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Notes -
Thoughts on Shifting Definitions and Models of Religious Liberty
I've been thinking a lot lately about how the definition of religious liberty has morphed in my lifetime. The legal definition of religious liberty seems to be expanding outward legally, while at the same time the feeling of liberty of belief for actually existing religious people feels like it is shrinking. These expanding protections feel necessary to maintain a degree of freedom, rather than expanding it. But so much of it is that the model of public faith has changed. The two quotes above give me my model of what religious freedom was, and how the context has changed.
The framers envisioned a society of men with three hearts when it came to religious liberty: a false secular heart in their mouths in public spaces, a sectarian religious heart in their chests that they shared with their friends and family and coreligionists, and a real true heart of their beliefs that they were entitled to keep private and that no one could punish or penalize them for. One's true personal third heart might be atheist or animist or deist, one's sectarian second heart might be Catholic or Quaker, but everyone agreed their first public heart would be secular and nonsectarian and that no one would be punished for their other beliefs. This view of religious liberty envisioned a country in which men could hold any religion, in which men would collectively acknowledge a kayfabe of secularism in public so that no one creed predominated, while all men would hold a private religion together with their friends, and where all men had the right to believe or not believe anything in their own heart without punishment or censure.
This is distinct from other visions of religious liberty historically. Many empires allowed variants of a different kind of religious liberty, confessional liberty, freeing the second heart but restricting the first and the third. Groups had some right to practice their own religion privately (second heart), even allowed to punish their own apostates (third heart), but in public they had to acknowledge the divinity of the imperial faith (first heart) and had no freedom to contradict it.The Jews under Roman rule could practice their religion amongst themselves, but they must engage publicly in worshipping and acknowledging Caesar Augustus, because the Roman cults were the public religion Jews would always be second class citizens. At the same time, individual Jews like Jesus were subject to punishment under Jewish religious laws for their own private beliefs, there was no individual right to freedom of worship.
In America, Quakers and Babtists and Catholics and Jehovah's Witnesses and even a few Jews and hey maybe a couple Muslims too all worked off the same system. None really believed in the secularism taught in schools but they would go along with it and agree with it., because everyone knew that everyone else went to church/synagogue/meeting on Sunday and learned something different that we agreed or disagreed about it in parts that weren't worth arguing. And it was understood that atheists were probably in those pews as well, but no one was going to launch an inquisition against them, that was their own business.
But in the 21st century, fewer and fewer Americans are actually operating on three different hearts. The rise of the "Nones" or secularism or wokism or successor ideology or whatever you want to call it, is the combination of the first and the second hearts. Max Lynn Stackhouse, when defining religion, called a religion "a comprehensive worldview or 'metaphysical moral vision' that is accepted as binding because it is held to be in itself basically true and just even if all dimensions of it cannot be either fully confirmed or refuted." Wokism meets all those criteria, while failing the Merriam-Webster definition of having supernatural elements (arguably). Because Wokes skirts the traditional lines of "religion" they are able to advocate everything they want in the public sphere, where traditional religions are restricted to only advocating half their beliefs. Wokism is, in many ways, a religious memetics that has evolved to avoid being restricted by traditional freedom of religion law. It offers answers to universal questions that feed the need for the sacred which all humans possess, while also being entirely within the rules of public discourse.
That is what Roberts, Barrett, Scalia (RIPower, King) are groping towards but not yet saying out loud. Traditional religions are fighting off the back foot, they aren't allowed to advocate in the public square because traditionally that was a method to avoid religious conflicts and persecutions. But Wokism has adapted to that circumstance, and now provides a full binding metaphysical moral vision in public that must be bowed to, Wokism seeks by monopolizing the first heart to destroy the freedom of the second and third hearts. For traditional religious pluralism to survive against this evolved competition, as the founders envisioned, we have to allow religions to fight on an even playing field. The religious freedom advocates on SCOTUS are groping towards this, but are restricted by their textual originalism, they are looking at the text of the constitution when what matters it that the circumstances have changed, the founder's vision is no longer possible when one competitor has adapted to the rules. So much like the NFL or MMA will change the rules of the game when a strategy emerges that ruins the spirit of the game, so freedom of religion must be changed to allow for the competition envisioned.
So how do we level the playing field, without shredding the constitution in ways we'll regret later when we live in Rick Santorum's Iran? I'm interested in all ideas. Here are a few I see.
School choice seems like step one. Religious schools already deliver better results at a lower cost, offering vouchers to as many students as want them would allow religious schooling to exist on a level playing field with secular schooling, and see who wins the Trans-Black-Lives-Matter School or the Sisters of Perpetual Ruler Snapping.
Restrict Atheist speech in the same way that religious speech is restricted. One should be just as loathe to say that there is no God as one is to say that there is only one. The traditional point of conflict is Biology class, which I think is a case of religions failing to adapt to facts, one can make evolution about the way the world works rather than how it started quite easily.
Restrict claims of religious faith to those who hold genuine religious beliefs more strictly. The phenomenon of fake religious trolling by atheist-Jews claiming that abortion-on-demand is a religious rite, or fakakta Satanists putting up statues of the Dark Lord because someone else put up one of the Ten Commandments, needs to reined in. How do we do that without instituting Santorum-Iran? I'm not sure.
Make and allow for more non-sectarian expressions of religious belief. I was an Eagle Scout, and for years the Chaplain's Aide of our troop, I've given tons of prayers in the name of a faux-Lenape "Great Spirit" that stood in for the member's of my troop for our personal beliefs in God, Allah, Jehovah, or Krishna. That worked, we all understood what was meant. How do we develop that secular stand-in that would work universally? Maybe we choose to honor Amerindian beliefs as a nation, invoke the Great Spirit? We should expect our presidents and our politicians to invoke a God, and assume everyone has the maturity to understand that it also means their God. Make America Believe Again.
ETA: Have a Happy Thanksgiving everyone. If you don't celebrate it, I recommend it. A feast of gratitude towards the almighty is a positive tradition, and should be exported.
I think you raise interesting points, and I agree with much of your perception of the "successor ideology" filling a religion-shaped void and your suggested prescription of reining it in under the same mechanisms that our society evolved to deal with plurality of traditional religion, but at the same time I bristle against your offhand conflation of all atheism and secularism with the successor ideology. This strikes me as wrong in both straightforward (I'm an atheist who is not woke) and implicational (there are major secularist countries that have not so far shown a tendency to evolve towards anything obviously shaped like Abrahamic religions at all, such as China, and in much of continental Europe the religion-shaped thing that grew to fill the void absent American influence was environmentalism, not racial wokeness) ways.
Moreover, it resembles another important instance where I've been under the impression that American right-wingers sabotage their persuasiveness by being unable to let go of old grudges, which compels them to argue that the new enemy is actually just a guise over an old ancestral enemy and if you had listened to them back then when they said the enemy must be eradicated then you wouldn't have this problem now - that instance being the insistence of labelling wokism with various versions of "Marxism" or "Leninism". To the yet-unpersuaded reader, that just winds up sounding like a barely-concealed "the actual problem with BLM is that you aren't letting us have child labour uranium mines and totalitarian company towns", and this sounds like "the actual problem with BLM is that you aren't letting us have Jesus Camp where the creepy pastor beats kids with a switch for having impure thoughts".
This is an absolutely bizarre take, given that the actual academic, theoretical basis for the constellation of ideas popularly called wokeness is explicitly Marxist and was conceptualized by self-identified Marxists. These Marxists - who, again, are not subtle or covert about their Marxist analytics framework - then cultivated and recruited a legion of protégés and catspaws to populate a vast network of entities, both public- and private-sector, to institute this ideology on a mechanical policy level.
You can look up the Frankfurt School and its roots in Gramsci, or you can look up Paulo Freire (about whom I have previously spoken in this forum) and his profound and wide-reaching impact on modern “woke” education. You can look up Rudi Dutschke and his advocacy for a decentralized “march through the institutions” which was then implemented throughout North America and later Europe. These things are not difficult to research, and the only way these people’s explicit Marxist convictions and methods are not better-known is that they’re counting on people like you not to put in the effort of trying to learn about it.
It really seems like you don’t want to know about it. You have formed mental associations between anti-Marxism as an ideology on one hand, and your outgroup on the other hands. You’ve pattern-matched “hates Marxism and is vigilant about it” with “mustache-twirling villains and theocrats”, which is precisely what Marxists want you to do. They want you to continue to associate “socialism” with “lovely middle-class Sweden in the 80’s” instead of “Maoist Red Guards” and you seem to be perfectly comfortable with not seeking out the information that would undermine that association.
Wellllllll....it depends on how you do the intellectual history. If we're doing the 2015-move and blaming the Frankfurt School (Marcuse, Adorno, Horkheimer et. al.) for this, then the theorizing is at least as much Freud as Marx, and the Marx that's left in there is a pale shade of the original; a double-distillate by way of Gramsci and Lukacs.
In fact, Frankfurt school critical theory had to fight for acceptance on the left in the 60s because it notably did away with the basic analytical assumptions that lay at the heart of standard Marxian analysis: first, that economic relations are prior to cultural or ideational ones, and second, that market production must necessarily destroy political domination of the proletariat through overproduction and repeated, escalatory crisis, from which the proletariat would arise victorious.
Without those two things, what they had left from the Marxian analytical tradition was...an over-developed theory of "classes" trapped in dialectical conflict by some quasi-Hegelian "historical process," a taste for describing that conflict in overwrought terms (though that might just have been the German romanticism in the metaphorical air), and a general dislike for modern capitalism (even as they had lost their foundational mechanism for criticizing it).
As you can see, there's not much substantive there; what's left is a general framework which got filled in through some mish-mash of Freud (see, e.g. Marcuse's Eros and Civilization), and a bric-a-brac of pet theories about the rise of Nazism focusing on culture, psychology, sociology, and sex to the exclusion of the analysis of political, legal, or economic structures (e.g. Wilhelm Reich's The Mass Psychosis of Fascism; Adorno's Authoritarian Personality, Kirchheimer's Punishment and Social Structure, etc., but c.f. Neumann's Behemoth).
So yeah, there is a line between Marx and the intellectual movements that kickstarted modern wokism. But the Marxism is just part of the analytical framework, and not at all part of the substantive analysis. The vast majority of the problem lies in a lot of 20's and 30's-era anthropology and psychology work (and the weird, weird philosophical work that went along theorizing about the nature of social scientific research in the first place). Through all of this I'm mostly following Martin Jay's line in The Dialectical Imagination.
Of course, this sort of deep theory doesn't really shed much light on the actual current-day goals or practices of woke and woke-aligned movements and scholars. The whole question is kind of supercilious; when they're changing the APA guidelines to make anything other than immediate affirmation of any kid's self-proclaimed sex- and/or gender-changes tantamount to abuse, does it really matter whether they're doing it out of a Marxian view that capitalist production necessarily recapitulates itself in sexual domination, or a Freudian attempt to liberate pure Eros from the constraints of das Genitale? Either way, you still have to answer the question of what to do about it.
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This is the Moldbug fallacy A descends from B, therefore A is B, you don't like A therefore you must also not like B. Ideas are all interconnected if you applied this principle rigorously you could refute western thought all the way back to aristotle, the trick is picking an arbitrary place to stop.
Wokism does descend from marxism but in a sense it also represents disillusionment with it, with the failure of class consciousness to materialize in the west and with the fall of the URSS simultaneously. Marxism says little about race and gender and is very preoccupied with economic class; wokeism is basically the opposite, to the point where you can make a corporate friendly version of it that disregards class entirely. Marxism is, in principle, materialist, wokeism is not.
For this argument to be valid, the salient features of A do not actually carry over to B. You argue this:
...But this argument is based on a particular interpretation of which portions of Marxism are salient. Others disagree with that assessment, and dismissing their arguments out of hand is not a productive strategy for good-faith discussion.
Both Marxism and Wokeism are fundamentally revolutionary, and in a very similar way. The arguments they deploy have very similar shapes, make similar mistakes, are persuasive for similar reasons, appeal to similar groups, and result in similar failure modes and, it seems likely, final outcomes. The aim of both is to secure radical social change by fomenting class conflict. Specifics of the classes and their features and grievances do not seem terribly relevant to the question of how and why the ideologies operate.
To some extent, what we're talking about here is the difference between Marxism internally and externally. For a doctrinaire Marxist of some particular strain, I've no doubt that Wokeism is absolutely heretical bullshit. But I am not a Doctrinaire Marxist, and I in fact do not see how the doctrine is terribly relevant or important in any way to anything I care about, any more than an American Indian should care about the doctrinal disputes between Lutherans or Anglicans in the 1600s. With regards to how Marxism impacts me, there is no significant difference between the old version and the new version: they appeal to the same people, they're pushed by the same people, they attack the same important social structures in the same ways, and the arguments against them are more or less isomorphic. Pretending otherwise mainly seems to be an attempt to maintain the suppression of social antibodies to a monstrous ideology that should be exactly as taboo as literal swastika-and-sieg-heil naziism.
This is actually not true, but you'd barely know it because the actual Marxists are so weak and have had their theory so exploded and bypassed by time that it just doesn't make sense anymore. The Trotskyist 4th International was actually one of the first places to host major historians pushing back against NHJ's 1619 Project, and some of the most prominent contemporary Marxist economists like Adolph Reed have been vocal critics of the current cultural turn in left activism.
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Not similar at all. Aim of Marxism is indeed radical social change, while aim of wokeism is preserving society as it is, only with more rainbow flags and transgender toilets.
When Marxists get their way, billionaires are expropriated. When wokeists get their way, billionaires are richer and more secure than ever before.
Actually existing Indians well understood differences between European colonialists and played them for their advantage as they could.
Your attitude is more like of the most hardcore and dumbest Salafist Muslims of today:
"Christianity and Hinduism? It is all idolatry, the same pagan filth."
I do not get why boomer conservatives insist on pushing "Marxist" straightjacket on everything, why they insist calling "Marxist" people who know nothing about Marx and never claimed to be Marxist.
If you asked woke activists about Marx, 90% would answer "What is Marx?" and 10% would say "Fuck this white racist colonizer".
Is it their childhood programming that taught them that Marxism is the worst thing in the world, and all bad things must be Marxist?
You do not have to be "doctrinaire Marxist" to understand it - here is what one lifelong hardcore Christian fundamentalist anti communist fighter Gary Kilgore North has to say.
Cultural Marxism Is an Oxymoron
Ignore Anyone Who Says Marxism Is a Threat
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IMO the contention that the salient portion of Marxism is not economic class is a pretty contorted view of how marxism has been generally interpreted in the past 150 years.
They don't, communism appealed very much to the working class. You may not see this because communism was basically illegal in the US, but where it did exist the parties were staffed by working class people and that's where they received votes. Wokism main centers of power are journalism and HR.
What would that be? I don't know where you are going with this, but often people say "the family" so I'll pre-empt that. All strong ideologies "attack the family" to some degree:
in the 10 commandments, allegiance to the family comes after allegiance to God and to the Church
fascism followed suit, proclaiming allegiance to "God, country and the family" (Dio, patria, famiglia) in that order
Jesus says "For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother" as well as many others to the same effect
Scientology practices disconnection from anyone who is declared SP, including family members if necessary
Isolation from family members is a common cult technique
Maybe for you.
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I agree with your point but I think 'conservatives' and the like are correct in playing this association game for a different reason. In short it would be bio-leninism + high heritability of certain political ideas.
The fact that a person is a devout marxist isn't a coincidence most of the time. Depending on what type of marxist they are and why boils down to biology. They have brain chemistry that makes them like X more than Y. And 'conservatives', for a lack of a better term, like Y over X. So it's not about the academic intellectual tradition being a poisoned well, it's that the people who can stand to drink from it are different from you in ways so drastic that you can't trust anything they have to say. Everything that extends from their thought process, by dint of their divergence from you, is therefor most likely toxic to you and the things you care about.
The fact they were 'marxist' or something else is just a signal or a uniform of sorts that helps you mark them as being neurologically different from you.
You could also try to fit Jonathan Haidt's work, specifically 'The Righteous Mind', into this.
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Well said. This, above, is how DiAngelo came up with the term “white fragility”. She, being seemingly blind to economic class, could genuinely not understand why American workers would dislike their bosses requiring them to attend meetings where they were psychoanalyzed in front of their coworkers, with the penalty for not submitting themselves to her quackery being running afoul of HR in a country where affordable health insurance in bundled with employment.
Robin DiAngelo didn't come up with anything per se. She just published and popularized a very salient critique against white liberal/progressive/leftist inaction in the face of the enormous gaps between blacks and whites in the US. A critique that had been floating about in academia for a while. (It should come as no surprise that she cites Noel Ignatiev & friends a lot.)
Most people don't understand what the term "white fragility" means and what it's useful for. White Fragility is not just about skin color. It's about your stated beliefs + your skin color. To give an example, if you are unapologetically racist and white you are not fragile. But if you are white and believe yourself not to be racist? Well... Why aren't you helping the blacks more? From that point onward every word that exits your mouth is white fragility in action. Why do you think blacks are poorer? Have worse educational outcomes? Have worse jobs? Everything you say here that isn't explicitly racist is either white fragility or an invitation for DiAngelo to ask you why you aren't doing more to help. And every answer you give to that question that isn't 'Yes Mam' followed by extensive plans for action is white fragility in action.
Robin DiAngelo walks into institutions filled to the brim with white self-described anti-racists and tears them a new one for not actually being anti-racist. And she is right. A person who says they care about racism and all the gaps between blacks and whites but doesn't do anything about it is either a hypocrite or a liar. Why shouldn't a group full of self-described anti-racists be called out on their lack of action? Black people are literally dying whilst you fret over what is for lunch.
Robin DiAngelo isn't breaking any rules here. Why shouldn't people who say they care about matters of race and the oppression be forced into action? Why should the plight of one overprivileged fragile white person who loses their job and healthcare matter more than the plight of millions of black people? Why should their personal worries be allowed to act as a bulwark against real anti-racist action? Why should the free market system that ties jobs with healthcare be used as a rhetorical moral shield for white people when it has been used as a sword against black people for centuries?
Robin DiAnglo talks about why she named her book what she did because she needed a term and an explanation for why white people were getting upset when exposed to her nonsense. And she couldn’t grok that people go to work to pay their rent/mortgage and not to publicly interrogate their subconscious as it is portrayed to them by $6,000/hour grifter consultants. I’m 💯 sure the managerial/executive class at many companies does prattle on in an empty manner about EDI, but this loops right back around to the underlying class conflict EDI deprioritizes.
The Blocked and Reported pedants did an interview with someone who went through one of DiAngelo’s company’s sessions. She was a graphic designer who, for her job, made a poster for the Odyssey. It was a minimalist poster that had a ship on a white background with the familiar blue-and-while Meander pattern you find on paper coffee cups in 80s movies. DiAngelo’s consultants told her coworkers the ship was a subconscious manifestation of colonialism and the Meander was a subconscious manifestation of Nazi swastikas.
Normally, going around telling someone’s coworkers they’re a secret Nazi will land you in HR. But you’re supposed to thank an EDI consultant and not be upset if they do it?
All you’ve offered are the espoused goals of EDI consultants. But you exempt mention of their methods, which is why DiAngelo had to come up with an explanation about why she was reducing people to tears that eased her conscience while the consulting checks kept cashing. And it’s definitely a class issue when management subjects workers to this stuff as a PR move.
Nothing you say changes the fact that self-described anti-racists are sitting on their asses in positions of power doing nothing to help black people who have been suffering for centuries. Sorry but no one should care about the crocodile tears of white overprivileged liars and hypocrites when they are finally confronted with the reality of their being.
All you are doing is shifting the conversation away from the plight of blacks and instead focusing on the fact a privileged white person doesn't like being called what they are. If you don't believe black suffering matters stop pretending and get out of the way of progress. The free market, that white people love when it benefits them and helps them exploit others, is now finally, in the tiniest way possible, affecting the most privileged people on earth slightly negatively by comparison. Forgive me for not caring when this 'inconvenience' is contrasted with literal slavery.
I don’t care one way or the other what you do or don’t care about. But you’ll need to define “the most privileged people on Earth” more broadly than the the capital-owning class to make your point, which proves mine.
Also, what evidence do you have that even a simple majority of people subjected to bizarre EDI sessions are “self-described anti-racists”? Tons of not-online normies who go to work for a paycheck work for companies who do, on the other hand, have a C-suite willing to hire “self-described anti-racists” as consultants and officers to provide a bit of a prophylactic against potential discrimination lawsuits.
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Because people aren't being hypocrites for fun; they're being hypocrites because they're forced into it. Attacking hypocrites under these circumstances is just adding more force.
Forced at what stage?
If they are forced into identifying as anti-racist then they are just racist cowards. Why shouldn't we apply more force to racist cowards?
In any case it seems you are valuing the comfort of white inaction above the suffering, oppression and death of black victims.
That's like saying that if you have to be forced to obey the Patriot Act, you're a non-patriotic coward.
The demands that you have to follow in order to be an "anti-racist" and keep your job have little to do with actually being anti-racist.
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You are engaging in some degree of messenger-shooting here. I know all these things! My point is that most people associate socialism with middle-class Sweden in the '80s, and you are fighting an uphill battle trying to overturn the association. What is even your purpose in convincing people that actually socialism means DEI commissars, if not to make people who are against DEI fight to become less like '80s Sweden through the backdoor? Assuming the latter is not your goal, what would successfully rewriting the association gain you in the fight against DEI commissars that would offset the loss of would-be allies who are concerned about being bamboozled into torching their neighbourhood Vårdcentralen?
Uh what? I mean, I don't think the modern DEI initiatives are my first association with socialism either, but neither is Sweden.
My first association is the Soviet Union. After that is China, North Korea, and Cuba.
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