The Return of Religion

Joshua Mitchell has made a strong case that religion has returned to public life. In American Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time, he argues that growing numbers of Americans are harried and oppressed by unaddressed guilt and shame. The recession of Christianity as the most prominent cultural power in our society deprives people of access to the mechanisms of repentance, atonement, and forgiveness. As a consequence, the guilt-ridden gravitate to the more primitive mechanism of scapegoating, heaping their guilt and shame on the white, heterosexual man, who must be humiliated and purged.

I’m not entirely convinced that identity politics and other disordered conceptions of justice currently abroad in our society can be explained by scapegoating. Nevertheless, Mitchell is surely correct to focus on guilt and shame. When they are not addressed by traditional religious practice, these feelings become a terrible burden. Our therapeutic culture can help us manage guilt and shame, turning guilty acts into “mistakes” and redefining shame as a socially imposed feeling that, once understood, will relax its grip. Yet the deeply felt stain remains, agitating our souls and circulating just below the surface of society.

Sometimes guilt and shame erupt. A 2022 poll indicates a growing pessimism about the future of the human race. More than 30 percent of U.S. adults believe it is likely that a climate catastrophe will lead to the extinction of the human race. Thirteen percent say it’s very likely. This remarkable belief is even more prevalent among young people. The activist group Extinction Rebellion wants governments to declare a “climate and ecological emergency” in order to prevent what its members envision as looming mass extinction. And of course there’s Greta Thunberg, the teenage shaman.

Though the science of climate change can be ­debated, there exists no rational basis for thinking that the world is on the brink of catastrophe. Moreover, as Ross Douthat notes, during the 1950s there was a widespread concern about the possibility of all-out nuclear war with the Soviet Union, a doomsday scenario far more plausible than today’s climate fears. And yet that decade was not characterized by dark pessimism. Why? “Perhaps,” Douthat answers, “because 1950s America was experiencing a religious revival.” And why do today’s zealous activists and their followers embrace climate change as the Avenging Angel? Maybe, observes Douthat, this fact is related to “rapid secularization or at least de-Christianization,” a trend that has accelerated in twenty-first century America, producing “the least-churched younger adults in modern American history.”

Sounds right to me. I recently had a conversation with a young woman who graduated from New York University in 2022. She told me that she found it difficult to be motivated in her career. “What’s the point? The world is going to be destroyed by climate change.” Marriage and children? She expressed the same despairing outlook. There was no rage. She did not blame Big Oil or other imagined malefactors. With a shrug, she seemed to be saying that the looming catastrophe was fitting punishment of the human race, because human beings are the source of evil in the world.

At the May 2022 commencement of my alma mater, Haverford College, after the fully masked students (Be Safe!) had been seated, college president Wendy Raymond approached the podium. She began her address, “We recognize that we live and work on Lenape land,” and continued with an elaborate liturgy of attendant obligations. This practice is now common for progressive universities and institutions. Public events open with a “land acknowledgement,” which is appended as well to official documents. Though certainly more innocuous than fear-mongering about climate catastrophe, land acknowledgements, which are self-evidently ritual and liturgical in character, bespeak the same need to discharge guilt and shame.

The same holds for reparations. The city of Evanston, Illinois recently launched a reparations program. Sixteen black applicants for public housing were selected to receive $25,000, to be used for down payments, mortgage payments, or home repairs. A race-based program of this sort runs counter to basic principles of justice. The crimes of communism were committed under the conviction that guilt and merit are collective, not personal. But we are living in an age in which the blood of past injustices cries out from the ground. Home of Northwestern University and of well-heeled professionals who work in Chicago, Evanston has a citizenry eager to make atonement.

I don’t believe that those lobbying for reparations regard themselves as accountable for the harms done by racist policies imposed more than half a century ago. But they are human, which means that they participate in the sin of Adam, a disturbing reality that pains our souls, driving us to find peace in one or another act of penance. Because of our history, Black Americans offer prized opportunities for white Americans to discharge their guilt, the sources of which are far wider and deeper than anything outlined in the 1619 Project.

The allure of the multi-faceted and now pervasive Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion enterprise, of which land acknowledgments and reparations are but a small part, rests in its promise of redemption. I suppose the religious undertones in putatively secular American public life are to be expected. Nineteenth-century European radicals were opposed to throne-and-altar conservatism, making the progressive tradition on the Continent anti-clerical. Its utopianism followed the Marxist pattern, claiming to be the deliverance of true science. By contrast, American (and, to a lesser extent, English) progressivism has its roots in liberal Protestantism. Those who lead corporate DEI training sessions are evangelists. They follow in the tradition of the Social Gospel.

Should we say, then, that religion is returning? We live in a paradoxical time. Our public culture does not manifest the calm, reason-governed debates promised by proponents of secularity such as John Rawls. The summer of 2020 saw scenes of protesters kneeling as they paid homage to St. George Floyd, in a particularly vivid manifestation of the fact that many aspects of public life are driven by religious impulses and needs rather than secular ones. Yet our draconian responses to COVID-19 during the same fateful year indicate that our society regards physical well-being as the highest good. With the embrace of lockdowns, often at the urging of religious leaders, we were willing to sacrifice transcendence for an increase in the odds of survival. Far from the return of religion, this development suggested the triumph of secularism.

Perhaps the paradox reflects a truth about the modern age. As our social imaginations are disenchanted and our lives reordered around the this-worldly goods of health, wealth, and pleasure, our hearts ache, not just with an unquenched desire for God, but perhaps more powerfully with the suppurating wounds of sin. Stripped of true religion, we cast about for substitutes, investing temporal hopes and fears with theological significance. Cabined in small worlds of technocratic management, we seek to paint our lives on the canvas of history, sometimes with dark colors of doom, at other times (or, more often than not, at the same time) with warm pastels of redemption.

First Things was founded to renew the influence of Christianity and Judaism on American public life. We need that influence now more than ever. Political life concerns the middle range of human affairs. It demands the art of governance, which distinguishes man from the lower animals, but which is not our highest end. The deeply human practice of politics cannot be reduced to the expert management of utilities, as technocracy proposes. And it is corrupted when raised to theological significance. Christianity and Judaism guard against both dangers. Without their renewed influence, I fear we will suffer a double tyranny, one that compels us to live for the sake of our animal needs, the bio-regime that Paul Kingsnorth and others resist, while those frenzied by guilt and hungry for atonement sweep us into their urgent, all-consuming projects.

WHILE WE’RE AT IT

♦ The minders at Twitter recently censored a First Things tweet. We use Twitter to promote content, and did so for Jonathon Van Maren’s December 6 essay, “The New Women’s Movement.” Maren documents the feminist reaction against transgender ideology, driven by young women who were subjected to hormonal therapy and mastectomies as children. He also draws attention to women who are fighting the pornography industry, which is almost entirely unregulated. Twitter censors blocked our promotional tweet, substituting a warning: “This tweet might include sensitive content.” That’s correct. Maren’s report is shocking and painful to read. It is so because shocking and painful things are happening in our society, and they occur with the full support of our political and cultural establishment. Shame on the Twitter censors. But far and away the greater crime is the complicity, even endorsement, of the rich and powerful.

♦ Emily Oster’s title says it all: “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty.” In her Atlantic article she allows that the draconian measures were often more damaging than helpful and rarely as effective as promised. Trillions of dollars were spent. Schools were closed, and student test scores are down dramatically. Vaccines were oversold. Mental health is at an all-time low. Okay, these are bad things, but Oster is keen that we let bygones by bygones. All the mistakes were in good faith, she insists. Nobody should be blamed! I predict exactly the same line will be pushed when the transgender mania recedes and the Great and Good allow that, well, perhaps some mistakes were made, and, okay, some lives were ruined, and, fair enough, there was a Jacobin spirit of persecution of anyone who dissented—but it was all in good faith.

♦ Wall Street Journal columnist Holman W. Jenkins Jr. has been a great scourge of elite groupthink. He has called out the officially approved lies designed to manipulate us into complying with the elite’s determinations of what is best for us. Jenkins was relentless during the pandemic, pointing out that “stop the spread” was always an unrealistic goal, not unlike the Chinese “­zero COVID” policy recently derided by journalists who only two years ago were championing similar policies in the United States. Jenkins shames the public health profession for its distortion of the facts.

And the complicity with lies extends beyond pandemic policies. In a recent column, he draws attention to the way in which, during the recent presidential campaign, the prestige media suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story. The editors of the Washington Post took at face value the statement of a group of former top intelligence officials that the laptop was a Russian ruse to influence the election. In truth, those intelligence officials lied, knowing full well that it was implausible to think the laptop was anything other than Hunter’s. Two years later, Jenkins observes that newsrooms are singularly uninterested in revisiting this episode to unpack it and explain to the American people who perpetrated this misinformation and why. Jenkins’s explanation: “So obvious was the lie that America’s biggest news organizations have to remain silent now because of their own complicity.” He goes on to quote his own comment on the story from 2020: “It ought to register with you how cravenly some of the mainstream media are trying to convince you something isn’t true that they know is true.” As we saw in the case of pandemic policies, our elite has no appetite for reconsideration, and certainly none for repentance.

♦ Harold Laski’s 1946 assessment of communist activists: They “act without moral scruples, intrigue without any sense of shame, are utterly careless of truth, sacrifice without any hesitation the means they use to the end they serve.” Are the Great and the Good in our own time any different? Laski continues, “The only rule to which the Communist gives unswerving loyalty is the rule that a success gained is a method justified.” Trump was defeated, and I’m willing to bet that the fifty-­one intelligence experts who signed a group letter that conjured a Russian plot count their success sufficient to justify their lies. And I’m sure the same success in securing Trump’s defeat assuages the consciences of the reporters and editors who were complicit in the politically motivated misinformation.

♦ I very much hope that the war in Ukraine can be brought to a successful conclusion. But what if it is not, and the conflict becomes a long-term suppurating wound on Europe’s border or, worse, escalates? Our political and cultural establishment has urged unbending support for Ukraine. What if things go sour? I’m confident that the Great and the Good will insist upon ­amnesty: It was all in good faith. That’s the kind of leaders we have in the 2020s. They demand the credit (and ­reward) for any success and none of the blame for their failures.

♦ Writing in the National Review “Capital Matters” column, David L. Bahnsen takes issue with my December 2022 Public Square, “Church, State, and the Common Good.” Among his criticisms is the charge that I make a philosophical mistake.

As a basic tautology, virtue is not compulsory, and while a tight legal order to punish criminal behavior is vital for a functioning society, economists, theorists, and our founders have always been aware of the limitations of a coercive state. No amount of state power can foster love and gratitude. The unwillingness to accept this basic reality of moral philosophy—that doing good is not good when it is forced; that acts of charity are only charitable when they are voluntary—sticks to Reno’s argument throughout.

I also hold that virtue cannot be compelled, nor can love and gratitude be produced by demand. But there is a middle ground between coercion and license. As any parent knows, virtue can be encouraged, and nurturing it is a mark of good parenting. Society is not a family, but it, too, can encourage virtue.

The charitable tax deduction is an incentive to give away money. It does not “create” virtue. There are plenty of less-than-admirable motives for the wealthy to make donations. But the tax deduction tilts the slope in the direction of virtue. The same goes for gratitude. In my youth, school boards set standards for civic education that emphasized our achievements as a country. I can report that this approach encouraged me to have gratitude for the courage of those who rallied at Concord and for the wisdom of those who crafted our constitutional form of government. I’ll venture that officially mandated instruction in accord with the 1619 Project will have the opposite effect.

I could go on, but I won’t. Common sense teaches us that governmental action can do more than prohibit and require. One of the basic assumptions of Reagan-era conservatism was that marginal tax rates affect behavior. Lower capital gains taxes do not require me to start a company or invest in stocks. They do not require companies to prefer stock buybacks to dividends. There can be no doubt, however, that lower rates encourage these behaviors, and others as well. And economic incentives affect culture. I guarantee that eliminating federal income tax for couples with four or more children would increase the percentage of four-child families headed by professionals with high incomes. Perhaps such a policy is unwise. But one thing it would not be is coercive.

♦ Pierre Manent on the seductions of Whiggery:

One of the strengths of modernity [by “strengths” ­Manent means ideological power], of the modern mind, and of modern philosophy is that it produces the feeling that it is irreversible. At work in the modern dispensation is a sense of philosophical necessity: a demand that you believe in the newness of modernity as something that evolves inevitably out of the past and is by definition superior to it.

By my reading of the signs of the times, interest in Catholic integralism, Christian nationalism, or other political views that were only yesterday thought dead and buried stems from the desire to break modernity’s hold, to undermine its claims to inevitability, and to open space for imagining something different.

♦ St. Augustine on our temptation to be zealous for falsehoods:

People have such a love for truth that when they happen to love something else, they want it to be the truth; and because they do not wish to be proven wrong, they refuse to be shown their mistake. And so, they end up hating the truth for the sake of the object which they have come to love instead of the truth.

♦ In early December, Lifeway Research reported a baffling statistic: In 2022, 84 percent of Protestant pastors said that their churches planned to have a service on Christmas Day. More than 15 percent were closed? On the feast of the Incarnation of our Lord? Which fell on a Sunday?

♦ Thurston Davis, S.J., was the editor in chief of the flagship Jesuit publication America from 1955 to 1968. A reader passed along a passage Davis wrote as a graduate student in 1943. In “Blueprint for a College,” the young Jesuit foresaw the need for strong Catholic leaders:

The coming generation of Catholics faces a showdown, and we Jesuits should attempt to fit them for the battle of the next half-century. It will be a half-century dominated by a monster secular press, class struggle, godless universities, and tremendous technical achievements in many of the means used to form public opinion. These are but a few of the fronts on which the battle will be joined, and it will be a battle for the culture and soul of America. It will be won or lost in the newspaper, the theater, on the radio, in the labor union, the city hall, and the classroom. The Church needs leaders in these storm-centers of American life.

Prescient. And truth be told, the postwar Society of ­Jesus did not fail to fulfill the need for leaders to stand up against the powerful instruments of secular propaganda. Justice Antonin Scalia was Jesuit-educated in the decade immediately following Davis’s call to action. Joe Biden? He was untouched by Jesuit education. My hunch is that a list of prominent Americans who attended Jesuit high schools in the postwar era would feature a large number of public figures who fought the good fight.

♦ A number of friends contacted me to correct my mistaken identification of Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia as a Jesuit. The president of the Pontifical Academy for Life and grand chancellor of the John Paul II Pontifical Theological Institute for Marriage and Family Sciences is a priest of the Diocese of Rome.

♦ Marc Sierra runs the ROFTERS group in the Detroit metro area. New members are welcome to join. You can contact him at sierramarc1000@gmail.com.

♦ As this issue goes to press, our year-end campaign is drawing to a close. I’m very grateful for the financial support provided by our readership. Your generosity plays an essential role in the success of First Things.