Capitalism and Conservative Christianity: the Biblical Roots of the Fraud

What led from the New Testament’s tales of the earliest Christians sacrificing their lives to establish a socialist paradise in preparation for humankind’s imminent judgment by God, to the late-modern Christian’s celebration of the dehumanizing hierarchies entrenched by capitalism?

The Bible mocks the disciples for misunderstanding Jesus’s message and for failing to see why he had to die on the cross. Once they saw Jesus in his resurrected form, they realized Rome’s occupation of the Jews and the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE served the divine purpose of creating a new covenant with God, one that opened up the best of Judaism to the gentile, as Paul explained in his epistles. Jesus’s defeat at the hands of Rome was only an illusion, since God used the crucifixion as the means by which sin and death could be overcome for humanity. So the earliest Christians kept alive their faith in Jesus and the dualistic message: natural injustice is only apparent, and we should adopt the transcendent ideal that inspired Jesus to sacrifice his life. Eventually, the Christian dualism that was inherited from Eastern spirituality (from Hinduism and Zoroastrianism) was watered down when the failing Roman Empire co-opted Christianity in the fourth century and the so-called Catholics drove out the anticosmic Gnostics. Many centuries later, after presiding over the Crusades and Inquisitions, Christianity congealed into the American perversions—Fundamentalist, Southern Baptist, and Evangelical—that idolize monstrous Trumpism and tout Nazi-like social Darwinism. Thus we have the absurdity, made infamous by Thomas Frank in What’s the Matter with Kansas?, that poor and middle-class “conservative Christians” in the United States beg the Republicans to make life harder for themselves by transferring political and economic power from the public to the private sector.   

Rendering unto Caesar

There are two biblical justifications the phony Christians use to conceal their hypocrisy. The first is the story of Jesus’s shrewdness in answering opponents who tried to trap him into denying that Jews should pay taxes to the Romans. Jesus ducks the question by asking the foes to find a coin, notice that the coin bears the image and name of Caesar and not of God (since there are no images of God in Judaism), and to pay to Caesar and to God what they’re each due (Mark 12:17). The coin evidently belongs to Caesar, but the coin can be made to stand for the whole earthly domain, as the Gnostics especially would have emphasized. Thus, Christians could run with that dualism as an excuse to compromise their spiritual aspirations and to submit to secular expectations and authorities. Not only should those who would prefer to live in God’s kingdom pay their taxes and follow their earthly nation’s laws, but they should divide their loyalties between Jesus, for example, and the pursuit of fame, money, or political power. Although Jesus reserved his harshest rebukes for hypocrites, so-called Christians could pay lip service to Jesus and the Bible, while acting as though they were concerned only with succeeding in secular terms. After all, Jesus appears to grant that there are two masters, two domains, and two loyalties.

Notice that Paul’s monism steps all over that rationale. Paul agrees that Christians should pay taxes and respect “thrones” and “principalities,” but the reason he supplies differs from Jesus’s. Jesus appears to concede that part of the world doesn’t belong to God, when he holds out the possibility of rendering unto Caesar what’s his and not God’s, whereas Paul affirms that God owns everything. Col.1:16: “For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him.” Thus, says Paul, “Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which is from God. The authorities that exist have been appointed by God. Consequently, the one who resists authority is opposing what God has set in place, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves…This is also why you pay taxes. For the authorities are God’s servants, who devote themselves to their work” (Rom.13:1-6).

If we interpret Jesus’s statement on taxes in the Gnostic manner, Jesus is saying the natural realm is ruled by profane powers, such as by empires like the Roman one. That semi-Gnosticism would provide the Christian the maximum excuse to effectively ignore Christianity until the end of earthly life, as Homer from The Simpsons once proposed, and to recant on his or her deathbed to live as a follower of Jesus only in the afterlife. The Christian could say that God’s kingdom hasn’t yet arrived, that nature is presently ruled by demonic powers, and that those powers should serve as our earthly models in the interim. Along with war and other blasphemies and atrocities, capitalism, the selfish, unsustainable struggle for profit and domination that reflects the animal’s red-in-tooth-and-claw fight for survival is a more fitting plan of action, given God’s absence, than any quixotic quest for socialist utopia or for heaven on earth. A Christian kingdom would require the miracle of God’s divine judgment of humankind, but until that happens Christians are obliged to give the devil his due, to follow suboptimal standards set, for example, by Caesar or by Trump, who may be the demonic powers’ agents or slaves. For example, if nature is governed not by God but by blind or evil forces that favour psychopaths and con artists, Christians had better compete on that unchristian terrain rather than pretend the moral, transcendent God has direct control over his creation.

President Trump is our Punishment

In 2019 all people of good will are tormented by the same burning question: “When will Donald Trump get his comeuppance?” Will he ever be punished for his flagrant villainy or will the injustice prove not just that there’s no God but that all our lives are sickening jokes? The shamelessness, vulgarity, childishness, psychopathy, narcissism, financial corruption, and con artistry—his list of depravities is long and familiar.

But notice that the easiest job in the world belongs to the destroyer, because through entropy the universe naturally flows towards dissolution, whereas creating something new and sustainable is practically miraculous, especially when there’s no intelligent creator. As such, Republicans, the proverbial foxes guarding the hen house, have had it easy since at least 1980. Their effrontery lies in the fact that they serve nominally as politicians who are supposed to govern, whereas their true agenda—not even kept hidden any longer—is to sabotage all functions of the government that benefit especially the majority of Americans. Republicans since Reagan serve only the richest of the rich, especially the top one percent, and those wealthy individuals live in their own gated worlds and needn’t rely on the government. With President Trump’s chaos and treachery, Republicans have removed the mask and stomped on it: theirs is the party now of apocalyptic anarchy for the duped masses and of kleptocracy for the scheming, monstrous upper class. Effectively, their motto is to steal what you can from the empire in its state of moral decay.

What if, for that reason, though, we’ve been preoccupied with the wrong question? What if Donald Trump can’t and shouldn’t be punished, because his mental disorders and senility render him subhuman so that holding Trump accountable for the damages he’s done to American values would be like punishing a rampaging donkey? Instead of tearing our hair out wondering whether this season of the reality TV show of American politics will end with Trump impeached, indicted or somehow disgraced, perhaps we should reflect on the possibility that Trump’s reign is a punishment—for everyone but Trump. It’s not Trump who deserves to be punished, but Americans in general, together with the “free” peoples that have followed the American example, and our punishment has finally arrived in the hideous form of a troglodyte’s holding the highest office on the planet.

Americans generally are culpable for leading the world, with China, in carbon emissions and for their ecological deficit, as their ecological footprint greatly exceeds their biodiversity. (As the Global Footprint Network explains, “A national ecological deficit means that the nation is importing biocapacity through trade, liquidating national ecological assets or emitting carbon dioxide waste into the atmosphere.”) China, parts of Europe, the Middle East, and some developing countries are also debtors in that regard, but no country cheers for consumerism like the United States. Americans generally allowed their culture and political systems to degrade to the point where Trump could be and was actually elected president. Perhaps we do always get the leader we deserve.

Is the Cynical Intellectual a Parasite?

Have you ever startled yourself while driving a car, snapping out of your second-nature skill as you realize you’re sitting in a hunk of metal, hurtling down a stretch of asphalt, surrounded by other speeding blocks of metal? To say that driving becomes second nature is to say that you can suppress those doubts and unite mentally with the car—just as a practiced horseback rider must feel while straddling the horse. The more familiar we are with something, the lower we drop our guard until we identify with the thing. At first while wearing braces, the metal on your teeth feels strange, but eventually you get used to it and the braces feel like part of your teeth.

It’s the same with language: from an early age we learn how to speak so that when we hear or read sentences we don’t regard the letters as peculiar sounds or squiggles, but identify them immediately as carriers of meaning. But every now and then, we might snap out of that familiarity, forget for a moment the word’s conventional meaning, and marvel at the letters’ strangeness. In short, we can exit the pragmatic mode and look at our tools objectively from outside the standard use. Assuming we can adopt the aesthetic stance in interpreting anything at all, including our bodies, family members, and nature in general, we’re only ever a moment’s abstraction away from an encounter with the uncanny.

With respect to the standard use of language, we transmit meanings bound up in our mind and we do so by suspending our disbelief in the inherent strangeness of linguistic communication. Again, from the aesthetic perspective, which is just the anti-perspective of objectivity that ignores technoscience’s instrumental motives, everything will seem strange, because to adopt that lack of perspective we must treat ourselves as the insignificant nothings we are from the universe’s vantage point. We must become inhuman to perceive the world as it really is, without the input of our personal and social interests. The real world at large is, of course, inhuman since human interests are incidental byproducts that don’t agree or harmonize with reality. Life in general will mean nothing when universal processes extinguish all living things on this planet eons from now, as the universe evolves for no reason, and so life presently only seems superficially to have a purpose from our subjective standpoints. We can set aside those standpoints and glimpse the noumenal essence of anything by attending to its mere aesthetic characteristics. What we can call, then, the “enlightened” treatment of language would amount to the standard use together with an act of mental negation, an unsaying of what’s said as we’re humiliated by the deeper pointlessness of speaking.

The long-term act of living a life likewise has conventional and enlightened modes. Exoterically, we’re supposed to be confident in ourselves so that the day-to-day acts of living become second-nature. We engage in our daily routines, eschewing any meta-perspective or philosophical questions as being counterproductive and depressing. By contrast, an elevated, transhuman outlook would call for just such doubts. When we understand that we’re all ridiculous in the big picture, that even our knowing, rebellious acts are small-minded and futile, we ought to lose some confidence in our abilities and trained reactions. As with the shell of language, the justification of our automated, civilized self can seem self-evident, because when we identify with our personality and with our socially-acceptable behaviours, our mind operates on autopilot to get the job done. The enlightened self, then, is a layer of mental activity that judges the encultured self and even the person’s character which has accrued from countless minor performances. This liberated self loses confidence in the artificial construct of the persona, as she beholds the strangeness of her behavioural patterns in their aesthetic dimension. Indeed, the “twilight zone” from pop culture seems like just how the world would be were we to misplace our familiar perceptual and cognitive filters and witness the world as so much indifferent art.  

The Incoherence of Meritocracy

Who should rule? Perhaps you think the answer is spelled out in the concept of a meritocracy, of a society run by those who excel on account of their ability and talent. The elites in a meritocracy are meant to be the opposite of plutocrats who buy power and of aristocrats who inherit power regardless of their aptitude.

“Meritocracy,” though, is a curious concept. Even in an aristocracy, the rulers do excel—at being selfish, spoiled, aloof, and indolent. An aristocrat would be incompetent at improving the lives of the peasants and slave labourers who support the empire, if that were the empire’s purpose, but a royal can inspire as a symbol of how arbitrary power corrupts character. Or take the kleptocracy, the society in which political power is stolen. The thieves in charge still excel—at conning the masses and wasting the natural resources. Or take an even more obvious case of a society supposedly run by impostors who don’t deserve their power, the kakistocracy which, by definition, is a society run by the worst persons. Again, these rulers would be abysmal, morally speaking, but that’s not to say they would be bereft of any talent. Con artists, for example, excel at selling, which is to say at deceiving and at restricting their perspective to their primitive, selfish urges as a result of their lack of empathy.

Only in a country in which power is handed out randomly would we expect the rulers to have no common skills. An aristocracy comes close to that scenario, because the randomness inherent to sexual reproduction is a factor in the bestowing of political power along a bloodline. That randomness, though, is balanced by the upper-class institutions that rear the royal child and by absolute power’s natural tendency to monstrify the powerful person, so that aristocratic personalities and talents do resemble each other. For example, aristocrats are all rich and they live in castles and have sycophantic servants; they also receive top-notch education, they’re famous from birth and know they won’t face immediate oblivion in the history books, unlike most people who ever lived, so aristocrats have to adapt to that common environment.

Amoral, Moral, and Mixed Meritocracies

These complications point to a more fundamental problem with meritocracy, which is that the concept might be incoherent. After all, ruling or governing implies some degree of coercion, of exercising power over others. If the kind of merit that’s relevant to a meritocracy were determined by moral criteria, the moral elites might be poor candidates for that job since they’d be inclined to avoid committing even the slightest infraction of the citizens’ rights. Depending on which skills are relevant to the task of ruling over the masses, or to speak euphemistically, of “governing the nation’s affairs,” some who’ve earned various merits might be the worst candidates for a political position. This would be the political realist’s perspective, which has recently entered popular culture via the success of “Game of Thrones.” The notion of a meritocracy, then, almost serves as a weasel word for obscuring these preliminary questions of the purpose of government and of which talents are suited to fulfilling that purpose.

Humble Cognition: Dread and Awe from Objectivity

Does scientific practice presuppose a philosophy or any nonscientific belief? As one philosopher, Nicholas Maxwell, points out, the rise of empiricism marked the breaking point between science and philosophy, when scientists began to assume that philosophy is irrelevant to science. Maxwell writes, “It was Newton who inadvertently killed off natural philosophy with his claim, in the third edition of his Principia, to have derived his law of gravitation from the phenomena by induction.”

In Newton’s words, “whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called an hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical…have no place in experimental philosophy [that is, in what today we would call “science”]. In this philosophy [i.e. science], particular propositions are inferred from the phenomena, and afterwards rendered general by induction. Thus it was that…the laws of motion and of gravitation were discovered.” Whereas the standard picture of the scientific method posits the hypothesis, that is, the informed guess, which the scientist tests with experiments, Newton evidently thought that the scientist should bring no presumption to her observations. The scientist is supposed to derive the best explanation from the phenomena themselves, leaving no opportunity for philosophical, religious, or otherwise unempirical interpretations.

Strictly speaking, this empiricism anthropomorphizes nature, which is to say there’s a category error in asserting, as Newton does, that “particular propositions are inferred from the phenomena.” Like the word “imply,” “infer” has to do with unstated communication. The communicator suggests or implies a hidden meaning, while the receiver infers that meaning from what’s been communicated. Thus, a natural phenomenon, such as a planet’s orbit or a property of light waves doesn’t imply anything, nor can you infer any meaning from what isn’t alive and capable of literal communication. Of course, if you were to believe that a deity is behind all of nature, so that God speaks through natural patterns, you could speak well of receiving the meaning of natural messages. Rather than philosophizing about that meaning, you could read nature’s messages, as Galileo said, using the universe’s language of mathematics. Newton’s pseudoscientific occult studies notwithstanding, however, the theistic or deistic basis for this strict empiricism, according to which the scientist only reads off her explanations and theories from the observations, with minimal philosophical, aesthetic, or any other human interpretative contribution isn’t remotely scientific. On the contrary, the self-serving faith that nature originates from an all-powerful intelligent mind (who will happily reward the best of us, being that this god is one of us—only perfected) is the most hackneyed dogma and a classic prejudice which scientific objectivity and skepticism rendered quaint.

If nature doesn’t literally communicate any message to the observer and if “sense data” aren’t given—ready-made—by the phenomena, but are processed, as Kant argued, by the mind and brain, empiricism is erroneous. The mind isn’t a blank slate and nature doesn’t hand explanations to the scientist. Instead, the entire scientific or rational enterprise, together with the articulation of theories and explanations, and even the fundamental concept of truth are human anomalies. Rather than belonging to nature in Daoist fashion, a statement about, say, the orbit of planets is epiphenomenal, a bizarre byproduct to which the natural fact in question must be so indifferent that the most enlightened response to the statement is to appreciate the statement’s absurd futility.

Buddhists, Pessimists, and the End of Suffering

Should our ultimate goal be to end all suffering? Is the highest form of spirituality a state of bliss? Is enlightenment the learning of secret knowledge and the attaining of a cosmic perspective that free the enlightened one from having to suffer due to ignorance? Is that what’s left when we extinguish our egoistic illusions, when we discover the truth of what life and the universe really are: inner peace and what one writer who contrasts Buddhism with pessimistic philosophy calls “morally blameless delight and a peace that brings wellbeing, fearlessness, and generosity”?

That author points out that while the Buddha did seek to prove that life in ignorance is suffering, the Buddhist departs from pessimists such as Thomas Ligotti, Eugene Thacker, and David Benatar in maintaining that “life and nature also contain real pleasures and beauty,” which inspire the Buddhist to champion “the moral purity and joy available to those who practice the way of self-restraint, lovingkindness, and meditative training.” By contrast, the pessimist’s “sober gaze on the shortcomings of the world leads neither to the transcendental freedom offered by many classical spiritual paths (both Buddhist and non-Buddhist) nor, it seems, to a commitment to the service of others.” Pessimism is only Buddhism’s First Noble Truth, according to that author; the others are about how to be happy in a world in which suffering predominates.  

Nihilism and Buddhist Values

I want to focus here on that notion of “morally blameless delight.” This delight or peace or enlightened happiness is supposed to be superior to pessimistic depression or cynicism. Both the Buddhist and the pessimist are clear on the horrific nature of reality, but the Buddhist transcends that knowledge by realizing that if nothing matters, because all events are morally neutral, dependently-arising probabilities, there’s no point in wanting anything. The loss of ego and the surrender of personal preferences free the mind and body to stop caring and thus to stop wasting time suffering from disappointment. While the pessimist wallows in misery and guilt, the Buddhist can excel at selfless action, since the Buddhist views the world from a cosmic perspective in which there’s only amoral causality.

But why help others if nothing really matters, because there’s no God or supernatural self or metaphysical purpose? Perhaps nature appears beautiful from the Buddhist perspective, and when she appreciates that beauty she’s naturally inspired to seek to end other people’s suffering, in which case Buddhist morality would be aesthetic. Suffering would be uglier than happiness. Meanwhile, the pessimist would be like the decadent Frenchman in The Matrix Reloaded movie, who is only bored by his unsurpassed knowledge of causality. However the Buddhist leaps into morality, there’s that author’s contention that Buddhist delight would be “morally blameless.” Presumably, the Buddhist shouldn’t be condemned because she no longer has a self that seeks to dominate others due to willful blindness to the real causes and effects that make nonsense of conventional beliefs and interests. For the Buddhist, conventional pseudoreality is only a field of hallucinatory illusions that traps us and imposes a sad regime in which we suffer from cravings that can never be fulfilled, because real causality is indifferent to our myths and ideals. We want to be happy even at the cost of harming others to get ahead, because we don’t realize there’s no such thing as the self in the first place; instead, there are natural mechanisms that give rise to particular events that can be aesthetically appraised. 

Is there a Conservative sense of Fairness?

According to Dan Meegan, author of America the Fair: Using Brain Science to Create a More Just Nation and an Atlantic article, Conservatives Have a Different Definition of ‘Fair,’ liberals miss the point when they presuppose that “fairness” should be defined in terms of need, so that those most in need—the poor, the disenfranchised, the physically or mentally challenged—are most deserving of government assistance. Liberals fail to appreciate that conservatives have an alternative view of fairness: conservatives care more about equity or proportionality, so that for them your benefits should depend on your contributions. Any helping hand, then, would be unfair unless we somehow earn that assistance. There’s no universal right to government assistance just because we’re in need of it if we’ve failed in life; on the contrary, in that case we’ve earned the barriers that result from those failures, given this conservative value of equity, of deserving to receive no more and no less than the fruits of our labour.

This appeal to conservative values—along the lines of Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations theory— allows Meegan to explain why the Tea Party, for example, used to defend the Medicare health insurance program even though this program provides aid to those most in need, such as the elderly. Medicare is also equitable since it’s funded by a payroll tax, so that working people expect the program also to reward them for their contributions. Social Security in the US is likewise funded by a payroll tax so that while the poor receive more than they contribute and the rich receive less, the middleclass receives equitable benefits, more or less proportional to what they contributed from their personal earnings.

Meegan points out that, “This conservative version of fairness is wired deeply in the human brain, and liberals ignore it at their peril.” In experiments, primates will reject a reward if they see another monkey receiving a superior reward for the same effort. A monkey would rather throw away a meager reward than concede to the unfairness of arbitrary or free-loading extraction of benefits. For Meegan the genetic message is clear: “Don’t take advantage of me [in the future], and don’t help yourself to more than you deserve.”

The Absence of Conservative Values

But there’s a giant flaw in Meegan’s analysis, which is that so-called American “conservatives” save their objections to the free-loading poor, as though the rich earn every penny of their millions or billions of dollars. You hear a “conservative” rail against the welfare state when the issue is whether the government should redistribute tax dollars to help the needy poor (since the conservative rejects this liberal sense of fairness). But you don’t find the conservative repudiating unearned, inherited wealth or the lobbyist-concocted financial system that multiplies wealth through monopolies and rent-seeking behaviour, which conflict with the value of equity. If you have a monopoly, for example, you engage in price gouging not because your efforts or contributions increase to justify the higher price, but because you can take advantage of the lack of competitors. Nor do you find the conservative castigating the rich with anything like the vitriol he or she reserves for the poor, despite the obvious fact that all private concentrations of wealth are created in part by luck, which means no fortune is ever wholly earned.

Nerds and Predators in World Affairs: Déjà vu from Childhood

In the schoolyard, the most aggressive children—typically boys—dominate the weaker kids, bullying and harassing them. The bullies know they’re only children themselves, not invincible, so secretly they’re afraid they’re overstepping their bounds. When society discovers a predator in its midst, the predator is locked up or slaughtered like a rabid dog. So the bully learns to conceal the depth of his depravity, acquiring the con artist’s knack for lying. This is the birth of the subcriminal psychopath, of the real-world monster that’s the source of all fictional villains.

On the other side there are the girls and the nerdy, effeminate boys, the budding intellectuals and gentle, proto-spiritual souls who are physically weak but mentally too strong for their good. These weaklings are ignored, dominated, or exploited as the case may be. For example, nerdy or unattractive girls may be teased or sexually abused by the popular boys who have wealthy parents and thus the apparent right to victimize the lower classes.

This dynamic between the thugs, con artists, and psychopaths, on the one side, and the girls, effeminate nerds and idealists, on the other, doesn’t disappear in adulthood; on the contrary, the divisions deepen.

In Europe, the elite bureaucrats are facing a backlash against antiglobalist authoritarian nationalists, including white supremacists who are opposed to immigration from Arab countries. In England, for example, the naivety of the elite neoliberals in the Labour and Conservative parties, protectors of the Establishment and of the Rule of Law, was revealed by their having been outmaneuvered by the demagogues who had whipped up anti-Europe sentiment in England, prompting the elites to promise the angry masses a referendum on the question of remaining in the European Union. Having underestimated the resentment from the many who were struggling under globalization, David Cameron held the referendum, campaigned that England should remain in the EU, and lost the referendum with only a bare majority of 51.9% voting to leave the EU. Despite the obvious split in public opinion, the elite intellectuals running the country refused to consider a do-over, and moved for the country as a whole to leave. What happened, then, is that half the British public was terrorized, fed misinformation, and bullied into surrendering Britain’s role in world affairs, by a pack of con artists and short-sighted anarchists (also known as “libertarians”).

Or take the war between Donald Trump’s Republicans and Nancy Pelosi’s Democrats. The former represent the free-loading, anarchical predators and powerful evil-doers (that is, the selfish parasites who are incapable of empathy). In counting on the Mueller report, the rule of law, and the wisdom of the founders, the Democrats, by contrast, represent the naïve pencil-necks and girly-men, the pie-in-the-sky spiritualists, artists, and intellectuals who are guided by utopian dreams.

The Democrats have their heads in the clouds and can’t bring themselves to fight dirty against the Republicans, because the Democrats are loath to admit the depths to which their society has sunk; in particular, they’re embarrassed by the fact that their political debates are driven by advanced renditions of schoolyard squabbles. The idealistic, “progressive” Democrats haven’t grappled with the catastrophic existential implications of Donald Trump’s election to the presidency in 2016. If a psychopathic predator can legally become president even in the country that’s supposed to lead the free world, why trust that democracy is an alternative to the authoritarian state? Why trust in the law if obvious evil has been rendered legal by decades of cynical lobbying? If nature wins in the end, why pretend the world can be improved, when you can just go with the flow of jungle law, as in theocracies, dictatorships, and oligarchies? 

New Atheism and Godless Spirituality

New Atheism isn’t so new anymore. As others have pointed out, what began as a rationalist backlash against the religious war between Islamist terrorism and George W. Bush’s neoconservative crusade has split and faded. When Obama succeeded Bush, the New Atheists found themselves divided along political lines, between progressives and the dawning alt right. Thus, New Atheism as a mainstream movement has been eclipsed by the “woke” liberals, fighting for social justice on the left, and by the “classic liberals” and enemies of political correctness, on the right.

Progressives such as an atheist blogger on Patheos diagnose the problem with New Atheism this way: “When people walk away from religion, they should also have discarded racism, sexism and all the irrational prejudices that were propped up and legitimized by faith. In too many cases, that’s not what happened. The decent people who were non-religious but also cared about social justice quite rightly wanted nothing to do with this movement, and that’s caused a decline in its prominence and visibility.” Meanwhile, classic liberal atheists such as Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Bill Maher along with their fellow traveller, Jordan Peterson, accuse the young progressives, known pejoratively as “snowflakes” or “social justice warriors,” of being akin to religious fundamentalists for shutting down debate about unpopular opinions. Instead of playing the religious faith card to avoid following reason, progressive secularists would prohibit all anti-progressive ideas and policies on the grounds that they’re oppressive and unjust.

Scientism and the Nonrationality of Politics

The fracturing of New Atheism due to politicization shouldn’t be surprising, since all that was new with this atheist movement was the application of doubt about God to politics in popular Western culture after 9/11. Atheism itself is, of course, global and ancient. For a great elaboration, see Jennifer Michael Hecht’s book, Doubt: A History. The notion that godlessness might be politically useful, however, is dubious, regardless of whether the applications are proposed by liberals or by conservatives. Thus, the problem with the above quotation from the progressive atheist is that religion isn’t what’s propping up racism, sexism, or other irrational prejudices. What props them up is biology, and reason is the messenger that alerts us to that fact. The cross-race effect, for example, means that we more easily recognize faces with racial characteristics similar to ours, since those are the ones with which we’re most familiar. Our inherent biases can be altered by environmental factors, which is to say we’re not fated by biology to be troglodytes. But the ancestral (Paleolithic) environment to which our brain adapted does irrationally prejudice us in spite of our civilized conceits. Just as a domesticated tiger or pit bull or killer whale can fall back on its wild instincts and wreak havoc, we’re prone to defying civilized norms, especially if we think we can evade the authorities that would hold us to a higher standard. This is, of course, how most criminal misconduct unfolds.

But reason goes further in the Humean and Nietzschean direction, directing our attention to the fact that the condemnation of “irrational prejudices” is itself foolish. Scientism on both the progressive and classic liberal or alt right sides is far from a rational position. You can have all the facts you want and all the logical powers of deducing which facts would follow causally from others under various conditions, and the sum of that knowledge wouldn’t prove that one type of behaviour is superior to another. You’d know which is most effective or useful, yes, but not which is morally best. For that prescription you need an irrational leap. You need a value judgment, a desire and more likely a vision of an ideal world that feels right to you according to intuitions arising especially from your formative experiences. Needless to say, atheism doesn’t entail scientism or the idol of hyperrationality. Atheism is the denial that the universe likely has a personal creator who intervenes in nature. Science and naturalistic philosophy have spread atheism and enriched our interpretations of what a godless world is like, but it’s far from obvious that atheists should strive to be rational in all their affairs. True, the main problem with theism is that the core theistic beliefs are preposterous, as has long been rationally established, but that doesn’t mean all irrational behaviours should be avoided.

American Atheism and the Lie of Conservative Christianity

Michael Knowles is a conservative American Catholic, a podcaster and columnist at Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire website. According to his Wikipedia page, Knowles graduated from Yale with a degree in history. More recently, he wrote a howler of a short article at The Daily Wire, called “God Help Us: Atheism becomes Largest Religion in U.S.”

Knowles laments that, “For the first time in history, atheists constitute the largest religious group in America.” According to the General Social Survey, those who say they subscribe to no religion have “increased 266% over the past three decades and now account for 23.1% of the population, just barely edging out Catholics and Evangelicals as the nation’s dominant faith.” The problem with this increase, says Knowles, is that, “As religiosity has declined, social ills have abounded.” Americans have seen an increase in mental illness, in the use of antidepressants, and in suicide. “American life expectancy declined again last year, as Americans continue to drug and kill themselves at record rates.”

Lest you think there’s only a correlation between the rise of “atheism” and of those social ills, Knowles hastens to add that, “Social scientists have long since established the link between religiosity and life satisfaction.” People who regularly attend religious services ‘are nearly twice as likely as those who worship less than once a month to describe themselves as “very happy.”’ And religious people are “more likely to engage in happy-making behaviors, such as getting and staying married.” Thus it’s “obvious,” says Knowles, that “the belief that God loves you and that you will live with him in eternity offers greater consolation” than the view of death as a dirt nap that stiffens you into worm food.”

Knowles ends by connecting a decline in the quality of American politics to the rise of “atheism.” Says Knowles, ‘A materialistic culture worships wealth; a licentious culture worships sex; a godly culture worships God. But “our Constitution was made for a moral and religious people,” as John Adams wrote to the Massachusetts militia in 1798. “It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”’ Thus, “A miserable politics awaits us when the irreligious rot flows downstream. Who but God can help us now?”

A Litany of Errors

I don’t believe the content of Knowles’ article merits refutation, since it seems written as a careless provocation—not so much to atheists but to American “conservatives” who prefer to view themselves as victims so they can feel as though their attitudes, values, and behaviour have something vaguely to do with Christianity. Knowles’ task is just to scare the gullible, not to argue with intellectual integrity. The statistics and the arguments he cobbles together are window dressing, since his rightwing readers don’t trust in fancy displays of rationality. The wisdom of this world is foolishness to God (1 Cor, 3:19) and all of that. Even the Catholic defense of reason is so much casuistry meant to use the devil’s weapons against him, to feign an interest in reason to prove to the ignorant faithful that there’s nothing to see here and it’s time to move on from the Scientific Revolution and the Age of Reason and to return to some dystopian theocracy that stands in for God’s kingdom. So Knowles’ foray into this foreign territory of rational argumentation is only for show, which explains the speciousness of just about every sentence in his article.

Here are just some of his errors, which I’ll list only to brush them aside to get to the more interesting issues. As many commenters on his article point out, Knowles confuses atheists with those who say they have no religion. As CNN’s report on the survey points out, ‘“Religious nones,” as they are called by researchers, are a diverse group made up of atheists, agnostics, the spiritual, and those who are no specific organized religion in particular. A rejection of organized religion is the common thread they share’ (my emphasis).