Introduction 

Brian Cox was born in Dundee in 1946 and has been a star of stage and screen for decades. His stage roles include Titus Andronicus and King Lear, and his film and TV credits include Sharpe, Manhunter (in which he played the first on-screen Hannibal Lecter), Rob Roy, Braveheart, Troy, X2: X-Men United, Churchill, and Succession. At the time this interview was conducted over Zoom (21 August 2024), Brian was in Glasgow about to start work directing on a new project. He couldn’t tell me much about this, except that it was something he had wanted to do for a very long time.  

Although we were pressed for time and the discussion could have gone on for much longer and in many directions, we covered a lot of ground, including Brian’s views on religion, acting as a form of humanism, the conflict in Gaza, sectarianism in Glasgow, Johnny Depp, Ian McKellen, Irn Bru addiction, and Scottish independence. All of this and more appears in the edited transcript of (and selected audio excerpts from) our conversation below.  

Interview 

Daniel James Sharp: Earlier this year, you caused a bit of a stir by labelling the Bible ‘one of the worst books ever’ and full of ‘propaganda and lies.’ But you also acknowledged the need people have for comfort and consolation. For you, though, theatre is the ‘one true church…the church of humanity.’ Is acting a form of humanism, then? 

Brian Cox: Yes. I don’t believe in churches, but if you need a church, theatre is the church of humanity. Acting is absolutely humanism. It’s based on who people are, what their belief systems are, how they’re plagued by their belief systems, and how they have to reconcile themselves to these belief systems—and when you think about it, in my view, that means reconciling themselves to something which is completely fictitious.  

It’s understandable that people need to believe in something because we live in an age where we’re so confused. What nobody ever talks about is where we are in our own state of evolution, because we’re clearly not fully evolved beings. If we were, we wouldn’t be doing what we’re doing again and again. We wouldn’t have a Putin situation. We wouldn’t have a Netanyahu situation. I feel that we have to be evolved. We are evolving, but we are not there yet. We’re a long way off, and we are in danger of destroying ourselves because of our own stupidity. At the root of a lot of our problems is tribalism. Am I Islamic? Am I Jewish? Etcetera.  

The Jews were treated appallingly by Nazi Germany, and they then founded their own state. But now they have all sorts of problems there. There’s a great division among Jewry, including some great friends of mine, about what is happening in Gaza and elsewhere right now. Because of what happened on 7 October last year, a lot of them are very afraid, and we have to understand that. But the genocide that is being committed is inexcusable on any level, and you have to put it down to the extreme right-wing Jewish government—which is not wholly representative of the Jewish people. That’s very important to note. A lot of the Jewish people do not like what’s going on in Gaza. And anti-Semitism is not the answer, of course. Anti-Semitism is what gave rise to fascism and we have to be very careful about that.  

That is just one example of the danger of being beholden to belief systems. They trap us, they don’t liberate us. They may give us comfort, they may give us what they call faith, but at the end of the day, they are not helpful. They are not ultimately helpful to the human spirit, at all.

Just on the point about Israel and Palestine, I think it is also worth keeping in mind that it’s the same with the Palestinians as it is in Israel: Hamas is not necessarily representative of the Palestinians as a whole. 

Exactly, nor are the Yasser Arafats necessarily representative. It’s awful how they are using Gaza for their own ends. When it comes to these situations, I always feel for the children. They live in these conditions created by the mistakes of adults. I just cannot stand what’s happened to the children in Gaza. How many children have been killed? A disproportionate number of children have been killed because of these adults’ mistakes.  

I don’t in any way excuse Hamas at all. I do not excuse people who hide behind law-abiding citizens, innocents, because of their own disharmony with the system. Yes, I understand that Palestine has suffered a lot of persecution—psychological persecution as much as anything else—but I don’t excuse Hamas. I certainly don’t excuse what happened on 7 October, not at all. That was horrendous.  

But what has happened in Palestine as a result is also just appalling. This is where belief systems do not support you. They support your view over that view, but they’re not about harmony.  

I compare it with Glasgow, where I am right now. If you come to Glasgow, it’s quite ecumenical with its Islamic and Catholic populations. It’s quite free. Of course, it has its streaks of racism, and that is always going to be there—that fear that man has about his fellow that he can’t quite understand. But on the whole, Glasgow is doing well. 

I feel that we’re in such a state of setback at the moment. We are failing to understand how we’re evolving. We’re going through such horrific things at the moment, and the thing that stops us from evolving is being stuck in these belief systems.  

Could you explain a little more what you mean by these external belief systems being inimical to the human spirit? What is the human spirit? 

What is the notion of a freethinker? It means a person who thinks freely, without any trammelling of any kind. Their thinking is of a sense of liberation, the liberation of the human spirit (their actions might be a different matter, of course). I’m not a classified ‘freethinker’, but that’s what I would have thought a freethinker is. I rather admire and respect that.  

I’ve been thinking about why I’m talking to a freethinking magazine. I think because there is a problem at the moment with the cancel culture that we live under. There’s not a lot of free thinking going around. … Cancel culture is offensive and damaging to the human spirit. 

I believe in the human spirit. We don’t understand our own mystery. We try to codify it. ‘Say your prayers and it’ll all get better and then you’ll have something at the end of your life.’ But that’s a mystery, and nobody knows anything about that. All we know about is what we’ve got to deal with now, with our two legs, two arms, and two hands, and a head that can, perhaps, function. I feel quite passionate about that. We should give it the respect it deserves and not fall into these systems. 

My sister was a strong Catholic. She cleaned the church. But at the end of the day, when she was dying, I said to her, ‘Where do you think you’re going to end up?’ And she said, ‘It doesn’t really matter, does it?’ That was her conclusion after 90-odd years of life. And that’s the truth. It doesn’t really matter when it comes to those elements which are definable, but it does matter to something else that we don’t even know about. 

I did want to ask a little about your background. You’re from a working-class Scots-Irish Catholic family. And you’re in Glasgow right now, which, historically, was torn apart by sectarianism. 

Oh yes, Glasgow has always been sectarian, because of the Orange Order. The Glorious Twelfth. ‘Our father knew the Rome of old and evil is thy name…And on the Twelfth, I love to wear the sash my father wore.’ [Lines from Protestant anti-Catholic songs, the latter celebrating the ‘Glorious Twelfth’, the victory of the Protestant King William III over the deposed Catholic King James II at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.] All in service of William of Orange, and what was he, except a good Proddie? 

The Catholics are good survivors because they’ve been hacked about ad infinitum. But there are also the acts that have been committed under the guise of Catholicism—the [Magdalene Laundries in Ireland], for example, and all those poor, misbegotten women who worked for them—so there is a lot of questioning there and nobody is exempt.  

And my sister, in the end, said that it doesn’t really matter. What does matter? We matter. Not our religion, not our faith, not our belief systems. We matter. Let’s try and understand who we are as a herd animal and as an individual animal. But we don’t even go there. Instead, we come up with all these stories that justify certain things.

And art is a way to understand ourselves. 

Yes. Art is the way I do that. Art is a way of looking at the world, and of looking at everybody in the world. From a dramatic point of view, we are looking at how human beings behave. What screws them up? What are their ambitions? What do they want? Why do they want it? Is it necessary? No, it’s not. Well then, why do they want it? Is it some kind of neurotic force at work or is it something else? That’s what actors do when we work on a role, we’re examining what’s going on. And that’s where all the belief systems can come into it. ‘Oh, I see, he’s Jewish, he’s got that kind of belief. Oh, but he doesn’t like being Jewish. Why does he not like that?’ Do you see what I mean? You’re creating an exploration of the human psyche, which to me is the great gift of acting.  

Who are your favourite actors? 

Spencer Tracy, for me, was the greatest screen actor ever, by far. He was extraordinary. He was very tormented, very Catholic, very guilt-ridden, but a great artist. The ease and the flawlessness and the way he negotiates stuff—tremendous. And he and [Katharine] Hepburn were extraordinary together. So, I think Hepburn is another of my favourite actors. 

Another is Cary Grant, who was a construct of a personality because of his horrific background, and he played all these wonderful, mysterious kinds of characters who just said, ‘I really don’t give a fuck.’ And of course, there’s [Marlon] Brando and Jimmy Dean, even though he didn’t live all that long. 

There are a few actors who grew better over time. Paul Newman got infinitely better as an actor as he got older. As a young man, he was a bit more confused.  

It’s a great craft, acting. And it is a craft. It’s a craft of human sensibility. Where are we coming from? Why are we doing it? What is it? What does it mean? What are we trying to achieve? And the truth is, we don’t know. We don’t know, because we’ve got all this other stuff that we have to deal with, that we’ve got to get through. 

That’s why I was interested in talking to somebody from a freethinking magazine. What is free thinking, and how free can thought really be these days? Or is there some impediment that makes it non-viable to think freely?  

I think it’s difficult to think freely at the best of times, but especially now. There’s so much pressure to conform to certain standards and ideologies.  

That’s right. And that’s why you’ve got to say, ‘Fuck it! I’m going to think freely.’ When the pressure is great, you don’t give up. It reinforces who you are. It looks as if you’re in doubt, but you’re dealing with a shit storm of meteors coming at you, and it’s very important to be able to think freely. I’m grateful because I think I’ve been able to do that for most of my life, and I didn’t even know I was doing it, and I did it because I didn’t have the usual constricts of family and parents and what have you. 

‘Fuck it, think freely!’ should be our new motto. You are well known for speaking your mind about politics, religion, and even fellow actors.  

I’ve got to shut up about fellow actors. I’m a bit naughty about that. It’s a hard game, and I sort of regret saying anything. And even if I did say something, it wasn’t meant as a damning criticism. It’s a question of taste. Not everybody likes everything other people do. I sort of regret calling Johnny Depp ‘so overblown, so overrated’ in my autobiography because he is fine in many ways. There are some things he isn’t fine at but, on the whole, he’s fine. He’s certainly very popular. It’s an imperious thing of me to do, to shoot on about somebody like that, because it’s a tough job.  

The best actors are children, and the greatest actors are the ones who can still be doing it at my age. I’m not saying I’m the greatest, just to be clear, but you know what I mean. I have great respect for people of my generation who are still doing it. 

In your autobiography, you talk about your and Ian McKellen’s different philosophies or styles of acting. I have a lot of admiration for both of you as actors.  

I love Ian, I really do, and I love him even more as he’s got older. He’s just a different style from me and naturally, I’m going to prefer my style, but that’s not about saying I’m any better. I’m not. I just prefer the way I work to the way he works.  

But he is a very special man in so many ways. He’s been a great champion, especially in the homosexual rights movement, standing up to Clause 28 and everything. He’s done phenomenal things in that way, so I have total respect for him. 

He’s a very sound man, in terms of his politics. I’ll still argue about the acting a wee bit. But as a man, I love him. We’ve known each other for a long time. We were neighbours recently. When I was doing the play Long Day’s Journey Into Night, he was next door doing Falstaff, where he sadly fell off the stage. I think that was a big shock for him.  

I was impressed that he was back on stage so quickly after that fall.  

Well, they gave that out, but he didn’t go back to do the job because it was too dangerous. The production should have taken into account the danger of being that far out on the stage. The upside of the accident is that it woke something in Ian. A shock like that is bound to wake something in you. He’s considerable, he’s absolutely considerable. He’s continued on his path and you can’t help but respect him.  

That’s the nice thing about getting older. You’re not beating tambourines anymore. You’re actually looking at people and saying, ‘Oh, well, I disagree. But my God! I respect that person.’  

It’s also great for viewers and audiences to have these different styles of acting. 

Of course. 

What do you make of the critique that actors should refrain from intervening in politics and the like—that they should stay in their lane? 

I think that’s a nonsense. Actors more than anything have an acute sensitivity to politics. If you’ve been in the game, you know that you can’t depend on it. It’s very fleeting.  

It took me a long time to come around to speaking up about things like Scottish independence, which I’m very interested in. I have never liked the name ‘Scottish National Party’, but I love the notion of the independent nature of Scotland.  

But I think that what we really require in these islands is federalism. We need each country to be self-standing on its own. These islands are a community. You can’t just say, ‘Oh, there’s Scotland, forget about the rest.’ 

Actors have a sense of that, of how they belong, and they also have a sense of not belonging. When you don’t belong in any one place, you get a broad view of what things are.  

Oh, you’re drinking Irn Bru!  

[Cue Irn Bru interlude. See audio excerpt.] 

I think that actors are very right to talk about stuff. We also have to talk about politics as it relates to our work. I think some of the practices that are happening to young actors now are despicable. Things like self-taping, where they’ve got to be their own technician and so on. They do these tapes and nobody even responds to them at the end of it. I find that appalling, so I will speak up about that, and I wish some of my fellow actors of my generation would also speak up about it. It’s our responsibility as the old regime of actors to say that what is happening to our young actors is not right. It’s not right that they lose the intimacy of a casting director.  

Some casting directors don’t work that way, of course. There’s a great casting director in Scotland, Orla O’Connor, who doesn’t do that. She believes in the relationship between people. But there’s a lot who do work like that. They used the excuse of Covid, and now they use the excuse of there being too many actors, and I say, that doesn’t matter. Common respect costs nothing.  

Do you think practices like self-taping will affect the quality of acting in future? 

I don’t think so. Actors are survivors, and you’ll get the talent no matter what. It’s just the battering that you get. It’s very wearing after a while, when you’re constantly not getting any response for what you’re doing. Young actors need some kind of response, even if they’re told they’re bad. And usually, they’re not bad, they just don’t fit into a particular project. But you’ve got to tell them, ‘Sorry, you’re not right for this project, and I’ll explain to you why you’re not right for it.’ 

Going back to politics, by advocating federalism, have you moved away from Scottish independence?  

No, not at all. I think federalism is the development of independence. We need to have a vision of how we live within these islands. We’re still a community, we’re still an island, like it or not. The border is a piece of land that’s flexible either way. At one point lots of people in the north of England were keen to be part of Scottish independence.  

I’m still pro-independence. I just think we’ve got to have a broader view of it, and federalism does that. We’re still very class-conscious in this country. I want to move away from that, to have a vision of what we want our country to be.  

We have to think about what an independent spirit means. To me, it means shaking off what we’ve suffered and endured for centuries. And we did it to ourselves, the Scots: we sold our Parliament out from under our feet in 1707 and became part of the United Kingdom. But that made us second-class in a way. For example, why did Prince William only go to see England at the Euros? That’s not very ‘United Kingdom’, is it? I think there’s still that attitude of, ‘Oh, the Scots are so tiresome.’  

When I was young, I couldn’t give a fuck about any of this. Now that I’m getting older, though, I think, ‘Hang on a second.’ In the project that I’m working on right now, my job is to honour the unity and the talent I see. People are delivering amazing work. And I want people to see that this is what Scotland can do. We can create stuff at a very high artistic level. But we don’t get that right now, we get reduced constantly. Our own culture is much older and more consistent than any other culture in these islands, because of the Celts that we all are.  

When I was younger, I was too ambitious. I didn’t care about any of this stuff. I just cared about me, but after a while, you get sick of that. And now, coming up to Scotland again, I see a kind of depression. It’s very difficult to describe but it’s there and it’s to do with permanently being defeated. We don’t need that. We can live through our defeat and learn from it. It shouldn’t make us depressed. It should do the opposite. It should free us more. It should make us think, ‘On, on.’ That’s how we’ve survived for centuries. We haven’t been browbeaten by it. It should make us think that maybe we could actually decide things for ourselves. That’s all I’m asking.  

Keir Starmer is absolutely against the breakup of the Union. It’ll never happen under a Labour government. He’s a stupid man—no, that’s not right, I’ll withdraw that. He’s very intelligent, but he’s very unspontaneous as a man. He’s limited in that sense. He doesn’t understand people’s feelings in Scotland and how necessary it is to nourish them, to make them blossom, to make them bloom.  

We’ve become so thwarted so much of the time, and that makes me sad because it is unnecessary. That’s why I believe in a United Federation, because I do think one of the things we are good at in Scotland is being very kind and considerate to others. All of those riots in England [in August], that would never happen in Scotland. We don’t do that. That’s not who we are. We are inclusive of our brothers and sisters who are Sikh and Islamic and so on. Of course, there will always be the headbangers. There will always be those who are afraid, who are intrinsically racist. You can’t avoid that. That’s something underdeveloped in the human spirit again. But on the whole, we’re really rather good at being inclusive in Scotland.  

For example, there was a meeting in Glasgow recently and what happened was quite stunning. About 30 right-wing people turned up. And against them you had the Indian, Irish Catholic, Scottish Presbyterian, and other communities all coming together. I think that is Scotland’s great gift. We’re good hosts. And that generosity of spirit is what I think could make us the nation that we should become.  

We’re out of time but thank you very much for talking to me. And good luck with your new project. 

My pleasure, it’s been nice to talk to you. Thank you very much. Take care. 

Related reading

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

Israel’s war on Gaza is a war on the Palestinian people, by Zwan Mahmod

Is the Israel-Palestine conflict fundamentally a nationalist, not a religious, war? by Ralph Leonard

Religion and the Arab-Israeli conflict, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Bloodshed in Gaza: Islamists, leftist ideologues, and the prospects of a two-state solution, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Young, radical and morally confused, by Gerfried Ambrosch

Britain’s liberal imam: Interview with Taj Hargey, by Emma Park

Can Religion Save Humanity? Part One, by Brian Victoria

Can Religion Save Humanity? Part Two: Killing Commies for Christ, by Brian Victoria

The far right and ex-Muslims: ‘The enemy of my enemy is not my friend’, by Sara Al-Ruqaishi

Reflections on the far right riots: a predictable wave of violence, by Khadija Khan

Free speech and the ‘Farage riots’, by Noel Yaxley

The post ‘F*** it, think freely!’ Interview with Brian Cox appeared first on The Freethinker.

Introduction

Jared Huffman is the Democratic representative for California’s 2nd congressional district and the only open non-believer in the US Congress. He is also at the forefront of the fight against Christian nationalism in America. He helped found the Congressional Freethought Caucus and the Stop Project 2025 Task Force. Andrew L. Seidel, constitutional attorney and author of The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American and American Crusade: How the Supreme Court is Weaponizing Religious Freedom (and Freethinker contributor) had this to say about Huffman:

Rep. Jared Huffman is unafraid to publicly declare his belief in church-state separation and his lack of religion. That fearlessness is something we rarely see in American politicians, and it gives me hope for our future. There is no more stalwart defender of the separation of church and state than Rep. Huffman.

I recently spoke with Huffman over Zoom about his career and his opposition to the theocratic agenda of a future Donald Trump administration. Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Interview

Daniel James Sharp: You are the only open non-believer in Congress. Could you tell us about that, and your personal background regarding religion?

Representative Jared Huffman: I had no intention of being known as the only open non-believer in Congress when I got elected back in 2012. I have been without religion for most of my adult life and in recent years came to sort of loosely identify as a humanist. But that was something I largely kept to myself. I had never been asked about it in politics. I’d spent twelve years in local government and six years in the California State Assembly and I could not imagine that it would ever come to be something I was known for in Congress.

But what I learned pretty early on is that there are all of these publications that want to know about the religious identification of people when they get to Congress. The Pew Research Center does this ongoing study about religiosity in Congress and there are all of these Capitol Hill publications that do surveys and ask you to choose your religious label. For the first few years, I essentially declined to answer those questions. I thought it was none of anyone’s business.

That changed when Donald Trump won the 2016 election and brought into government a growing number of strident Christian nationalists and an agenda that troubled me quite a bit and which I saw as deeply theocratic. I decided that this was something I needed to push back on.

However, it was hard to do that when I was keeping a little secret about my own religious identity, so I came out publicly as a humanist, making me the only member out of 535 in the House of Representatives and the Senate who openly acknowledges not having a God belief.

Do you think there are many other nonbelievers in Congress?

I know there are many more, but I’m the only one dumb enough to say it publicly!

Has coming out affected you politically?

I think that’s been an interesting part of the story. Conventional wisdom holds that you should never do that. And even in some of our more recent polls, atheists tend to rank lower than just about every other category in terms of the type of person Americans would vote for. So there was a lot of nervousness among my staff and from a lot of my friends and supporters when I came out in the fall of 2017.

But the backlash never came, and, if anything, I think my constituents appreciated me just being honest about what my moral framework was. I think they see an awful lot of hypocrisy in politics, a lot of fakers and people pretending to be religious, including Donald Trump, and I found that being honest about these things is actually pretty beneficial politically, and it also just feels more authentic, personally speaking.

Since Trump was elected in 2016, you have become very involved in resisting theocratic tendencies in government. You helped to found the Congressional Freethought Caucus in 2018, for example. Could you tell us how that came about?

Yes, that came next, after the Washington Post wrote a story about me coming out as a humanist. I think it was the next day after that piece was published that my colleague, Jamie Raskin, came to me on the House floor and said, ‘Hey, I think that’s great what you did, and I share the same concerns you have about the encroachment of religion into our government and our policies, we should think about some sort of a coalition to work on these secular issues.’ Conversations like that led pretty quickly to the creation of this new Congressional Freethought Caucus that we launched a few months later.

And what does the caucus do?

We support public policy based on facts and reason and science. We fiercely defend the separation of Church and State. We defend the rights of religious minorities, including the non-religious, against discrimination and stigmatization in the United States and worldwide. And we try to provide a safe place for members of Congress who want to openly discuss these matters of religious freedom without the constraints our political system has traditionally imposed.

It seems important to note that the caucus is formed of people from all different religious backgrounds. It’s not an atheist caucus.

Yes, it’s a mix, and it’s a mix that looks like the American people, which is different from Congress itself as a whole. The American people are getting less religious all the time and they are getting more religiously diverse, but Congress is stuck in a religious profile from the 1950s.

Do you think these changing demographics are part of the reason why there is this renewed Christian nationalist push?

I do. Religious fundamentalists correctly sense that their power and privilege are waning and that has caused them to become more desperate and extreme in their politics.

What is Project 2025?

Project 2025 is an extreme takeover plan for a second Trump presidency to quickly strip away many of the checks and balances in our democracy to amass unprecedented presidential power and use it to impose an extreme social order. It’s a plan to take total control over not just our government but also many of our individual freedoms. And the Christian nationalist agenda is at the heart of it.

Do you believe Trump’s statements distancing himself from Project 2025?

No, they are deeply unbelievable and implausible. Trump is inextricably intertwined with Project 2025 and until very recently both Trump’s inner circle and the Heritage Foundation, who published the plan, were openly boasting about the closeness of that connection. As Americans have come to learn more about Project 2025 and what it would do to their lives, it has become politically toxic to be associated with it, and that’s why you see these sudden attempts by Trump and his team to distance themselves from it.

How did people become more aware of it? It flew under the radar for quite a while.

Indeed, it flew under the radar for over a year. But our Freethought Caucus and others in Congress founded the Stop Project 2025 Task Force two months ago and, thanks to our efforts and the efforts of many others in the media and outside advocacy groups, more people have come to know about Project 2025 and the threat it poses to our democracy. Project 2025 went from being an obscure thing very few had heard about to, just a couple of weeks ago, surpassing Taylor Swift as the most talked about thing on the internet.

Quite an achievement! So, how exactly do you stop Project 2025?

It starts by understanding it, by reading the 920-page document that they arrogantly published and proclaimed as their presidential transition plan. That document lays out in great detail exactly what they intend to do. Our task force has been doing a deep dive into that, working with several dozen outside groups and leading experts to understand what some of these seemingly innocuous things they’re proposing actually mean in real life.

They hide beyond technical terms like ‘Schedule F civil service reform’ and we have been able to understand and help spotlight that what that really means is a mass purge of the entire federal workforce, rooting out anyone who has ever shown sympathy for Democratic politics, anyone who has ever been part of a diversity, equity, and inclusion programme, anyone who has worked on climate science—or anyone else who has offended the sensibilities of MAGA Republican extremists. They want to reclassify these employees and summarily fire them. This would affect well over 50,000 people throughout the federal workforce.

And then, as creepy as that already is, these people would be replaced by a cadre of trained and vetted Trump loyalists who are already maintained in a database housed by the Heritage Foundation. Essentially, they plan to repopulate the federal workforce with their own political operatives. This is not self-evident when you read the technical stuff in Project 2025, but that is exactly what their plan entails.

Can you give another example of their plans?

Yes. There are several ways in which they plan to impose their rigid social order. One of these is to dust off old morality codes from the 1870s using a dormant piece of legislation called the Comstock Act. The Comstock Act criminalises things that can be seen as obscene or profane and one of the things it criminalised back in the 1870s was anything that could terminate a pregnancy. Using this dormant legislation, which many believe is unconstitutional, Project 2025 are proposing what would amount to a nationwide ban on abortion, strict nationwide restrictions on contraception, and the criminalisation of in vitro fertilisation—very extreme and dystopic things.

It seems that the best way to stop Project 2025 is to stop Trump from being elected in November.

That’s the best way. That’s the most definitive way. But even if we beat Trump in this election, now that we have seen the Project 2025 playbook, we are going to have to build some policy firewalls against their plans in the future. The threat won’t go away. We need to build our defences against this kind of extreme takeover of government. But that is going to be much harder to do if Donald Trump is in the White House and his sworn loyalists are populating the entire federal workforce and they have broken down all of the checks and balances that stopped Trump’s worst impulses in his first presidency.

In essence, that’s what Project 2025 is: a plan to remove the obstacles that prevented Trump from doing many of the things he wanted to do or tried to do the first time around and to allow him to go even further.

Do you have a ‘doomsday scenario’ plan in the event of a Trump victory?

Yes, but it’s less than ideal. It relies on a lot of legal challenges in a legal system that has been well-populated by Trump loyalists. It relies on mobilising public opinion in a system where democracy and the democratic levers of power will not mean as much, because, frankly, Project 2025 is about accelerating the demise of a functioning democracy. Of course, there is no scenario under which we would just let all of this bad stuff happen without putting up a fight, but the tools that we would have to stop Project 2025 would be much less reliable if Trump wins.

How would the implementation of Project 2025 affect the rest of the world? What would be the consequences for America’s friends and allies?

I think that’s an important question for your readers. There’s no doubt that Project 2025 is hostile to the rules-based international order and our alliances that have kept Europe mostly free of war for the past half a century and more. It is hostile to globalism, as they refer to it, meaning free trade and the kind of trade relationships that we have with the European Union and many others around the world. It is hostile to confronting the climate crisis and even to acknowledging climate science. All of these are things that I’m sure folks in Scotland and the UK and throughout Europe would be deeply concerned by.

And there’s no doubt that Project 2025 is fundamentally sympathetic to strongman authoritarian regimes. In fact, it was inspired by Viktor Orbán in Hungary. The folks at the Heritage Foundation took a little trip to Hungary to learn about how Orbán had advanced all of these conservative, nationalist, authoritarian policies. Orbán has influenced the American right wing in a big way. He’s a bit of a rock star in Donald Trump’s world.

And so is Vladimir Putin, to an extent.

Indeed.

What are the chances of beating Trump in the election, now that Kamala Harris is the Democratic candidate?

A heck of a lot better than they were two or three weeks ago. My hope is that America is about to do what France did very recently. The French stared into the abyss of a right-wing authoritarian government and they realised what a scary and terrible prospect that was. In a matter of weeks, they united around a broad alliance to keep the far right out of power, and they succeeded. I think we are seeing a similar realisation and pivot from the American people. At least, I hope that is what’s happening. It certainly feels that way to me.

Looking in from the outside as an admirer of America, one thing I would like to see more of from the Democrats in particular is the patriotic case for secularism. The Christian nationalists and their ilk have claimed the mantle of patriotism, but their ideals are very far from the ideals America was founded on.

I think that’s a great point. And I know that you have worked with Andrew L. Seidel and others who are doing heroic work to recapture secular thought as part of what it means to be a patriotic American. I’m certainly all in for that. But the truth is that, though we did an incredible thing by separating Church and State in our Constitution, we have never done a great job of upholding that ideal. We have allowed Christian privilege and Christian power to influence our government for a long, long time, and in some ways what we’re struggling with now is a reckoning between the written law and the desperate attempts of Christian nationalists to hang on to their power and the founding premise of separating Church and State.

I suppose in some ways that’s the story of America. The battle between competing visions of America and trying to live up to those founding ideals.

Yes, that’s true. And the other thing that’s going on, I think, is that Christianity itself is in many respects changing around the world. I’ve spoken to secularists in Europe, in Scotland, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, and it does seem that there is a strain of fundamentalist Christianity that has become more pronounced in recent years, a strain that is hyper-masculine, focused on power, and militaristic. The old ‘love thy neighbour’ Christianity is falling out of favour. People are fleeing traditional Christian denominations and identifying with these extreme, fundamentalist versions of Christianity. And they even mock what they see as soft Christianity. There’s a violence to these strains, which we saw with the January 6th insurrection in a big way.

So there is a lot happening, and it is more than just a fight between secularists and religionists. It’s also an internal struggle within Christianity itself over some pretty core values.

Going back to your point about the influence of Orbán, it seems to me that it also works the other way around. You have American fundamentalists pouring money into right-wing groups in Europe and funding fanatics in Israel and Uganda. So what can people outside of the US do to help in the fight against American fundamentalism?

It’s hard to compete with the mountains of dark money spread around the world by billionaire Christian nationalists, but we’re not powerless. The good news is that most people don’t really want to live in an authoritarian theocracy. I think lifting up education and science and civil society around the world is essential, as is promoting the idea of keeping religion out of government, of letting people make their own private religious choices without being able to impose their morality codes on everyone else. It’s a huge challenge, but I welcome the influence of secularists in Europe and elsewhere to try to counterbalance this wrong-headed phenomenon that, unfortunately, is emanating from my country.

That seems like a good place to finish. Good luck in the fight, and in November.

I appreciate that very much. I hope to talk to you again after we have saved our democracy.

Related reading

Donald Trump, political violence, and the future of America, by Daniel James Sharp

Donald Trump is an existential threat to American democracy, by Jonathan Church

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

Against the ‘New Theism’, by Daniel James Sharp

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

The post ‘Project 2025 is about accelerating the demise of a functioning democracy’: interview with US Representative Jared Huffman appeared first on The Freethinker.

We all remember Hans Christian Andersen’s folktale ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ in which charlatans convince the vain Emperor that only clever people can see the clothes they make for him. Everyone goes along with this delusion for fear of looking stupid, including the Emperor’s advisers. Until, that is, they parade through the town one day and a little boy shouts, ‘The Emperor has no clothes!’ Thus the spell is broken and the people laugh at their Emperor. Feeling embarrassed, the Emperor continues on with his parade, for now he fears looking foolish.

There is a parallel here with the religious mindset. Religious people often need everyone else to share their beliefs. Why? Are they just so enraptured with their faith that they feel they are doing everyone a favour by proselytising? Or could it be that a part of them knows their beliefs are, shall we say, unscientific at best? Who knows—perhaps these itchy doubts are soothed by the participation of all?

The Bible itself, not atypically, gives mixed messages on this need to ‘witness’ private beliefs. Jesus extolls Simon and Peter to leave behind their nets and become ‘fishers of men’ rather than of fish. And yet Matthew 6:5 says that ‘when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men.’  

Which is it? And where do we draw the line in a modern, secular society? Freedom of religion and freedom FROM religion is an important principle for secularists. The right to hold religious beliefs and not to be persecuted or discriminated against is paramount, but sometimes the invocation of ‘religious freedom’ is used as cover by the religious to make special claims and demand special platforms for themselves. Examples of this are endless so forgive my summarising of some of the more egregious examples in modern Britain:

• We have unelected clerics in national and local government (bishops in the House of Lords and, in Scotland, religious nominees on council education committees). Embarrassingly, this makes the UK one of two countries to have unelected clerics in government. The other is Iran.
• Taxpayer-funded faith schools can often select their students using religious criteria and are allowed exemptions from many equality laws, notably in their teaching of sex education.
• There is compulsory religious (Christian) observance even in state schools. (Note that this is very different from Religious Education classes, which teach about, rather than preach, religion.)
• In Scotland under the new Hate Crime Act, religious belief (a choice) is a ‘protected characteristic’ on a par with immutable personal identities like race and sexual orientation.
• We allow the mutilation of children’s genitals for non-medical reasons—so long as the mutilators are convinced that they are carrying out a religious duty. Why is religious custom a protection from activities which would normally be criminal?
• Religion is given automatic stewardship of events like Remembrance Sunday. If important civic events like this are to be chained to an ever-diminishing Christianity, there is a real danger that both will be forgotten together.
• Religions are given privileges in charity law: to become a registered charity (with accompanying tax breaks), ‘the promotion of religion’, however controversial the views in question, is de facto in itself sufficient to qualify.
• The state pays for hospital chaplains. Why should a niche service which only serves a minority be paid for by all?
• Churches are empowered by the state to solemnise marriages and yet many, notably the established Church of England, retain the power to decide the marriages of which they approve.

Here, we must distinguish between secularism and atheism. Atheism is a metaphysical position which holds that there is no good reason to believe in any gods. Secularism is a principle of social administration by which the state is kept separate from religious influence (and vice versa).

For secular campaigners, this is an important line. Secularists campaign for secularism, not for atheism: a distinction which too many still fail to appreciate. Secularists do not seek to impose state atheism. So when the religious argue that ‘you just want to impose your atheism in place of our religion!’, the proper response is to compare this to a noisy neighbour arguing that ‘you just want to impose your silence in place of my noise!’

Last year in Scotland there was an SNP leadership election; the winning candidate would become First Minister. That one of the candidates, Kate Forbes, declared her opposition to marriage equality on account of her religious beliefs flagged up an interesting nuance in the argument about ‘religious freedom’.

Ms Forbes, I assume, did not rise to her political position because of her Christianity so there was no unfair religious privilege involved here. She was entitled therefore to allow her religious views to inform her political views, as she did. Similarly, the public was entitled not to vote for her because of her views. No arguments so far, but the problem arises from the fact that her defenders argued that to reject her candidacy because of her homophobia was to discriminate against her Christian beliefs! This clash of ‘protected characteristics’ has come up before (remember the gay cake). [Update: Forbes is now Deputy First Minister – Ed.]

For various reasons, including (but far from limited to) the need to fill in explanatory gaps and the human impulse to seek agency where there is none, religious belief has been and remains incredibly tenacious. But tenaciousness is not a testament to worthiness, nor does it mean that religion ought to be privileged in public life. It might bring comfort to many, and no secularist would wish to deny this comfort to those who need it, but religious freedom should not grant a seat next to the Prime Minister. 

Like the mythologies of all the many world religions, the Bible might still contain comfort and wisdom for some, but Christian belief has declined precipitously in the UK—and that trend shows no sign of stopping. Historic churches are falling into disrepair and rightly being taken over by the state to be used as premises for all. Christianity no longer represents Britain, and Christians must now act with grace: they must decouple from local and national government and they must relinquish their privileges. In short, they must be content to be treated equally under the law. The same, naturally, applies to all other religions.

Nobody begrudges the faithful their private beliefs but if they expect religious freedom to mean religious privilege, they risk being humiliated by any little boy who shouts, ‘The church has no clothes!’

Further reading

Atheism, secularism, humanism, by Anthony Grayling

Disestablishment and Bishops in the House of Lords

‘This is not rocket science’: the Disestablishment of the Church of England Bill 2023, by Emma Park

Bishops in the Lords: Why are they still there? by Emma Park

Religion in schools

Faith schools: where do the political parties stand? by Stephen Evans

Religion and belief in schools: lessons to be learnt, by Russell Sandberg

The Scottish Hate Crime Act

From Satan to the Hate Monster, by Emma Park

Faith Watch, March 2024, by Daniel James Sharp

Is the spirit of liberty dead in Scotland? by Noel Yaxley

Genital mutilation

Circumcision: the human rights violation that no one wants to talk about, by Alejandro Sanchez

Religion and charity law

Faith and charity law: time for a rethink and Secularism is a feminist issue, by Megan Manson

The post The case for secularism (or, the church’s new clothes) appeared first on The Freethinker.

If the Scottish Government is to be believed, a roving band of bigoted individuals is attacking its citizens. In an attempt to deprogram the hate-filled hoi polloi from their rabid bigotry, the Hate Monster has been let loose. In an 80-second video, a character eerily reminiscent of Captain Caveman grows larger, fuelled by hate: ‘When ye feel angry; he’ll be there, feeding aff they emotions. Getting bigger and bigger, till he’s weighing ye doon.’ Since this online periodical’s editor is Scottish, I made sure to quote the proper vernacular to avoid committing a hate crime. [Och aye! Very wise! – Ed.]

Scotland’s Hate Crime and Public Order Act went into effect on 1 April. It was created to consolidate existing hate crime legislation and safeguard minorities who were thought to be particularly vulnerable. In 2020, after the George Floyd murder, then-Scottish Justice Secretary Humza Yousaf stated that ‘We cannot, and will not, tolerate hate crime, prejudice or discrimination of any kind.’ This came just a couple of months after he introduced the Hate Crime Bill in the Scottish Parliament. More recently, the First Minister has called for a ‘zero-tolerance approach to hatred.’ In addition to a long list of protected characteristics, including age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, and transgender identity, the Act establishes a new offence of ‘stirring up hatred’.

According to Police Scotland, a hate crime is defined as ‘Any crime which is perceived by the victim or any other person as being motivated (wholly or partly) by malice or ill will towards a social group.’ Put another way, it is a perception-based crime: the alleged victim’s—or witnesses’—subjective assessment alone is sufficient to classify an incident as a hate crime, without the need for any additional evidence. 

The Act’s defenders contend that this is an incorrect interpretation of the law. They argue that it is necessary for a ‘reasonable person’ to agree that an incident is threatening or abusive enough to constitute a hate crime. But there were already laws pertaining to death threats and every liberal democracy is based on laws that protect people from physical harm. So what of abuse? Words are not violence. This law conflates physical and verbal abuse. When someone verbally attacks you, the worst you will suffer is a bruised ego. It does not put a restriction on your freedom. 

And what of the effects on the alleged transgressors? You might be recorded as having participated in a non-crime hate incident (NCHI), even if you have not broken the law. If this occurs, you are unlikely to be informed, but it could become apparent when your employer conducts a disclosure check on you. Although NCHIs were not introduced as part of the new Hate Crime Act, it is a reasonable suspicion that more of them will be recorded now. The Court of Appeal (England and Wales) declared in 2021 that the recording of NCHIs as it had been done until then was unlawful. Despite this, police in England and Wales persisted, issuing 6,489 of them between June and November of last year, many of which involved ‘petty rows’. The Scottish police are merely doing the same.

It appears that elite paranoia about the general population is the motivation behind the Hate Crime Act. Hundreds of sites have been made available by Police Scotland for the public to report hate crimes, which range from a Glaswegian sex shop to a mushroom farm in North Berwick. You can visit one of these snitching centres located across the length and breadth of the nation and submit an anonymous report about someone. What could possibly go wrong?

If Harold Wilson’s oft-quoted observation that ‘a week is a long time in politics’ is correct, then the Hate Crime Act’s first one has been an unmitigated disaster. In the seven days since the Act’s enactment, Police Scotland logged over 6,000 reports. The police are wasting valuable resources on overtime due to the unceasing influx of incidents, costing hundreds of thousands of pounds, while actual crimes like burglary remain unsolved. 

Perhaps the worst aspect of the Act is that the dwelling defence has been removed, so people now face the possibility of prosecution for remarks they make while at home. Fines and jail terms of up to seven years are among the available forms of punishment.

And the Act is a hostage to the law of unintended consequences. As a senior Scottish police officer said, people might ‘use the legislation to score points against people who sit on the other side of a particularly controversial debate’. Thus, police might be forced to adjudicate between warring parties seeking revenge.

Meanwhile, Thomas Ross KC suggested that football fans might report rival supporters using the Act. Given the fierce rivalry and sectarian history of Old Firm football, this could prove a real headache for the police. Indeed, a number of reports regarding hate crimes were made after a match on 7 April according to The Times, including from people who overheard Rangers fans’ singing on the TV and radio, though the precise figure has not been verified. 

Like all laws that aim to outlaw offence, this one appears to have been thrown together on the fly. The best example of the ad hoc nature of the Act was provided by Siobhan Brown, the Minister for Victims and Community Safety, who stated that individuals may be subject to investigation if they misgender someone. J.K. Rowling chose to test the new law on April Fool’s Day, which, ironically, was also the day the Act went into effect. The gender critical feminist posted on Twitter/X about a number of men convicted of sex crimes now identifying as women. She said, ‘If what I’ve written here qualifies as an offence under the terms of the new act, I look forward to being arrested when I return to the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment.’

Thankfully, the police declared that the Harry Potter author’s tweets were not criminal. Additionally, they ignored reports against Humza Yousaf, who became a target for his now-infamous speech in 2020 in which he effectively criticised Scotland for being too white. Naturally, this has led to accusations that the police are selectively enforcing the new law. Take the Scottish Conservative MSP Murdo Fraser, who had an NCHI recorded against him for tweeting that identifying as non-binary was like identifying as a cat. Fraser now intends to challenge this in court. 

I write a lot about culture, so let me share a humorous example that encapsulates our submission to political correctness. Scot Squad was a Scottish mockumentary series about a fictional police force, and one episode was incredibly prescient. In it, the chief repeatedly digs himself into a bigger hole in an effort to make up for a relatively trivial comment. Feeling he is always offending someone, his long apology never ends. 

A recent poll indicates that 45% of Scots support the repeal of the law, while 21% support it. This is a heartening indication that the spirit of liberty in Scotland is not dead yet. The more people learn about it, the more resistance they seem to be putting up. We owe a debt of gratitude to J.K. Rowling for making the general public aware of the ridiculousness of this law. Ironically, it took a woman with a big set of balls to show up this illiberal legislation.

Further reading

From Satan to the Hate Monster, by Emma Park

Faith Watch, March 2024, by Daniel James Sharp

The return of blasphemy in Ireland, by Noel Yaxley

The post Is the spirit of liberty dead in Scotland? appeared first on The Freethinker.