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I'm currently reading Tim Keller's "The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism", and so I'm knee deep in the apologetics of a theologically orthodox pastor capturing a key part of his experience, essentially, running his church in Manhattan in the 1990s and 2000s and raising the kinds of objections he got constantly from New Yorkers who engaged with him and more traditional Christianity in that context. And quite a number of his interlocutors (from the quotations he includes, but also this is obvious if you know the culture he's talking about anyway) overtly think the world would be improved if his entire belief system, everything he valued, and everything he sacrificed for, disappeared from the face of the earth... I mean, obviously. I certainly have encountered this stance in my life from plenty of people too when it comes to the beliefs of more traditional Christians.
And the reality is, there were and are a bunch of obstinate, noisy fundamentalists who make that dynamic much worse. The frustration with certain high profile strains of traditional Christianity is a complicated phenomenon, but it didn't come out of nowhere.
I'm leading with all of this to say, I could easily imagine being Keller and finding it enormously exhausting to go thrust yourself in conversations with people who would like to see your way of life and deepest beliefs dwindle away and disappear (but then, that's also why I'm not Tim Keller). But I also think he was right, in an important sense - he recognized that he couldn't reach everyone, but that when he publicly fielded questions from skeptical New Yorkers after his sermons, there was often a curious audience there, and a spectrum of skepticism, and while that might've meant he had to field particularly unsympathetic or even unfair questions from certain perhaps unreachable audience members, how he fielded those questions mattered in how he reached other people, and how he developed his capacity to reach such people. It would be the easiest thing in the world for someone like Keller to cultivate a thin skin about the public bigotry against traditional Christians that legitimately does snake through many of our higher status institutions, and perhaps Keller would even be morally justified in doing so... but that version of Keller wouldn't have affected all the people he did, and it would have prevented him reaching people like, well, me.
I suspect the audience here is, in some ways, like the audience Keller faced at his churches, but for a bunch of progressive stances at this point. There is a spectrum of skepticism. And exactly like those high profile fundamentalist voices had a way of poisoning the well that Keller had to deal with, the obliteration of the older racial conversation detente by a bunch of extremely loud, aggressive progressive activists and their influence in major institutions over the last decade and a half means that a lot of us now have a huge amount of skepticism when now it comes to the new social justice "consensus" that has been rammed down our throats (especially if we exist within high status progressive social spaces, as many of us do). And a big part of the obliteration of that consensus is a new willingness, on the part of people like the ones here, to entertain ideas that the consensus wants to police entirely out of existence, because there's a sense that the man behind the curtain has been revealed, and a sense that truth seeking and authoritative boundary policing are increasingly sharply at odds. But that does mean many of us have a willingness to entertain all sorts of really unpleasant ideas, because we've noticed that some of those ideas do come true, and we've also noticed the one way ratchet of the social policing of unpleasant ideas has been aggressively used as a tool to grab social power and engage in ideologically driven social engineering. But all these dynamics come together to make a space where really morally awful (by most lights) ideas get entertained, too, and when a group relaxes boundary policing, some people use that relaxation to grind their axes and engage in overtly hostile behavior.
At this point, I think Progressives need their own small army of Tim Kellers - public thinkers who are willing to endure the hardest critiques of the fundamentalisms of their movements, actually hear those critiques, and publicly endure the truth in them in good faith and engage with them. I don't think the overwhelming majority of people who are extremely skeptical of progressive shibboleths or even accept the general HBD frame want to bring back slavery or even be particular unkind to decent, law-abiding black citizens. But there is absolutely a spectrum of skepticism here, about a great many received social justice fundamentalist critiques of our inherited culture, and we've reached a place where it is very, very difficult to publicly discuss empirical reality as we see it without the morality police stepping in and inadvertently torching their own public legitimacy at very high volume to drown everyone else out.
But it might not be your role to be a Tim Keller but for babysitting the skepticism of anti-woke people in the context of topics about black people. It might not be your role to engage with a spectrum of skepticism and respond winsomely. And I totally get that - my capacity to endure being around doctrinaire progressives at this point has fallen off a cliff, too, even though I've often had relatively good rhetorical success gently drawing conversations out of their inherited partisan frames and adding a bit of nuance and complexity and so on and persuading people to see some issues with more nuance, if I'm dealing with people who aren't too radicalized. But it often means enduring a lot of thoughtless NPC bumper sticker slurs and bigotry along the way, and eventually it just makes me tired. To be honest, if I were black or a woman, I'm not sure if I would stick around here either - it is absolutely the case that there are selective demands for rigor here on some topics, obviously. But I think think that may be necessarily tangled up with what works about this place at its best, too.
I feel like the older I get the more evidence I have that religion (and sadly, bigotry, although I'm not going to comment on the relationship between those) are a kind of zero-sum quantity in human nature. We can recognize them when we see them, and make efforts to move away from them, but those are doomed to just ooze out in other, often less well-understood places. New Atheism thought it had defeated God, but it really just built its own idols and called them something else. I don't think years of progressive anti-racism activism has managed any broader changes than merely changing the acceptable set targets of bigotry (in "proper" circles) in the modern era (in: Jews and rural white people, out: everyone on the "progress" flag).
And I say this as someone generally neutral on religion: I have my own beliefs I'm content with, and I'm happy to let-live with reasonably wide bounds on others'. And I find racism and bigotry generally to be pretty abhorrent and I'd love for there to be less of it in the world. I'm just not sure how to actually fix human tribalism and it's downstream failures. But I'm open to suggestions.
As usual, there is nothing new under the sun. Bonus amusing phrasing from wiki:
"Psst, Moses, you won't believe what those rascals are up to!"
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