of wokeness taking over the West. The liberal democratic world is in danger of collapsing if it doesn’t return to its Judeo-Christian roots. The rise of secularism in the United States and Europe has created a spiritual and moral vacuum which is being crammed with conspiracism, political extremism, and identity politics.

These are a few of the ideas you’ll encounter if you spend some time listening to the New Theists. While the term ‘New Theism’ has been used before, the journalist Ed West provided a useful definition in a December 2023 article in The Spectator: ‘Their [the New Theists’] argument is not that religion is true, but that it is useful, and that Christianity has made the West unusually successful.’ While the extent to which the New Theists regard religion as true varies from person to person, West’s definition captures the general thrust of the movement.

The conservative public intellectual and self-help guru Jordan Peterson is the Richard Dawkins of New Theism. Peterson has spent many years defending religious narratives as integral to human understanding and flourishing, and he believes a recommitment to these narratives is indispensable for the survival of Western civilisation. He also believes that Western civilisation is a product of Judeo-Christian values and institutions—despite the long history of secular resistance to religious dogma and tyranny in the West.

In a recent conversation with the philosopher Daniel Dennett, Peterson described religion as the ‘enterprise that specifies the highest aim, or the most foundational of aims’. If you ask Peterson to define words like ‘religion’, ‘god’, or ‘divine’, you’ll get labyrinthine, metaphor-laden monologues about hierarchies of values, the logos, consciousness across time, something called the ‘transcendental repository of reputation’, and so on to a boundless extent.

Meanwhile, Peterson won’t answer straightforward questions about his attitude toward the metaphysical claims of Christianity. During a 2018 debate, Susan Blackmore asked Peterson if he believed Jesus was divine: ‘Did he do miracles?’ He responded: ‘How about this? “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s.” That’s a miracle.’ The host didn’t allow Blackmore a natural follow-up, like: ‘Sure, but did he rise from the dead?’

Peterson isn’t the only New Theist who shies away from explicit affirmations of his theological beliefs—particularly beliefs which require faith in any supernatural phenomena. In November last year, Ayaan Hirsi Ali published an essay about her conversion to Christianity, in which the name ‘Jesus’ appears nowhere.

Hirsi Ali described her atheism as a reaction to the horrors of fundamentalist Islam—particularly the September 11 attacks, but also her vivid memories of religious stupidity and persecution, which she has bravely confronted all her life. She said her discovery of Bertrand Russell’s 1927 lecture ‘Why I am Not a Christian’ was a great relief which offered a ‘simple, zero-cost escape from an unbearable life of self-denial and harassment of other people.’ She discussed her contempt for the refusal among many Western ‘politicians, scholars, journalists, and other experts’ to acknowledge the theological motivations of the perpetrators on September 11. She said she enjoyed spending time with ‘clever’ and ‘fun’ New Atheists like Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.

But Hirsi Ali now calls herself a Christian for purely instrumental reasons—she believes that ‘Western civilisation is under threat’ from the aggressive authoritarianism of China and Russia, radical Islam, and the ‘viral spread of woke ideology’. She laments the ineffectiveness of ‘modern, secular tools’ at countering these threats: ‘We are either running out of money, with our national debt in the tens of trillions of dollars, or we are losing our lead in the technological race with China.’ She continues: ‘The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.’

Hirsi Ali made three main points: Western civilisation is ‘built on the Judeo-Christian tradition’, the only way to defend liberal values is through a recommitment to this tradition, and atheism ‘failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?’ These are the central arguments made by many other New Theists.

Hirsi Ali spent many years as an atheist, so it’s surprising that she attributes the development of ‘freedom of conscience and speech’ in the West solely to Christianity. She says nothing about the secular humanism developed by Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire and David Hume. She doesn’t mention Thomas Paine’s great attack on Christianity, The Age of Reason. She skips over Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, the document which laid the foundation for the First Amendment and erected what Jefferson described as the ‘wall of separation between church and state’ in the United States.

Many of the most important advancements for free speech and conscience in the West were made despite furious religious opposition. The Enlightenment was in part a response to centuries of religious bloodletting in Europe, which is why criticism of religious authority was such an integral part of its development. The reason Peterson celebrates Christ’s injunction to ‘Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s’ is that this line provides Biblical authority for the separation of church and state. But it still took centuries of moral and political progress—almost always in conflict with religious power—to institutionalise that separation.

According to Hirsi Ali, Peterson, and other New Theists (such as the historian Tom Holland), the liberal principles and institutions of the West—democracy, free expression, individual rights, and so on—are all ultimately attributable to Christianity. As Holland puts it, ‘We are goldfish swimming in Christian waters.’ Hirsi Ali says that Christianity is the ‘story of the West’. Peterson describes the Enlightenment as ‘irreducibly embedded inside this underlying structure’ of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

But what does a recommitment to this tradition look like in practice? Beyond their selective history which leaves out the centuries of political and philosophical struggle against religious dominion, the New Theists don’t have much to offer in the way of solutions to what they view as a spiritual and political crisis in the West today.

Hirsi Ali recommends Christianity as a source of social solidarity, as it will fill the ‘void left by the retreat of the church’ with the ‘power of a unifying story’. She doesn’t explain how this will better equip the West to confront China or Russia, and she doesn’t seem to care that the ‘unifying story’ doesn’t apply to the 37 per cent of Americans (and much larger proportions in many European countries) who aren’t Christians.

Hirsi Ali believes religion has been replaced by a ‘jumble of irrational quasi-religious dogma’, such as the ‘modern cult’ of wokeness. This is a common claim. West says that the ‘collapse of American Christianity gave rise to a new intolerance towards anybody who diverged from progressive opinion.’ In his 2019 book The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity, the conservative commentator Douglas Murray argues that Christianity has been replaced by a ‘new religion’ of strident identitarian activism.

There are several problems with this narrative. First, the process of secularisation has been going on for decades, while many movements the New Theists decry as ‘woke’ have emerged more recently. Second, Christianity has historically been compatible with a vast range of political and social movements. Many Nazis were Christians, as were many liberators of the concentration camps. Christianity has been used to justify slavery for millennia, but it was also invoked by civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. (with crucial support from secularists like Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph).

According to Hirsi Ali, ‘We can’t withstand China, Russia and Iran if we can’t explain to our populations why it matters that we do.’ But we don’t need Christianity to explain why resisting theocracy, imperialism, and totalitarianism matters. Take Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, for instance. The West—even in its secularised and allegedly degenerate state—shocked Putin by rallying to Ukraine’s defence when his forces attempted to abolish its existence as an independent state. Ukraine’s desire to join the Western system of economic and political organisation was the trigger for the war, and solidarity with a fellow democracy under siege was sufficient to convince Ukraine’s Western allies that they had a responsibility to help.

Many politicians and intellectuals who present themselves as defenders of the Christian West don’t have an inspiring record on Ukraine. Viktor Orbán has cultivated an image of himself as the leader of a ‘Christian government’ which is defending traditional Christian values against sinister, godless globalists. He also wants to abandon Ukraine. He recently declared that Donald Trump ‘will not give a penny in the Ukraine-Russia war. That is why the war will end’, and he regards Trump as the ‘man who can save the Western world.’

Trump wants to pull the United States out of NATO and he says the Russians should be able to ‘do whatever the hell they want’ to American allies that haven’t made sufficient investments in their militaries. The overwhelming majority of white evangelical Protestants supported Trump, and this support has held despite his attempt to overthrow the 2020 election. These American Christians aren’t just indifferent about the fate of Ukrainian democracy—they’re willing to put their own democracy in peril to bring their favourite demagogue back into the Oval Office. Is this what the defence of Western civilisation looks like?

Hirsi Ali’s fellow New Theist Jordan Peterson sneers at Western solidarity with Ukrainian democracy as ‘shallow moral posturing’ and a ‘banal form of dimwit flag-waving.’ Peterson has long been opposed to Western support for Ukraine, and he blames the invasion on ‘NATO and EU expansionism’ (a standard argument for Putin’s apologists like the ‘realist’ academic John Mearsheimer, whom Peterson has consulted with).

In an essay published several months after the invasion of Ukraine, Peterson argued that the conflict is a ‘civil war’ within the West. He believes liberal democracies like the United States have become increasingly degenerate and spiritually bankrupt, and he’s impressed with how Putin presents Russia as a ‘bulwark against the moral decadence of the West.’

Putin has increasingly cloaked his authoritarianism and imperialism in the garb of the Russian Orthodox Church, but instead of recognising the grotesque cynicism of this ploy, Peterson says he feels reassured by these professions of faith. He also suspects that Putin is on the right side of the global culture war: ‘Are we degenerate, in a profoundly threatening manner? I think the answer to that may well be yes.’ Peterson believes Putin decided to ‘invade and potentially incapacitate Ukraine’ to keep the ‘pathological West out of that country’, and his recommended course of action is total surrender.

Peterson is the most influential New Theist in the world, and he’s sympathetic to the cultural grievances of a brutal dictator who started the most devastating conflict in Europe since World War II. He believes the ‘pathological West’ should submit to the whims of that dictator and abandon his victims—people who are risking and losing their lives to uphold the values and institutions of the West every day. Hirsi Ali isn’t just wrong when she says that belief in Christianity is necessary to defend Western civilisation from its most dangerous foes—she fails to see how belief can actually be a severe impediment in that fight.

The New Theists aren’t the guardians of Western civilisation they purport to be. They use religion as a crutch and cudgel—they have a ‘god-shaped hole’ in their lives and assume that the only way to find any real meaning or purpose in life is to fill it with Christian dogma. Then they insist that this spiritual problem is universal—and tell us that they alone have the solution. That’s the thing about New Theism—it doesn’t take long to realise that there’s nothing new about it.

Further reading on New Atheism and New Theism

The case of Richard Dawkins: cultural affiliation with a religious community does not contradict atheism, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Do we need God to defend civilisation? by Adam Wakeling

What has Christianity to do with Western values? by Nick Cohen

What I believe: Interview with Andrew Copson, by Emma Park

Against the ‘New Theism’, by Daniel James Sharp

How three media revolutions transformed the history of atheism, by Nathan Alexander

Atheism, secularism, humanism, by Anthony Grayling

‘An animal is a description of ancient worlds’: interview with Richard Dawkins, by Emma Park

‘Nature is super enough, thank you very much!’: interview with Frank Turner, by Daniel James Sharp

Consciousness, free will and meaning in a Darwinian universe: interview with Daniel C. Dennett, by Daniel James Sharp

Christopher Hitchens and the long afterlife of Thomas Paine, by Daniel James Sharp

‘The Greek mind was something special’: interview with Charles Freeman, by Daniel James Sharp

‘We are at a threshold right now’: interview with Lawrence Krauss on science, atheism, religion, and the crisis of ‘wokeism’ in science, by Daniel James Sharp

The post Can the ‘New Theists’ save the West? appeared first on The Freethinker.

In December 2023, Ed West wrote for The Spectator about a phenomenon I have been interested in for quite a while: the rise of a new counter-Enlightenment that defends religion, and Christianity in particular, based on its social value rather than because it is true. West termed such defenders of faith(s?) the ‘New Theists’, a term that I like very much and which I shall probably use quite often from now on.  

The New Theists, says West, argue ‘not that religion is true, but that it is useful, and that Christianity has made the West unusually successful.’ Whether West himself is a New Theist, I do not know, though his article seems very sympathetic to the New Theist argument. I am going to take issue with that argument soon enough, but first, who are the New Theists? 

I am tempted to date New Theism to the publication in 2019 of Tom Holland’s book Dominion. Holland’s argument is that almost all of Western culture is essentially Christian, even the parts seemingly antagonistic to Christianity. Holland wants to claim everything from gay rights to science to liberalism to the Enlightenment itself and even atheism as an outgrowth of Christianity.  

(Notice that, even as he tries to hide it behind a disinterested scholarly facade, Holland is a latter-day champion of Christianity—he is especially keen on claiming all the nice bits of Western civilisation for the faith. Christianity’s many historical crimes are explained away as not being really representative of its essence.) 

Dominion has been very influential since its publication, as perhaps most dramatically demonstrated by Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s citation of it last November as a reason for her conversion to Christianity. But, as West rightly notes, this sort of argument has a long history. And in its current form, it precedes Tom Holland. As Adam Wakeling writes in the Freethinker: 

Perhaps no public figure has become more associated with this argument than Jordan Peterson. Peterson does not appear to believe in a literal supernatural being, but believes that the secular ethics of the modern west are based in Judeo-Christian values and it would be better if we acted as though the Christian God did exist.

So, since Peterson seems to have really started publicly obfuscating on religion in 2017, perhaps that is a better origin date for New Theism. Holland, Hirsi Ali, and Peterson are just a few of the more famous New Theists, though Hirsi Ali is unique in having formerly been a New Atheist. There are plenty of others. Some are actual believers, some are not, and many are just Petersonian wafflers. 

New Theism, of course, is named in opposition to New Atheism.¹ (I should say here that I pretty much consider myself an unreconstructed New Atheist.) West again: ‘Like New Atheism, [New Theism] largely involved unbelievers, and argued for the same western liberal tradition.’ I think New Theism is broader than West allows here—for example, Theo Hobson, another of its champions, is a theologian (and, incidentally, Hobson’s arguments for New Theism precede 2017). West’s third clause is also questionable, not least given Sam Harris’s interest in Eastern spirituality, but it is broadly true.  

Where West really misunderstands the relationship between New Theism and New Atheism is in New Theism’s much narrower focus: it is concerned only, or at least mainly, with religion as a social phenomenon. The New Atheists were concerned with both of the really big questions about religion: its truth and its utility. True, there were differences of emphasis. Richard Dawkins was much more interested in the God hypothesis, and Christopher Hitchens in the evils of religion. But they all dealt with both questions, while the New Theists are only really bothered about one of them. Hobson himself recently put it thus in a review of a book called Coming to Faith Through Dawkins²:  

This is the real flaw in New Atheism: it inherits a vague rational humanism that it has to pretend is natural, or common-sense. It’s an important task of Christian apologetics to point this out, to insist that the moral assumptions of our culture have Christian roots. But most Christian apologists fail to focus on this and get bogged down in tedious arguments about first causes, and try to make a rational case for God, and even the historical likelihood of the resurrection. Most of these contributors take this approach, some citing the apologetics of William Lane Craig and Alister McGrath (who is this book’s co-editor). 

To my mind, this is deeply unhelpful. It sinks to Dawkins’ level. A wise apologetics is minimalist. It calmly exposes the moral muddles of rational humanists, their weak grasp of the history of ideas. But it doesn’t overstate the role of intellectual argument in belief.

And this is telling. The God argument has been lost; all that is left is the argument from utility. The near certainty of God’s non-existence has been apparent since long before New Atheism³, but it now seems that the argument has been given up entirely. New Theism, then, is a rear-guard action, a desperate attempt to salvage religion even when its core has been gutted and even as the number of its adherents dwindles by the day. It is also an insult to the truly devout, for whom the truth of religion is very, even supremely, important. I have recently had the misfortune to have to endure The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Ratzinger, and the happily deceased pontiff often made that point very clear.  

Now, with the faith in tatters, the New Theists are often not even, or are barely, theists (and isn’t there something strangely postmodern about that?⁴). And they now spend most of their time proclaiming that Christianity is fundamental to Western civilisation. In so doing, everything institutional Christianity ever opposed until it was beaten into submission—liberalism, secularism, gay rights, free speech, to name a few—are claimed for Christianity! This argument takes some chutzpah, I allow, but it is essentially the theology of the consolation prize—and a sign of continued decline rather than rejuvenation. 

An important exception to the above is Justin Brierley, a believing Christian apologist who tries to convince his readers of Christianity’s truth while also championing it in the fashion of Holland and the other New Theists.⁵ His latest book, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God: Why New Atheism Grew Old and Secular Thinkers Are Considering Christianity Again, is an explicitly New Theist text, and I am surprised West did not reference it.⁶ Of course, the popularity of any idea is no guarantee of whether it is correct or not, but I think Hobson and Brierley are simply the latest in a long line of people wrongly claiming that New Atheism is pretty much dead (see footnote 1 for a note on Jerry Coyne’s rebuttals of this oft-parroted critique, among other ones). The secularisation of the world, even in America, continues unabated, however much the New Theists wish otherwise. I do not think that New Theism will reverse this trend or have the public impact that New Atheism had in its heyday, but it is well capable of causing serious confusion (and perhaps worse⁷) nonetheless.⁸

There is little point in me going into great detail on the very many flaws of Hollandaise Christianity⁹, since many others have done so already—and, I think, have done so decisively. I will just recommend pieces by Nick Cohen, Peter Thonemann, and Gerard DeGroot in addition to the Wakeling piece mentioned above (and also Wakeling’s recent book Why the Enlightenment Matters: The shift in our thinking that made the modern world). The books of Charles Freeman—particularly The Closing of the Western Mind and The Awakening—are also fatal to Holland (I discussed this, among other things, in an interview with Freeman for the Freethinker). I also recommend looking through Richard Carrier’s website, for, even when not discussing Holland directly, he does refute many of Holland’s claims (e.g. on the supposed invention by Christianity of charity and the concept of dignity). I will allow myself one lengthy quote from Thonemann, though: 

Mr. Holland’s argument about the continuing legacy of Christian sensibilities involves selecting one particular winding strand of Christianity—the one that happens to terminate in our present-day value system—as the “real” one. Mr. Holland postulates a golden thread of Nice Christianity, directly linking Jesus’ teachings with the civil-rights movement, the end of apartheid, #MeToo and so forth. When large numbers of actual Christians between Paul and Pope Francis turn out to have subscribed to Nasty Christianity (butchering Albigensians, incinerating sodomites and suchlike), Mr. Holland blithely comments that “the Christian revolution still had a long way to run.” This argument—that everything Nice in our contemporary world derives from Christian values, and everything Nasty in the actual history of Christendom was just a regrettable diversion from the true Christian path—seems to me to run dangerously close to apologetic. 

Perhaps Wakeling puts it most concisely: ‘According to Genesis, God created man in his image – yet the morality of the Bible is not humanist.’ (My emphasis.) Indeed—and it is very often anti-humanist, with its injunctions to slavery, rape, and genocide and its threats of eternal torture for nonbelievers.¹⁰

Secular liberalism has spent centuries defanging Christianity (one of civilisation’s most noble achievements, though the task is still incomplete). Christianity did not inspire secular humanism—and least of all did institutional Christianity, which, as Freeman notes, became an imperial and authoritarian structure in the fourth century. Once it became dominant in that period, it did not challenge slavery or wealth inequality or militarism, nor did it do any of the other nice things that it should have done if its essence was as Holland says. On Holland’s thesis, the millennium and more of Christian supremacy should have produced a paradise of liberalism and democracy long before the Enlightenment arose. The emergence of secular modernity has other roots, many of which predate Christianity by a long time and most of which were almost pulled up by Christianity before they had produced even the tiniest of shoots. 

To return to West’s apparently pro-New Theism article, a couple of small points of disagreement before we get on to the meatier stuff. West says that ‘Framed as opposition to religion in public affairs, [New Atheism] gathered much of its energy from fear of Islam following 9/11, although it was impolite to make that explicit.’  

Who said it was impolite? Given that the New Atheists frequently criticised Islam in their books, speeches, and debates, and that Hitchens deliberately inverted the Takbir in the title of God Is Not Great, and that some of New Atheism’s fiercest (and most unfair) critics were those who saw anti-Muslim bigotry in the work of the New Atheists, any implication that the New Atheists shied away from Islam is bogus (it is unclear whether West intends any such implication).¹¹ 

Second, West writes that ‘[r]ather than ushering in a golden age of enlightenment, the collapse of American Christianity gave rise to a new intolerance towards anybody who diverged from progressive opinion.’ Again, it is slightly unclear what West means in the full context. Does he mean that the New Atheists believed that destroying religion would ‘usher in a golden age of enlightenment’? If so, he is plain wrong. Hitchens, for example, wrote in God Is Not Great that “[r]eligious faith is…ineradicable. It will never die out, or at least not until we get over our fear of death, and of the dark, and of the unknown, and of each other.’ No New Atheist claimed that the world would become an enlightened paradise after the demise of religion (which was unlikely or even impossible, anyway), or that religion was responsible for all the world’s ills.  

The point about the impossibility of fully throwing off religion is quite an important one, so I shall let Matt Johnson discuss it further. From his Quillette piece critiquing Konstantin Kisin’s argument against the New Atheists: 

The title of Kisin’s article is “The Atheism Delusion.” He now regards religion as “useful and inevitable.” The argument that religion is inevitable is one the New Atheists have always taken seriously: Hitchens described religion as “ineradicable”; [Daniel] Dennett’s book Breaking the Spell examined the ways in which religion evolves and survives over time; a central part of Harris’s career is channelling the religious impulse into secular forms of introspection and mindfulness; and Dawkins acknowledges that religion may reflect a deep psychological need among many people. Where the New Atheists part company with Kisin is over his argument that religion is useful—particularly in the third decade of the 21st Century.

With that out of the way, on to the meat. West writes that ‘The atomising effect of secularism has become extreme. While America’s poor filled their God-shaped hole with drugs and alcohol, its rich did so with politics.’ By the final clause, I think West means to refer to Critical Social Justice ideology, or ‘wokeism’, as his following reference to progressive intolerance implies. But these are just unevidenced assertions. There are plenty of other explanations for atomisation, drug and alcohol abuse, and the rise of wokeism, and why should one prefer secularisation over all others without any evidence?  

Indeed, poverty, genetics, mental health problems, and the social environment are among the many more convincing explanations for drug and alcohol abuse than some nebulous ‘secularism’. They are certainly more concrete. The causes of the US opioid epidemic, which West perhaps has in mind here, also lie largely in the many structural problems of the American healthcare system itself. Social atomisation and alienation also have many alternative explanations, though I grant that the shared community offered by churches has been and is very important for many people. But there are other sources of community that do not require belief in mumbo-jumbo or come with the negative effects of religion (which, to my mind, outweigh those ‘shared community’ positives)—although we must do better at providing them.  

Most fatal to West’s argument here is the fact that the social woes he lists are positively correlated with religiosity, while the opposite holds true for secularism, as the sociologist Phil Zuckerman has copiously shown. Or, as I have put it previously: 

Though we can’t re-run the tape to produce a definitive answer to the question of whether religion has overall been good or bad for humanity, perhaps we can draw some conclusions from the state of our existing societies. Put very broadly, and with the caveat that the causation/correlation relationships are complex, the data shows that more religious societies are poorer, less safe, and less happy while more secular societies are richer, happier, and more just. If religion is good for us, why should this be so? 

I would also argue more directly that nobody with even a shred of dignity or decency would wish to live in an extremely religious society. We have seen, and can see even now, what such societies look like, and it is not pretty. One need only look at the Muslim world or pre-Enlightenment Europe to see that where religion rules, tyranny and poverty are the norms. If you think religion is good for you, I invite you to consider living in a society where it reigns supreme; I think you will be rushing back to the decadent, post-Enlightenment, secular West very quickly. 

West, naturally, differs with all this, and might object that he goes into more detail in the very article I am criticising:  

[T]his period has also coincided with a proliferation of social science studies pointing to the benefits of religion – both belief and practice – on child welfare, social capital, individual happiness and most of all the suppression of anxiety, the cause of that modern-day “mental health epidemic”.

Fair enough, one might say: delusion does have its benefits. I can only repeat what I have already said: the negatives outweigh the positives, and these positives can all be gotten without the negatives. Religion might help with the problems West lists, but much better, I think, to provide adequate healthcare, housing, income, and the like.

The studies to which West points are also rather undermined by the data referenced above, which, among other things, suggest that as societies become more prosperous and more just, the need for religion, particularly to salve our social ills, evaporates. Perhaps religion has some benefits for the individual or the social group, but not so much as West seems to think. And is it not curious that religion is most popular among the destitute, the crisis-ridden, and the weary? It is almost as if the God delusion preys on desperation. 

In my previous article above, I also addressed the wokeism point: 

I know that the temptation to champion traditionalism and religion against the tide of Critical Social Justice (or, colloquially, and although it’s a term I’ve come to dislike, ‘wokeism’) is very strong. But consider: is championing another vile dogma really the solution? Of course it isn’t.¹² (Besides, wokeism is hardly the greatest threat in the world today; jihadist Islam and the grotesque alliance of Trumpism with Christian nationalism in the U.S., are, I would argue, much graver ones.) The solution is to keep fighting for free, secular societies based upon reason and universalism and human rights. This fight, and the societies produced by it, count among humanity’s greatest achievements.¹³ Much better to go forward in this enterprise, rather than embracing religion (or wokeism).

Matt Johnson, in the piece referenced earlier, has much more to say on the wokeism argument, including the following: 

The notion that we abandoned our old faiths and replaced them with the new alternatives is too tidy and simplistic. For one thing, the process of secularization has been gaining momentum for decades, long before the “Great Awokening.” For another, unlike the Pew researchers who ask respondents how their religious views have evolved over time, the critics of progressive dogma don’t provide much evidence for their claims about the ways in which religion is supposed to have been supplanted by this new faith. Isn’t it possible that many religious people identify with elements of progressivism? Black Americans are disproportionately religious and far more likely than their fellow citizens to support the Black Lives Matter movement (81 percent versus a national average of 51 percent). However, they’re less progressive when it comes to issues such as gay rights—black Protestants are considerably less likely than their white counterparts to support gay marriage. Young even admits that wokeness has “made converts within the established Churches, particularly the Church of England.” 

… 

No matter how exhaustively the word “religion” is redefined, there’s plenty of evidence that secularization has taken place across the Western world. But there’s far less evidence for the opportunistic claim that this shift is responsible for the emergence of another socio-political movement. Those who say otherwise may have a “god-shaped hole” in their own lives, but they shouldn’t assume that everyone else suffers from the same affliction. More and more commentators are attempting to resuscitate religion under the guise of anti-woke politics, but they’re just exchanging one dogma for another.

On the argument that the West (though I would prefer to say ‘liberal democracy’) needs Christianity to combat the various threats it faces, much could and has been said. Michael Shermer has expertly done so already, along the way demolishing the other tenets of New Theism, so I shall simply recommend his piece and quote the central point: ‘Atheism isn’t the alternative to the Judeo-Christian worldview, Enlightenment Humanism is.’ 

Towards the end of his article, West says some quite astonishing things. First, he argues that ‘At the very least, the act of being involved in the community and ingesting a message of forgiveness would act as social Valium.’ I think I have said enough to make this at least a questionable assumption. When I shared West’s article with Matt Johnson, he responded to me with an understatedly tart observation: ‘Yes, because the essential message of forgiveness has always made Christians more tolerant throughout the ages.’  

A ‘social Valium’, though! The land of Europe is barely dry after centuries of Christian bloodlust. And remember the horror inflicted upon millions of people around the world when Christianity had real power in the West. Even today, Christianity remains one of the most dangerous forces in the world. Indeed, the fields of Europe even now are soaked through with the blood spilled by Christians in the name of faith. In the context of American fundamentalism’s support for the disgusting Ugandan ‘kill the gays’ bill, I wrote last year: 

We all know what American Christianity has done to America itself of late—helped to elect and shore up support for the most vulgar and dangerous man to ever hold the office of president, Donald Trump.¹⁴ Christian nationalists were heavily involved in the January 6 coup attempt. And don’t forget that a slew of anti-LGBTQ bills are being introduced across the US as I write these very words (at least American Christian fundamentalists practise what they preach to others). Looking a little further back, Christianity was the core of the creationist/Intelligent Design movement, which tried its very best to inculcate American children with superstitious rubbish. Going even deeper into history, we find pietist Protestants banning alcohol, sharia-style, and the Bible acting as the bulwark of the case for slavery. And so on and so forth. 

… 

In short, those of us who value secularism and humanism ought not to be complacent about Christianity. In its senescence, or senility if you prefer, it is as dangerous as ever. And American fundamentalists are among the most dangerous of all the followers of Christ. The disgusting bill that has just passed in Uganda is a chilling reminder of these facts. It should also harden the resolve of freethinkers worldwide, American ones in particular, to recognize—and relentlessly combat—the barbarism that Christianity is still very well capable of unleashing upon the world.

For the Freethinker, and with reference to the dangers posed by other religions, I recently wrote: 

[F]rom Israel and Gaza to the US and India—not to mention the bloodstained steppes of Ukraine, where Orthodox-inspired and supported Russian troops are trying to destroy a young democracy [indeed, in March this year, the Russian Orthodox Church declared Putin’s assault a ‘holy war’]—religion, in various forms, remains one of the world’s greatest threats to democratic and secular ideals, and to the ideals of peace and freedom. How far we secularists still have to go! And perhaps it really is not too much to say that “religion poisons everything”.

Finally, I can’t help but note again how lame New Theism is. From world domination and supreme authority over billions of human beings and their eternal souls to a Valium faith. What a mighty fall for mighty Christendom!  

West’s true sympathies are, I think, revealed by his conclusion: ‘But Christianity is not some meditation method or get-happy-quick guide. It is a deeply strange idea. Which makes its triumph over the West all the more unlikely – dare one say, miraculous.’ 

One might as well say the same about any hugely influential religion that has ever existed (here one might instance the ‘miraculously’ rapid spread of Islam¹⁵) but that would be to ignore the very worldly—and often very grubby—ways in which they gained power. As Charles Freeman notes in my Freethinker interview with him: 

One of the frustrating things about Dominion is that it does not mention the emperor Theodosius and his Council of Constantinople of 381, which fully declared the Trinity, and basically that said everybody who disagreed with its formulation of Christianity were ‘demented heretics’. This made Christianity into an authoritarian religion allied with the imperial Roman state.  … 

Holland is a distinguished classicist and a very good writer but in Dominion he completely missed the way in which Christianity was integrated into the authoritarian setup of the Roman Empire and how it developed very conservative, authoritarian views. Christianity became a very conservative force in a way that it did not need to be. Christianity was shaped by political and historical forces and could have taken a different path, as shown by the Quakers, who went back to the more radical, earlier forms of Christianity.

There is not much miraculous about cosying up to state authority to expand your influence, as I think West would agree.  

I have gone on long enough, certainly much longer than I anticipated at the outset (and I apologise for all the long quotes, but they were necessary). This is a subject I am likely to return to in future, and it is an important one. Critical as I have been, West’s piece is very good. It is certainly stimulating, and it provides a useful framing of the argument. It crystallised some things I have been thinking about a lot, albeit from a rather different perspective. So I am grateful that he wrote the piece, and even more grateful that he coined what I think is a very useful term for the very un-miraculous and probably over-hyped resurgence of Christianity.  

To finish off on a more positive note, a couple more quotes, including another of my own. In arguments about religion there is always latent the question of meaning. What meaning can there be in a godless universe? From my Freethinker interview with the New Atheist ‘horseman’ Daniel Dennett, where I asked him that very question: 

Well, life is flippin’ wonderful! Here we are talking to each other, you in England [Scotland, actually, but it didn’t seem the moment to quibble!] and me in the United States, and we are having a meaningful, constructive conversation about the deepest issues there are. And you are made of trillions—trillions!—of moving parts, and so am I, and we are getting to understand how those trillions of parts work. Poor Descartes could never have imagined a machine with a trillion moving parts. But we can, in some detail now, thanks to computers, thanks to microscopes, thanks to science, thanks to neuroscience and cognitive science and psychophysics and all the rest. We are understanding more and more every year about how all this wonderfulness works and about how it evolved and why it evolved. To me, that is awe-inspiring.¹⁶

And from my own piece on religion, quoted earlier: 

One last thing remains. There is the question of meaning. Without religion, without the supernatural, how can humans even bear to get up in the morning? I think I have obliquely answered this already: secular societies are happier. But I’d like to add that this, to me, is an impoverished view of humanity. Without delusion, it essentially says, what’s the point? 

Well, there is art, and literature, and science, and philosophy; there are friends and family; there is sex, and parties, and music, and love. What more meaning can you possibly need? If you need the supernatural to find the transcendent, I pity you. 

In the end, I can make weaker and stronger versions of my argument. At its strongest, I can say that religion is not just harmless but harmful. At its weakest, I can say that religion is irrelevant. Either way, religion is not positively good for us. We have no need of it. Humanity is weak and foolish, yes, but it also contains what Saul Bellow in his great novel The Adventures of Augie March so beautifully called the “universal eligibility to be noble”. 

I submit, finally, then, that the highest, noblest path that humanity can pursue is one without religion. We must face the uncaring universe with our chins up. Abandoning religion is not a guarantee of utopia (indeed, utopia is unattainable anyway), but it is a good start. We are mere apes, yes—but apes capable of art and science and love. Supernaturalism, which is the core of religion, is a distraction from, even a negation of, this most important and inspiring of truths. 

So let’s reject the false, dangerous delusions of religion, and be worthy of humanity—that is, of ourselves.

In short: Christianity (and religion in general) is neither true nor particularly useful, and the New Theism is but a sputtering and desperate response to that fact. 

Update 9 February 2024: Charles Freeman writes to me to mention the splenetic David Bentley Hart as a forerunner of the New Theism and a critic of the New Atheism. Indeed he is both those things, though I did not have space to mention everyone who falls under those headings. I append this update only because Hart is a particularly obnoxious man, and his work is oft-trumpeted as a fatal knockdown of New Atheism. The ever-reliable Jerry Coyne once more makes nonsense of such claims.

Let me also add that, in his work, Freeman makes the very good points that Christianity’s Pauline disdain for philosophy and its extreme salvific exclusivism prevented it from being a vehicle for science and human rights almost from the very beginning.

This is as good a place as any for a further update. After I had written the bulk of this piece, I rediscovered a good passage from Bertrand Russell’s classic Why I am not a Christian that puts the point much better than I ever could:

You find this curious fact, that the more intense has been the religion of any period and the more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has been the state of affairs. In the so-called ages of faith, when men really did believe the Christian religion in all its completeness, there was the Inquisition, with its tortures; there were millions of unfortunate women burnt as witches; and there was every kind of cruelty practised upon all sorts of people in the name of religion.

You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step towards the diminution of war, every step towards better treatment of the coloured races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organised Churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organised in its Churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.

1. I am more or less sidestepping the question of whether there is even such a thing as New Atheism. Many so-called New Atheists disavow the term altogether and see nothing particularly new in it (Jerry Coyne is a good exemplar here) or don’t regard it as a coherent movement in any meaningful way. I have some sympathy with these objections, but I think that it is a useful term nonetheless. Similar objections could be lodged against the use of ‘New Theism’, of course. But both terms describe real phenomena, regardless of whether there is anything new about them and however formal or informal they are as ‘movements’. 
   
   Incidentally, if you search ‘atheism’ or ‘New Atheism’ on Coyne’s website, he has done a remarkably thorough job over the years of defending New Atheism from its many critics, who never tire of pronouncing it dead or leading to ‘wokeism’ or being bigoted or whatever else. Critics dismantled by Coyne are as various as (but are far from limited to) John Gray, Freddie DeBoer, Rupert Sheldrake, Sebastian Milbank, Massimo Pigliucci, Tim Stanley, and Julian Baggini.  ︎
2. By the way, this book’s trumpeting of former Dawkinsian atheists finding faith should be seen in the context of how many people lost (and never recovered) their faith thanks to Dawkins. I think if you tallied these numbers up, it would not even be close. ︎
3. I have no space for that argument here, but many of the people I reference in this essay deal with it. I would also recommend Victor J. Stenger’s book The New Atheism (Stenger, incidentally, embraced the ‘New Atheist’ label and in his book on the subject enumerated what he saw as its key propositions). I shall just say here that ancient atheists in Greece and India came to this conclusion long before Christianity even existed and that there is not much to add to David Hume and Bertrand Russell and the rest. I think Richard Dawkins’ Ultimate Boeing 747 Gambit (elaborated in The God Delusion and elsewhere) is unassailable unless you engage in theological hand-waving. Richard Carrier has made a similar ‘argument from specified complexity against supernaturalism’.
   
   This might be the moment to mention that I am familiar with a lot of what Jerry Coyne, in a deliciously condescending manner, terms ‘sophisticated theology’. It is, unsurprisingly, unimpressive stuff, full of hokum and special pleading and mere assertion (and Coyne mercilessly rips a great deal of it apart in his Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible). ︎
4. And perhaps this is what really marks New Theism out as ‘new’. In that sense, it is perhaps more appropriately labelled than New Atheism. ︎
5. Richard Carrier has laid waste at some length to Brierley’s apologetics, as propounded in Brierley’s 2017 book Unbelievable. ︎
6. Note added 23 April 2024: I have just come across a good review of Brierley’s book in the New Humanist which has led me to reframe things slightly. Brierley and other genuine believers seem to be riding the wave of the barely-theistic New Theism, hoping that the popularity of obscurantist gurus like Peterson will give them an opening to win souls. This is unlikely ever to happen, as the New Humanist reviewer explains. As I say in note 8 below, I can see the religion debate becoming prominent again, partly because of the New Theists but also because of the resurgence of religious fanaticism—the continuing depredations of the Islamists, the Christian and Hindu nationalists, Tucker Carlson’s resurrection of creationism, etc. A moment for a new New Atheism, perhaps? ︎
7. Vide the unfortunately named National Conservatism movement.
   ︎
8. On the other hand, I can envision a return to prominence of the religion question in public debate. It is certainly an important question given that religious fanaticism is undergoing a resurgence across the world. Perhaps we’re in for another New Atheist-type moment in the discourse. I still doubt it will be as prominent now as it was then, though, and I certainly don’t think that it will have much effect on secularisation. ︎
9. Would using le Christianisme hollandaise be too pretentious? And yes, I know ‘hollandaise’ means ‘Dutch’ (or ‘Hollandic’) in French. I just like the sound of it, though given that the word ‘Hollandaise’ was applied by the French to the sauce during the Franco-Dutch war of 1672-78—that is, between Catholic absolutist France and a relatively (and I mean relatively) tolerant Dutch Republic, perhaps I could conjure some more substantial meaning into my little joke. In any case, only a teeny bit of fun at Tom Holland’s expense is intended. ︎
10. I would also recommend Mister Deity’s less scholarly but funny and scathing video series debunking Dominion. In the last part, he makes a good point: if Holland’s work ends up winning more converts for secular humanist ideals, perhaps that’s no bad thing. Also, there have been several more recent pieces in the Freethinker tackling New Theism, including one by Jack Stacey, which also deals with Richard Dawkins and the ‘cultural Christian’ hysteria (on which more below). You can look forward to another anti-New Theism article by Matt Johnson soon. ︎
11. And that provokes a thought: New Theism is largely about Christianity, not religion in general—another big difference with New Atheism. Both West and I, you will have noticed, switch between ‘religion’ and ‘Christianity’, when it is mostly Christianity under discussion. I, at least, also have religion tout court in mind, while West, I think, does not.
    
    New Theism is, to a large extent, a merely political movement (a conservative one, of course). It is also largely an exercise in apologetics containing assertions of Christian supremacy. All this makes it much less intellectually sophisticated than New Atheism (and, yes, I say that with a deliberate and disdainful nod to the critics of New Atheism who think it crude and philosophically naïve).
    
    I wonder if, in a few centuries when Islam has been tamed, we shall see similar arguments from its votaries and champions? Indeed, some Muslim apologists already claim that much of modern science is contained in the Qu’ran. Fatuously claiming pre-eminence in achievements that religion had little to do with is nothing new for its defenders.
    
    Incidentally, Richard Dawkins has recently spoken of his preference for Christianity over Islam. This is nothing new; he has called himself a ‘cultural Christian’ many times before (and his cultural affinity with Christianity is apparent in The God Delusion). But I do worry that in championing Christianity in this way, he misses the many ways in which the followers of Jesus Christ still pose a terrible threat to liberty and democracy around the world today. In fairness, I should say that he was specifically talking about the contemporary and very woolly British variant of Christianity. Nevertheless, it is worth restating that the solution to religious tyranny is the Enlightenment; it is not to be found in preferring an apparently softer religion over a more openly tyrannical one. That way only disappointment lies, and the noose will find its way back to your neck regardless. I think Dawkins would agree with all this, but I wish he would make it clearer. Still, and especially when he flirts with being a ‘Political Christian’ Ayaan Hirsi Ali-style, I do shake my head. I also agree with Kunwar Khuldune Shahid, who wrote in this magazine that Dawkins’s recent comments verge, if not quite on the chauvinistic, then on the anti-secular.
    
    Indeed, it did not take very long for the New Theists to pounce on Dawkins’s recent pronouncements. It should be said, though, that they have misunderstood him: he did not say that the West’s liberal values owe anything to Christianity; he merely said that he preferred Christianity today to Islam today and that he has an affinity for Christian, particularly Anglican, culture (music, cathedrals, and the like). He explicitly denied the New Theists’ central claim last year in his open letter to Hirsi Ali. ︎
12. Here there was a footnote in the original piece: ‘On April 29 of this year [2022], Angel Eduardo wrote a very good piece for the Center for Inquiry blog on this very topic: ‘No, We Don’t Need to Go Back to Church’. In it, he puts the point very well: “Trading dogma for dogma is no solution at all.”’ ︎
13. I might now emphasise here that Christianity had little to do with the formation of these concepts or the success of the Western world, which is better explained by other factors, as discussed in more depth by many of the articles referenced in this piece. ︎
14. And they remain faithful to Trump, who is now more or less openly declaring that he will seek to destroy American democracy and rule as a dictator if he regains power in November. ︎
15. Christian apologists used to argue that Christianity arose at just the right time to become absorbed and spread by the Roman Empire. Some of them probably still do.
    
    But one could make the same argument about Islam today: if the claims that it is the fastest-growing religion are even remotely true, perhaps Allah ensured that people from Muslim countries would be among the greatest beneficiaries of the age of mass migration. Perhaps he even made sure that there was such an age to begin with! All so Islam could spread across the world, even into decadent secular lands.
    
    Yes, that really is about the level at which religious apologetics operates. ︎
16. Incidentally, Dennett accepts the point about the ‘shared community’ value of religion even more strongly than I do, as you can read in that interview. ︎

The post Against the ‘New Theism’ appeared first on The Freethinker.

In Why the Enlightenment Matters, Adam Wakeling sets himself the ambitious task of defining the shift in thinking known as the Enlightenment that occurred in northern and western Europe between 1600 and 1800, and explaining how it made much of the modern world what it is.

Prosperous nations now enjoy benefits unimaginable throughout most of history, such as advanced health care, respect for human rights, free speech, tolerance, democracy, material comfort, scientific knowledge, education, and a reduction in wars and barbaric punishments. The author’s central thesis is that this is due to the Enlightenment. Of course, things are far from perfect – famine, disease, poverty, and dictatorship are still widespread, and the Enlightenment has an ambivalent record when it comes to racism and slavery. But today’s world would have been unrecognisable to the people of sixteenth-century Europe, when the book’s story starts.

Wakeling begins his narrative in 1553, with the burning alive of the Spanish theologian Michael Servetus in Calvinist Geneva. Servetus had denied the Trinity, proclaiming to the very end that Jesus was ‘the Son of eternal God’ and not the ‘eternal Son of God’. John Calvin, who had once been Servetus’ friend, approved of the heretic’s execution. This was the pre-Enlightenment world. In the fourteen chapters that follow, the author takes us through the unfolding story of the extraordinary changes that took place in northern and western Europe between 1600 and 1800, and gives us his explanation of why and how they happened.

His account is admirably comprehensive in scope, rich in historical detail, and highly readable. This reviewer is not an historian, and other curious non-historians will learn much about the manifestations and effects of Enlightenment thinking. Their common themes are principally the challenges to spiritual and political authority, and the rise of science and innovation. They include the effect of the Protestant Reformation on the breakdown of centralised authority in northern and western Europe and its role in promoting literacy. From these came the growth of toleration in the Netherlands, despite the efforts of the Dutch Reformed Church. In seventeenth-century England there was the end of rule by ‘divine right’ of English monarchs after the Civil War, and the subsequent  growth of alternative justifications for government found in the ideas of Thomas Hobbes and especially John Locke. Scholastic natural law theory was modified to include rights to property and political rebellion. Developments in just war theory, especially by Hugo Grotius, had already been made urgent by the excesses of religious wars. The eighteenth century saw Adam Smith’s attempt to provide a ‘science of man’ and his role in the decline of mercantilism and the burgeoning of free trade.

Also discussed in learned detail is the history of the Enlightenment in France, where it arrived later than in the Netherlands, England and Scotland. We read of the eventual success of the Encyclopédie despite attempts to suppress or censor it, and the influence of Enlightenment ideas about the ‘Rights of Man’ on the French Revolution. Of course, the Revolution’s bloodthirsty descent into Terror, largely engineered by the fanatical Maximilien Robespierre, caused many to doubt the whole Enlightenment project.

Running parallel to these rich narratives of political changes and their attendant wars is an account of how the scientific method became established. Aristotle had already made patchy attempts at empirical enquiry into nature but had been hamstrung by his teleological theory. His ideas had become embedded in the Catholic Church’s teaching as doctrines, despite their originally provisional nature, and it was only when the Church’s authority began to fracture that Aristotelian science could be questioned. Francis Bacon exposed some ‘idols of the mind’: errors or cognitive biases such as the ‘gambler’s fallacy’, excessive reliance on personal experience, the miscommunication of correct ideas and the spread of false ideas through existing systems of philosophy. Such issues still make it hard to discern truth from prejudice in science. Yet it was only after the patient observations and hypotheses of Galileo, Kepler and Newton, in part while trying to explain the anomalous behaviour of planets, that the geocentric view of the universe was dislodged, and otherwise inexplicable celestial movements could eventually be explained in terms of a universal theory of gravitation.

Wakeling shows how religious authorities tried to obstruct scientific thinking, not only in Europe but further afield. In fifteenth century Samarkand, for instance, the Islamic authorities destroyed an observatory, and in sixteenth century Constantinople, a similarly impressive observatory was closed by the Sultan amid concerns that its founder, Taqi ad-Din, would be prosecuted for heresy. But for some reason, the Enlightenment prevailed in northern and western Europe, whereas the pockets of Enlightenment thinking that had sprung up in other places, such as the Ottoman Empire and India, never took off. Moreover, in the eighteenth century, the nations where the Enlightenment occurred began to overtake the rest of the world in technological knowledge and economic power, and in the nineteenth century brought massive improvements to the living standards of ordinary people.

The final chapter of the book is especially interesting and potentially controversial, as it explores why the Enlightenment was successful in Europe and north America but not elsewhere. It brings us back to the author’s account, given near the start of the book, of what the shift in thinking that defined the Enlightenment really amounted to. In his view, it consisted of five simple elements: recognition of the limits of reason, empirical thinking, toleration of dissent, universality, and progress. Of course, in a broad sense the Enlightenment was a rational project, in that its thinkers used reason to question authority and dogma. But they rejected the notion that pure reason could reach truths that, as it happened, only empirical methods could reveal. Once dogmas were questioned, dissent was inevitable, and the issue of toleration became unavoidable. Wakeling argues that it was precisely this shift in thinking that explains the success of the countries where the Enlightenment took root.

This is controversial, not only because fashionable post-colonial theory is suspicious of the Enlightenment, but also because some writers think the flourishing of Western civilisation is traceable to Greco-Roman times and Christianity.

Wakeling’s rebuttal of the latter notion is, in essence, that the Enlightenment’s empirical style of thinking and its toleration of dissent amounted to a radical break with the past. There was much that was bad about the Greco-Roman world, and much of the history of Christianity is one of intolerance.

In reply, one might say that it was the best features of the classical world, such as Greek democracy and philosophy that inspired Western civilisation, and that it was not so much Christianity as its connection to state power from the fourth century onward that explains why the Enlightenment took so long to occur. As Wakeling concedes, Jesus reportedly said that his Kingdom was not of this world, and Christians were persecuted in the Roman Empire until 313 AD. These questions are of course complex, but whether or not Christianity ultimately contributed to the Enlightenment, Wakeling is persuasive in arguing that the latter was almost certainly a major factor in Western success, due to its distinctive style of thought.

I highly recommend this book both for scholars and the general reader. It is a rare combination of erudition and lucidity; it makes its thesis plain from the outset and it sets out its evidence clearly and thoroughly. Since it is primarily an historical analysis, it does not respond to contemporary philosophical critiques of the Enlightenment, such as that of Alasdair MacIntyre. Some thinkers might regard the Enlightenment view of human nature as naïve and lacking in spiritual insights into our darkest flaws: a world of rights and prosperity may be lacking in love and humility. But for all that, the Enlightenment provided fertile soil for the better as well as the worse aspects of humanity, and readers will find this stimulating book an invaluable resource.

Adam Wakeling, Why the Enlightenment Matters: The shift in our thinking that made the modern world, is published by Australian Scholarly Publishing, May 2023.

See also Wakeling’s article for the Freethinker, Do we need God to defend civilisation?

The post The Enlightenment and the making of modernity appeared first on The Freethinker.

Following the barbaric terrorist attack of 7 October 2023 on innocent Israeli civilians, large numbers of young Westerners came out in support not of the victims but of the perpetrators. Many not only failed to condemn Hamas, a genocidal Islamofascist organisation, but even celebrated the atrocities committed. There is clearly a moral confusion here. What might explain it?

It is easy to see why young, uneducated Muslims raised in a fundamentalist culture rife with antisemitism might side with Hamas. But a keffiyeh-clad UPenn student glorifying rape, murder, torture and kidnapping before a jubilant crowd of her peers? That calls for a deeper explanation.

As a former radical, who grew up middle-class in Austria and became involved with the international far-left and anarchist scene through punk culture in the late 1990s, I am familiar with such callousness. And I know a thing or two about the mentality behind it, the social dynamics at play and how ideology corrupts young, impressionable minds. I also know from experience that the spell of radicalism can be broken.

At the time of the September 11 terrorist attacks, I was part of an anarchist-leaning underground scene that interpreted the tragedy in the context of the chickens coming home to roost. We saw the capitalist West—in particular the US, with its Middle Eastern ‘outpost’, Israel—as a global oppressor. This made Al-Qaeda’s terrorism seem somewhat justified. Many in our circles reacted with glee or even admiration. After all, ‘Down with Western civilisation’ was one of our slogans.

Like the progressives defending Hamas today, we were deeply confused about the intentions and worldview of the perpetrators of 9/11. Our enemy’s enemy, we assumed, was our friend. As one American activist with a similar social background to mine, who found himself in Washington, DC on the day of the attacks, reported in the anarchist periodical Rolling Thunder,

‘I wished I could put a black flag on the roof so whoever the fuck was behind this would know we were anarchists trying to fight capitalism and the state, who had no great love for the U.S. government—so please don’t kill us, thank you very much!’

However, a common enemy does not imply shared values or goals. The Islamist mass-murderers who hijacked those planes clearly did not share the anarchists’ ‘dreams of a more compassionate world’, an oft-repeated mantra that belies their rationale. ‘Many of [the people killed] had been running the financial apparatus of global capitalism, pushing the buttons that calculated the numbers written in the blood of the poor,’ according to the young anonymous activist in DC. In other words, they had it coming. Yet despite these claims, many of those killed in the 9/11 attacks were just ordinary people: adults, children and even unborn babies.

Similarly, young Hamas apologists today tend to look at those savagely brutalised on 7 October not as innocent civilian victims but as avatars of the ‘Zionist entity’. In this dehumanising view, which denies the historical connection of the Jewish people to Palestine, every Israeli is, by definition, an occupier complicit in the oppression of Palestinians. Some anti-Zionists have gone so far as to argue that there is no such thing as an Israeli civilian. This, in part, explains why misguided young radicals feel justified in ripping down or defacing posters of kidnapped Israeli civilians—including children.

Like me and my anarchist peers at the beginning of the millennium, these radicalised young people have learned to view the world through a low-resolution lens of oppressor and oppressed. Through this lens, Palestinians can do no wrong, because they are assumed to be the oppressed group. In the words of Hamas leader Ghazi Hamad: ‘We are victims … everything we do is justified.’ Yet Hamas-controlled Gaza had not been under Israeli occupation since 2005, although it must be conceded that, according to Aljazeera, ‘Israel has maintained strict control over Gaza’s airspace and territorial waters and restricted the movement of goods and people in and out of the enclave.’

Conversely, since the Jewish state is seen as the oppressor, Jews do not qualify as victims. Of course, this ignores the well-documented fact that Jews are undoubtedly one of the most victimised groups in history. Their demonstrable success in the face of such adversity, however, in areas ranging from business to culture and science—Jews are greatly overrepresented among Nobel laureates—contradicts the prevailing progressive narrative that disparities in outcome necessarily imply unearned privilege and power. This fallacy is also central to antisemitism. Not for nothing was antisemitism referred to as ‘the socialism of fools’ as early as the nineteenth century.

Another oft-committed fallacy is that of moral equivalence. The argument goes that many more Palestinians than Israelis have died in the generations-long conflict, as if that would somehow excuse Hamas’s orgy of violence on 7 October. While it is legitimate to criticise Israel’s devastating military response, intent does not even enter into the equation. In the same fashion, the radical community I was involved with back in the early 2000s morally equated US and UK military action with Islamist terrorism. We, too, failed to differentiate between collateral casualties and the deliberate targeting of non-combatants. All that mattered was the number of dead on either side.

If it is all about numbers, however, it makes no sense to accuse Israel of ‘genocide’, at least as a consistent policy over the long term, since both Gaza and the West Bank have seen significant population growth. The same is true for Arabs living in Israel, whereas Jewish populations in Arab countries have declined dramatically. Considering these long-term trends and the fact that Israel has, for many decades, had the military strength to conquer and ethnically cleanse the Palestinian territories, it is just not plausible to assume that the motivation behind the current war against Hamas is genocidal. This is not to deny that we are witnessing a humanitarian tragedy on the ground in Gaza. But anti-Israel protesters calling for a (unilateral) ceasefire forget that Hamas could instantly end the war by releasing all Israeli hostages and surrendering.

Nor is Israel an ‘apartheid state’, as many young protesters have claimed. Such rhetoric has a long tradition among radicals and serves to morally discredit the enemy, in this case a multi-ethnic democracy that grants equal rights to all its citizens, including, of course, the 21.1 per cent who are Arabs. This is not to ignore the fact that Arabs have been discriminated against, mistreated and displaced in the context of Israeli occupation and settlement. However, by perpetuating fundamental misconceptions about Israel as a nation, young pseudo-justice warriors in the West have made themselves into useful idiots for antisemitic theocrats in the Middle East. Greta Thunberg did the jihadists’ bidding when she appeared on stage donning a keffiyeh and chanting, ‘No climate justice on occupied land!’ The George Washington University students who projected the words ‘Glory to our martyrs’ onto a campus building were more explicit in their approach. But the message was the same: Hamas is engaged in a just war of resistance. In a cynical reversal of victim and perpetrator roles, Hamas’s terror against Jews has thus been reframed as restoring justice ‘from the river to the sea’, in a slogan which carries genocidal implications.

Funded in large part by autocracies such as Iran and Qatar, Hamas seeks to wipe Israel off the map. This is not just because the Jewish-majority country receives military and financial support from the hated US, but also because it is seen as an alien entity in an otherwise Muslim-dominated region of the world. The events of 7 October have, once again, made clear that, for Hamas, killing Jews is an end in itself. This is not to suggest that all Gazans share this attitude or deserve the death and destruction inflicted upon them. But it would be a mistake to downplay the role of radical Islam, martyrdom and antisemitism in this conflict, especially considering that Palestinian support for Hamas has soared since the beginning of the war.

Still, most young Western anti-Israel protesters, even those openly sympathetic to Hamas, will deny allegations of antisemitism. In addition to the antisemitic tropes used at their protests, however, their obsessive focus on the world’s only Jewish-majority country, founded to protect Jews from genocide and persecution, is itself indicative of antisemitism. Tracing Zionism’s historical roots, the writer Ralph Leonard notes in the Freethinker that ‘early Zionist thought made its claims not in the name of the Jewish faith, but of the Jewish people’. This is a crucial distinction to make—because antisemitism targets Jews as a people. Nor is the conflict in the Middle East primarily about religion, although both sides invoke it, and although Hamas is a radical Islamist organisation.

While some anti-Zionists naively assume that once Israel has been obliterated, the remaining Jews will be permitted to live in peace in a ‘liberated’ Palestine, others just do not seem to think that Jewish lives matter—for otherwise they would not want Israeli Jews to become a vulnerable minority again.

Strong anti-Israel sentiments were also common in the radical underground of the early 2000s and influenced the way we made sense of September 11. For us, Israel was an illegitimate occupier of Palestinian land that had to be defeated. Anyone who supported it we regarded as complicit in the oppression of the Palestinian people and thus as a legitimate target for the ‘global Intifada’. This included civilian infrastructure. Naturally, we also boycotted Israeli products so as not to support the ‘occupation’. None of this seemed antisemitic to us. As one anarchist propagandist argued in 2006, ‘[T]he cost of the establishment and perpetuation of the state of Israel has been colossal in terms of the suffering and death of both Israelis and Palestinians.’

What is missing from this analysis is the counterfactual: what would happen in the absence of a Zionist state in the Levant? On 7 October, Hamas gave us a brutal taste of what that would mean for Jews. Antisemitism is rampant across the Arab world. Moreover, ‘Israel’s establishment brought many benefits to the Arab population in the region,’ according to the now-deceased Israeli diplomat Moshe Arens. ‘An Arab victory in the 1948 war against Israel,’ he wrote, ‘would not only have led to the destruction of the Jewish community here, but would most likely have caused havoc and suffering to the local Palestinian population.’

As a former Israeli official, Arens was, of course, biased. But he had a point: by cultivating large swathes of previously unploughable land, Zionist settlers laid the foundation for Israel’s thriving economy, which created unprecedented opportunities for Palestinian Arabs. Had Israel been defeated in 1948, the area would most likely never have blossomed into the prosperous, multi-ethnic, democratic nation it is today. In all likelihood, it would instead be indistinguishable from the countries it borders.

Of course, this does not give Israel carte blanche. In my experience, however, progressive radicals rarely entertain such counterfactuals or question their ideological assumptions. While my peers and I styled ourselves open-minded critical thinkers, we clung to our axiomatic beliefs. But our hostile stance toward Israel and its allies in the West did not go unchallenged in the post-9/11 era. When, for example, a member of a punk rock band from our milieu was seen sporting a T-shirt with the slogan, ‘Burn, Israel, burn’—in Germany, of all places!—the group was collectively accused of antisemitism and had several concerts cancelled.

Part of the reason the group found themselves banned from left-wing music venues across Germany was that the Anti-German movement was gaining ground among German leftists at the time. A typical banner of this political group read, ‘Down with Germany, solidarity with Israel, for communism.’ Anti-Germans supported the US after September 11 because of its instrumental role in liberating Europe from Nazism; they also supported Zionism as a matter of principle in light of the Holocaust.

Back then, our main point of criticism of the Anti-German movement was that its ideology was one of collective guilt rooted in German identity. Young radicals today, however, seem to have no qualms about embracing such identitarianism when it comes to race, gender and so on. What is more, our anarchist principles—‘no gods, no masters’—stopped us from ever siding with governments, much less with theocratic ones. The same cannot be said for activists who support Hamas.

Nevertheless, today’s protest movement strongly reminds me of my experience as a young radical. We were absolutely convinced of the righteousness of our cause: the end justified the means. Nor did we lose sleep over potential unintended consequences or seek out information that contradicted our preconceived notions. We interpreted major world events, such as 9/11, through the narrow and distorting prism of our radical ideology. As would-be revolutionaries, we were unscrupulous optimists, blind to the ever-present danger of retrogression and unappreciative of the civilisation we had inherited.

However, ours was a fringe ideology confined to underground echo chambers—along with, as I found out later, certain pockets of academia. So what explains the prevalence of a similar belief system and attitude among young people today? The September 11 attacks, after all, were not followed by mass youth protests in support of the terrorists, at least not in the West.

While mass immigration from the Muslim world has certainly exacerbated the situation, it is no secret that radical professors in the humanities and social sciences have, for decades, been teaching students to scorn Western civilisation, with its emphasis on reason and science, to problematise ‘whiteness’ and embrace ‘decolonisation’.

This worldview took root in academia in the context of postcolonialism under the influence of the Palestinian-American scholar and activist Edward Said, who, as early as 1978, critiqued Western discourses about the Orient as a form of imperialism. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s ideas about language and power, postcolonial thought has since found its way into many fields of study. For example, a 2013 article in the journal The Canadian Geographer set out to ‘advance personal and educational decolonization [and] interrogate how whiteness continues to be normalized within environmental education through various dominant narratives [and] the ongoing erasure of Indigenous Peoples.’

Race entered the picture with the rise of Critical Race Theory (see below) and its offshoot, Whiteness Studies. The latter constitutes a form of activist scholarship aimed at ‘dismantling white supremacy,’ which it views—based on Foucauldian discourse analysis—as the underlying power structure of the West.

When contextualised as a non-white, indigenous liberation movement against Western-supported ‘settler colonialism’, Hamas ticks all the boxes. With its murderous bigotry theorised away or simply ignored, the terrorist organisation that has ruled Gaza with an iron fist since 2007 has become something of a poster child for progressives. Add to that the fashionable notion that all forms of oppression are interrelated, and all oppressed groups are natural allies by virtue of their oppression by Western society and its power structures, and you end up with absurdities such as ‘Queers for Palestine’.

University students defending Hamas often find support from faculty. Such support appears to be more ardent among the humanities and social sciences than in STEM, business, economics and law. At Columbia University, two open letters were issued following the massacre of 7 October, one defending and one condemning students’ defence of Hamas. An analysis of the signees’ affiliations revealed that, unlike in the other departments, a majority of faculty members in the humanities and social sciences supported rather than condemned pro-Hamas sentiments among the student body.

The professors, in other words, are backing their radicalised protégés. This highlights a general problem with the progressive movement today: a lack of adults in the room. It is only natural for rebellious youth to be attracted to a protest movement that rejects societal norms and values. And because it challenges the established order, Palestine is a perfect issue to rally around. However, without adequate boundaries being set by their teachers and mentors, radical students are running wild on campus and beyond.

Even high school students have joined the anti-Israel movement. Street protests and school strikes are one thing. But hundreds of fanatical teenagers rampaging through the halls of a high school after discovering a Jewish teacher had attended a pro-Israel rally, and forcing the terrified educator to hide in a locked office, is another thing altogether. One is reminded of the 2017 Evergreen State College turmoil and hostage situation, which occurred because a professor, Bret Weinstein, had objected to an initiative barring white students and faculty from entering campus. A self-righteous student mob formed and accosted Weinstein before effectively taking university staff, including college president George Bridges, hostage in a conference room. Today’s teens have seen radical groups such as Black Lives Matter enforce their ideology through violence and intimidation. A defining moment was the BLM-Antifa riots of 2020.

Under the influence of such groups, young people have also learned to identify oppression with ‘whiteness’. The latter is both a racial concept and a shorthand for the liberal-humanist value structure of the West. Based on American notions of race and racism, this ideology treats Jews as essentially white and Palestinians as ‘BIPOC’ (‘Black, Indigenous and People of Colour’). This helps explain recent slogans such as ‘You’re either on the white or right side of history,’ spotted on a placard at a pro-Palestine demonstration in the UK, with the flags of Israel, the US, the UK and France surrounding the word ‘white’. Note that these nations are all liberal democracies, unlike the places represented by the flags around the word ‘right’: Palestine, Congo, Sudan and East Turkestan.

It is crucial to understand that what we are dealing with here is an anti-liberal ideology based, among other things, on Critical Race Theory, which originated with American legal scholars such as Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado and Kimberlé Crenshaw. As the jurist Jeffrey J. Pyle explained in 1999, ‘Critical race theorists attack the very foundations of the liberal legal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism and neutral principles of constitutional law.’ This is because they regard liberal values as ‘mere social constructs calculated to legitimate white supremacy.’ And while they ‘purport to share the liberals’ goal of racial and social justice, they view that endeavour not as a matter of principle, but as a matter of simple group interest to be achieved ‘by any means necessary’.

When I was first taught to ‘problematise whiteness’ in an American Cultural Studies course at university, I was intrigued by the esoteric rhetoric and progressive pretensions of this obscure—and obscurantist—philosophy, which seemed to offer a new language for the broader revolutionary struggle against oppression. What put me off, though, was its monomaniacal focus on race and its tendency to accuse an entire group of people of racism just by virtue of their skin colour. My radicalism, after all, was colourblind. It would have never occurred to me, for instance, to frame the September 11 attacks in terms of ‘brown people v. white people’.

That was twenty years ago. Since then, a bloated Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy, informed by the same theories, has usurped the West’s institutions of science and learning, making its ideology mandatory policy. And it does not stop there. Cloaked in the language of civil rights, it has also spread to the realms of business, politics and culture. The Jewish-American journalist Bari Weiss has described the underlying belief system as

‘… a worldview that replaced basic ideas of good and evil with a new rubric: the powerless (good) and the powerful (bad). It replaced lots of things. Color blindness with race obsession. Ideas with identity. Debate with denunciation. Persuasion with public shaming. The rule of law with the fury of the mob.’

For Weiss, this worldview has antisemitic implications:

‘For Jews there are obvious and glaring dangers in a worldview that measures fairness by equality of outcome rather than opportunity. If underrepresentation is the inevitable outcome of systemic bias, then overrepresentation—and Jews are two percent of the American population—suggests not talent or hard work, but unearned privilege. This conspiratorial conclusion is not that far removed from the hateful portrait of a small group of Jews divvying up the ill-gotten spoils of an exploited world.’

Easily the most powerful catalyst for the propagation of this ideology, in particular among young people, has been the rise of social media, with the legacy media trying to keep up. Loud minorities have seized a megaphone to shame and intimidate a silent majority afraid of being called out or cancelled, while algorithms designed to boost engagement have functioned to reinforce echo chambers, increase polarisation and accelerate social contagion.

But perhaps the most consequential aspect of social media has been that it has created compelling alternative realities for young people lacking real-world experience. Like progressive ideologues in academia, those living online tend to measure truth not by whether their views correspond with objective reality, but by whether their equally biased peers agree, a phenomenon scientists have described as the ‘echo chamber effect on social media’, which works by ‘framing and reinforcing a shared narrative’. It is no wonder, then, that there are people out there who deny the truth of the Hamas massacre of 7 October 2023 or call it an ‘inside job’— in other words, who are taken in by conspiracy theories that play on the portrayal of Hamas as the victim.

I fell for similar conspiracy theories back in the day, and for similar reasons. In the mid-to-late 2000s, movies such as Zeitgeist, Loose Change and Fahrenheit 9/11 set out to challenge the ‘dominant narrative’ about what had happened on 11 September, 2001. More importantly, however, these movies confirmed my community’s anti-American outlook. Hardly any of us put it past the US government to have staged, orchestrated or at least facilitated the attacks as a pretext to go to war for oil. This goes to show that echo chambers have always existed. In terms of scale and reach, however, social media has completely changed the game.

Israel’s enemies know very well how to exploit social media for their propaganda machine. Online jihadis bombard young users with emotionally charged half-truths and misinformation. But even they must have rubbed their eyes in disbelief when they saw Osama Bin Laden’s newly recirculated and blatantly antisemitic ‘Letter to America’, in which he justifies 9/11 on the basis of US support for Israel, go viral on TikTok. Nor did my former life as a radical prepare me for such a trend. Having said that, perhaps if I had read the letter as a young radical, I too would have found parts of it compelling. However, in the absence of social media, my ability to publicly advertise my ignorance on the matter would have been limited.

This points to another major problem with social media: it incentivises young people to share their opinions on subjects they know nothing about. There is almost an expectation to take a political stance. Indeed, a failure to do so could arouse suspicion and lead to ostracism. However, as shown by scientific evidence, it is probable that the brain is not fully developed until the age of about 25. This, and the sheer intellectual difficulty of forming a coherent philosophical ideology, may help explain why overly simplistic ‘takes’ prevail online and offline, especially among the young. Sloganeering has replaced reason and intellect by packing broad socio-political concepts into easily consumable and endlessly repeated catchphrases, which young people have latched onto. Nor is there any incentive to consider counterfactuals, or simply think things through, before posting or chanting slogans such as ‘globalise the Intifada’. On the contrary, unthinking regurgitation signals loyalty to the tribe.

Before the internet and social media, such slogans and catchphrases often reached us in the form of song lyrics through the underground music scene. I was in my late teens when a punk rock lyric shaped my understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for years to come: ‘Fuck Zionism’. Judging from my experience, youth culture undoubtedly has the power to mould a young person’s political worldview, especially if complex political issues are presented in the form of such overly simplistic slogans. I was not particularly rebellious as a teenager, but I responded to radical messages of this sort on a visceral level.

There is also the thrill of joining a movement, which can offer a sense of meaning, purpose and belonging to young people. As a radical, my social identity was tightly interwoven with my politics. This made it difficult to apply sufficient scepticism to the beliefs professed by my peer group. The same dynamic appears to be at play when we see masses of young progressives parroting the slogans of antisemitic extremists online and in the street.

A more charitable and optimistic interpretation is that today’s young people have an appetite for justice: they identify injustices in the world and want to be part of the solution. I can relate to that. The problem is that they have been misled. Had they not been so deceived, they would be protesting Hamas’s theocratic terror regime, which not only indiscriminately butchers Jews, but also holds its own people hostage and uses them as human shields. They would understand that people who behave in this way are not seeking justice, and they would act accordingly rather than engage in the theatre of radicalism.

However, it may not be too late for these young activists to see the errors of their way and change course. I am living proof that this is possible: I overcame my radicalism and learned to value the peace, freedom and prosperity characteristic of Western liberal democracies. For me, the turning point came when I understood that these are extraordinary and fragile civilisational achievements, and that neither the West nor Israel is primarily to blame for other cultures’ failure to build free, peaceful and prosperous societies. Of course, the West, broadly defined, has a lot to answer for; however, its cultural and economic achievements stem from a set of values and ideas rooted in Enlightenment humanism. Radical Islam, as propagated by Israel’s enemies Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthi movement, negates these values and ideas.

There is no way round it: the young people supporting Hamas and its allies on social media, on campus and in the street must come to their senses and abandon their erroneous preconceptions. ‘We can offer something else in return,’ says ex-Muslim author and human rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who would have sided with the protesters in her youth. ‘But we do have to work for it, and we do have to agree on the basis of what it is that we want to transmit.’ She elaborates:

‘One of the questions that I have asked myself is: What is it that [Muslim] immigrants have in common with Gen Z? … both groups have been failed by us, because we are failing to transmit to Gen Z, and we are failing to transmit to immigrants who come here, what it is that they are going to inherit, what this society is all about, the most basic, fundamental principles of this society.’

While the reasons for young people’s current moral confusion about Hamas are manifold and call for a diversified response, this certainly seems like a good starting point. It is up to us to pass on the Enlightenment tradition of the West to the next generation—whatever their cultural and religious background. We must lead by example and stand up against antisemitism in all its forms. We must defend liberal values from corrosive ideologies and refuse to be intimidated. We must do our best to make young people understand what is at stake, and that Hamas is the antithesis of whatever it is they think they are fighting for. Many will not listen. But some will.

The post Young, radical and morally confused appeared first on The Freethinker.

Amid all the horror, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has had one cleansing effect. The self-satisfied notion that the West is Christendom and that our democratic and liberal values are rooted in Christianity is taking one hell of a beating.

As it turns out, the greatest threat to the ‘Christian’ West comes from Russia, whose imperialist expansion into historically Christian Ukraine and the attendant crimes against humanity are supported with ghoulish enthusiasm by the Russian Orthodox Church. Russia’s contempt for the supposedly religiously inspired values of democracy and freedom depends for its ultimate triumph on evangelical Christian voters returning Donald Trump to power in the 2024 US presidential election. Once in the White House, Trump has made it very clear that he will cut off support for Ukraine and leave ‘Christian’ Europe to fend for itself.

In other words, a victory for evangelical Christians’ preferred candidate will ensure the defeat of the values of the supposedly Christian West. Surely (and finally) we can now dispense with a version of Christian identity politics that has always been flattering and foolish in equal measure.

The argument that ancient cultural identities would be the primary source of conflict in the post-Cold War world came from Samuel P. Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisations’ hypothesis. Western civilisation, he maintained in 1992, was built by Christianity in its Catholic and Protestant variants. It covered the United States and Canada, Western and Central Europe, Australia, and Oceania, but not, strangely, Catholic South America. The West and its values were incompatible with the world’s other civilisations, most notably Islam.  

‘The most important distinctions among peoples are [no longer] ideological, political, or economic,’ Huntington declared. ‘They are cultural.’

Cultural determinism had a huge appeal after the failure of the Western interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Otherwise respectably liberal people held that democracy and human rights were not for Muslims. Islamic culture could not handle them. Look at the Muslim Middle East, we were told. Only Tunisia was a democracy, and a visibly failing democracy at that.

Equally, Huntington held that the Orthodox Christian world was also condemned to be in an inevitable conflict with the Protestant and Catholic West. Huntington’s ideas did not directly inspire the revival of Russian illiberalism and imperialism—a foreign intellectual could never hold such power. But his emphasis on the role of religion and his notion of a separate Orthodox civilisation led by Russia appealed to Putinists for all the obvious reasons.

And yet today Russia, an Orthodox-dominated empire, is invading Ukraine, the cradle of Russian Orthodoxy. The Orthodox world is fighting a civil war.

The notion that liberal democracy is only for Westerners and is the product of specifically Western religious traditions has always been asinine, however plausible it may have seemed in the early twenty-first century. Japan and South Korea are part of ‘the West’, after all. Far from being a sign of democratic solidarity, Christian identity politics has become the friend of every enemy of Western democracy.

Before I go further and explain why, I need to introduce a plethora of caveats. I am not talking about, let alone criticising, the majority of European Christians, who are as likely to support liberal ideals as anyone else. I am not finding fault with this aspect of Lutheran doctrine or that Vatican pronouncement. Cultural determinism is as wrong when it is used to maintain that religion poisons everything (as the late Christopher Hitchens used to say) as it is when it is used to announce that Christianity blesses everything and has given us democracy, feminism, human rights, and all that is good and lovely in the world. Totalising explanations always fail. They cannot handle complexity.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali recently made my point for me. Last November, the former atheist announced her conversion to Christianity and unintentionally revealed the fatuity of Christian identity politics as she did so.  Any genuine Christian reading the articles and interviews that accompanied her conversion would notice there was no embracing of the Nicene creed; no declaration that Hirsi Ali now believed in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father.

 She spoke of a personal crisis and of finding ‘life without any spiritual solace unendurable’. But she made clear that her conversion was rooted in political rather than religious belief.

Hirsi Ali saw Christianity as a political identity. ‘Liberalism is rooted in Christianity,’ she declared at one point. It was a bulwark against China, Russia, and Iran, and an antidote to her ideological pet hates. ‘We can’t fight woke ideology if we can’t defend the civilisation that it is determined to destroy,’ she wrote. ‘And we can’t counter Islamism with purely secular tools.’  

Citing Tom Holland’s claim in his 2019 book Dominion that Western morality, values, and social norms are ultimately products of Christianity, the former atheist said that she had realised that Christianity was the source of Western safeguards for freedom and dignity. ‘All sorts of apparently secular freedoms — of the market, of conscience and of the press — find their roots in Christianity,’ she continued. To believe in freedom and to defend it one ought to be Christian.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali has shown extraordinary courage in standing up to the threats of radical Islamists. Tom Holland is the nicest and most intellectually generous historian I have met.

But this is hopeless stuff. In much of Europe the struggle for human rights, which Hirsi Ali presumably admires, was in part a struggle over state religion. The Enlightenment was a reaction against the bigotry and slaughter of the European wars of religion. To this day French liberals insist on defending secularism because they remember the arbitrary power of the Catholic church and fear the arbitrary power of Islam. The drafters of the US constitution wisely prevented the state from passing any law affecting religious worship and belief because they wisely feared the power of the religious persecution.  It is not just that so many Western freedoms originated in the anti-clerical struggles of the Enlightenment – and it is ridiculous to say that they are nevertheless still somehow ‘Christian’ freedoms – but that the argument is circular. If everything comes from Christianity, even freedoms that were achieved in opposition to the constraints of state religions, then there can never be real change in the world. If everything comes from Christianity, then religion is stretched so thinly that it all but vanishes, as it clearly has in Hirsi Ali’s strangely faithless conversion. If everything is Christian, then nothing is Christian.

The worst of it is not the determinism but the complacency – the idea that, while we in the West have our human rights and democracies, the rest of humanity, alas, is doomed by culture and history to never enjoy our advantages. Sad, but once you are on the wrong side of civilisation’s clashes you can never escape your cultural destiny. It is the conservative’s version of the woke left’s cultural essentialism.

Few people can go along with Hirsi Ali’s argument today. Those that do will be on the right or the extreme right. Liberal Christians or those who identify with the Christian tradition, such as Tom Holland, see democracy and human rights as flowing from Christian beliefs. But Christians with actual power are making a nonsense of their argument.

A Trump victory would lead to a Russian victory in Ukraine and the unravelling of European security. If this happens, the very Christians that Huntington, Hirsi Ali and Holland believe to be the providers of Western values will have destroyed Western culture.

In the 2020 presidential election, 81 per cent of white evangelical Protestant voters backed Trump, and they did so fervently. When Trump first appeared in 2016, you could have argued that the relationship between Christian conservatives and a politician who was not remotely religious, and who had committed all the sins known to scripture, was merely transactional.

Christian voters held their noses in return for Trump appointing judges who would impose their religious prejudices, most notably concerning abortion, on the rest of the United States.

But any sense that this was a marriage of convenience has long gone. Evangelical Christianity has embraced Trump and gone along with his every assault on the US Constitution. And two religious factors that Christian apologists rarely mention or even think about explain this righteous love for a pagan candidate: apocalyptic millenarianism and theocracy.

Tim Alberta, a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism,explains both well. Alberta, an evangelical Christian himself, talks of the end-of-days mood in American evangelicalism. As he explained in an Atlantic interview, many evangelicals believe that ‘the barbarians are at the gates, and that if we don’t do something about it now, then this country, this ordained covenant country that God has so uniquely blessed, that we’re going to lose it—and that if we lose it, it is not just a defeat for America; it’s a defeat for God himself.’

Alberta is telling us what we already know. American Christianity, at least in its white evangelical Christian form, is not the shield of the West. If anything, religious conservatives admire Putin and celebrate his homophobia. In the words of Steve Bannon, the Machiavelli of the far right, the US should support Putin because ‘he’s anti-woke’. The real enemy of the Christian right is not Russia or China or Iran but the American left. This is why, to use Alberta’s phrase, we see today a ‘fanatical, cult-like attachment to Donald Trump in some quarters of the evangelical universe.’ Trump will destroy the left, or so he says, and that is all that matters.

And if the left’s destruction means taking down American democracy, denying the verdicts of lawful elections and storming Congress, so be it.  Extreme religious belief makes assaults on the Constitution easier. The faithful are obeying the Lord’s commands and they do not admit the right of any earthly constitution or ballot to restrain them. Hirsi Ali and many others fail to draw the parallels with the woke movement they deplore. To the worst type of progressive the West is the sole source of global oppression. Whiteness and Eurocentric beliefs are sins. And yet in the US Christian conservatives, who are spurred on by their opposition to progressive authoritarians, are no more willing to defend the West than their left-wing enemies.

This year will be a decisive year for the West. One way to get through it would be to end our self-serving and flattering cultural exceptionalism. The enemies of democracy are not only to be found in foreign tyrannies, they are among us. And the more devoutly they claim to uphold Western Christian values, the more likely it is that they are willing to subvert Western civilisation.

The post What has Christianity to do with Western values? appeared first on The Freethinker.

Quebec holds a cultural distinction in the framework of the Canadian Federation that should be better understood and appreciated. The Quebecois know what it means to take pride, collectively, in what they have fought for. Yet too often and by too many, Quebec is harshly and wrongly called racist for its pride in preserving its secularist, pluralist culture. This culture is the very same one that endless numbers of new Canadians—immigrants and refugees—freely choose to adopt by coming to Quebec to create new lives for themselves.

Yves-François Blanchet, leader of the Bloc Québéçois, made this point during a press conference before he met with Amira Elghawaby, the federally-appointed anti-Islamophobia adviser, earlier this year. Elghawaby had written in 2019 that ‘the majority of Quebecers appear to be swayed not by the rule of law, but by anti-Muslim sentiment.’ This was in response to public support for Bill 21, a Quebec law placing limits on the wearing of religious clothing by several types of public sector workers. Blanchet’s response to her was: ‘Someone who says Quebec is racist needs to know more about Quebec.’ I agree with him on this point. Unless you study Quebec’s history, you will have little understanding of the sociocultural and sociopolitical transformations that the province underwent after 1960, during the period of la Révolution Tranquille (‘the Quiet Revolution’).

Before the Quiet Revolution swept across the province, Quebec was a largely rural and conservative society dominated and maintained by the Catholic Church, which promoted traditional social hierarchies. During the first half of the 19th century, the Catholic Church wielded significant power in the cultural, religious and political spheres, especially in higher education. In fact, the province set up a Ministry of Public Instruction in 1868 but abolished it in 1875 due to pressure from the Church. Catholic religious leaders combined nationalism with anti-secular Ultramontane ideas to further their interests and increase their authority.

Conservative Catholic domination of Quebec reached its apogee in la Grande Noirceur (‘the Great Darkness’), the period during which Maurice Le Noblet Duplessis’ Union Nationale party held power (from 1936 to 1939 and again from 1944 to 1959). Duplessis viewed Quebec as a Catholic province and ran it with an iron fist, as if it were his own private Catholic corporation. He championed values aligned with the Church and allowed Catholic leaders to directly participate in education, health services, and social assistance, thus affirming the idea of a Quebec that was distinctively and exclusively Catholic. The Duplessis era was the culmination of centuries of Catholic domination of the social and cultural framework of the province.

By the 1960s, the people of Quebec were no longer willing to remain subservient to the clergy and its political backers. ‘Things have to change,’ was one of the slogans of Quebec’s Liberal Party, led by Jean Lesage, during the 1960 election campaign. The victory of Lesage in that year was the beginning of a period of nearly 20 years of dramatic modernisation. New, progressive approaches were adopted in the social and political realms.

Notably, the Liberal government set up a Ministry of Education which created a state-controlled education system and gave women the same rights to higher education as men. It also effectively secularised Quebec by decoupling Church and state and limiting religious influence in public institutions. Since the 1960s, Quebec’s identity has been rooted in the ideal of secular governance; it is seen by Quebecois as a place where all people are represented fairly, rather than one governed by ecclesiastical power in which the clergy dominates the people.   

This brings us back to Bill 21 and Quebecois secularism today. Should accommodations for religious minorities be granted? If so, how should they be implemented and what are the limitations on such accommodations?

There are justified criticisms of Bill 21 but there is also much misunderstanding about it. These misunderstandings often stem from two different traditions and interpretations of secularism. In the English-speaking world, secularism focuses on individual freedom of religion whereas in the French-speaking world, laïcité focuses on the collective freedom from religion. This is because the English-speaking and French-speaking worlds have had different historical experiences with religion. In general, the French sought freedom from the dominance of the Catholic Church and the English fought for the individual’s freedom to worship according to their conscience.

Bill 21 is in the spirit of the secularism of the French Republic, which has also been accused of racism because of its enforcement of laïcité for religious minorities. Such accusations are misplaced, however. Bill 21 makes no distinction, for example, between the types of religious symbols worn or displayed. All religions are removed from the public sphere, and this is seen as an equaliser for the benefit of all Quebecois citizens.

‘Est Québécois qui veut l’être’ (‘Whoever wants to be a Quebecer is one’), said René Lévesque during his victory speech after the 1976 Quebec election. The ethical importance of that statement is that the social criteria for being Quebecois are not centred on ethnicity or allegiance to any religion but instead are founded in the upholding, understanding and embracing of the immemorial values of Quebec society. These values are the values of the Enlightenment, as well as liberalism and democracy.

Opponents of Bill 21 see it as a ‘racist’ ban on religious symbols. They see it as an assault on religious minorities in Quebec and argue that it misapplies the principle of religious neutrality as understood in Canadian law. This Canadian principle, which is an interpretation by the Supreme Court of Canada, holds that governments must remain neutral on questions of religion by neither favouring nor disfavouring any particular belief. This implies that although the Canadian government cannot be explicitly religious, it also cannot be explicitly anti-religious: the state must treat religious groups equally.

The problem created by treating religious groups equally is that it opens the door to limitless demands from all religious groups, including illiberal ones. These groups would have criticism of religion designated as hate speech. They would have illiberal and bigoted practices—such as the imposition of Sharia family courts—be not just tolerated but approved of. Treating religious groups equally is mistaken because it falsely assumes that they consist of a homogenous community that can be represented by one or a few loud (usually conservative and male) voices. It thus disregards the repressive treatment that minorities within these minorities often face and it sets up bigoted, misogynistic interpretations of religious doctrine as the one true version that must be respected and accommodated.

Bill 21 does not misapply religious neutrality. It understands and applies it through a French lens. This differs from the English lens that interprets religious neutrality on the federal level. This is perhaps why Anglophone Quebecois were more upset with the bill than their Francophone fellows—indeed, English-language school boards were exempted from the law by Canada’s Supreme Court. It is important to recall that the notwithstanding clause of the Canadian Constitution, which was invoked by Quebec’s National Assembly in passing Bill 21, was intended precisely so that unreasonable court decisions could be rejected by Parliament and provincial legislatures. In 1981, Justice Minister Jean Chrétien stated clearly that the clause would allow legislatures to quickly ‘correct absurd situations’ resulting from court decisions. ‘We needed to have the supremacy of the legislature over the courts,’ Peter Lougheed, then the Alberta premier, who suggested the clause in the final negotiations on the Constitution in the early 1980s, explained. ‘We did not [want] to be in a position where public policy was being dictated or determined by non-elected people.’

The question, then, is this: What kind, or rather kinds, of religious beliefs will be accommodated, permitted and tolerated? Quebec more than perhaps the rest of Canada at present has an excellent chance of strengthening its vigorously pluralistic society. But for this to happen, religious groups need to be compelled to abandon certain presumptions that are incompatible with Quebec’s open liberal democratic society—and should certainly not be allowed to undermine Quebecois secularism.

‘A nation is judged by how it treats its minorities,’ Lévesque once said. Must we now shy away from treating religious minorities with the same maturity as we would any other religious group? Why should we not have the same expectations of minority groups as with any others? Should they not be expected to assimilate and to be open to justified criticism of their practices and beliefs? Is it not insulting to give special protections to their feelings of offence?

The domestication of religion is one of the unremitting responsibilities, as well as one of the hallmarks, of civilisation. Those who, inspired by nebulous notions of diversity, equity and inclusion, would cast aside liberal and Enlightenment values, must understand that they would be throwing away the very things that make liberal democracy a system worth having in the first place. Quebec’s Bill 21 is an assertion of liberalism in the spirit of the Quiet Revolution, not a negation of it, and the values of laïcité are among the most precious—and hard-won—that Quebec has.

The post Quebec’s French-style secularism: history and enduring value appeared first on The Freethinker.