I wish to make two points about my antitheism and then reflect upon the matter. First, in addition to criticizing belief in impossible things as its own problem, my antitheism primarily concerns the problem of exclusive and oppressive ideology, especially those religious doctrines that put so-called “divine law”—which is, in fact, man-made or natural law either seeking false legitimacy by appealing to a fiction or estranged from its actual origins. Systems based on such doctrines are intrinsically totalitarian, as they are the product of the cleric who pretends to divine the wishes of an imaginary entity—that is revelation—over against law developed through considered reason and self-correcting method. Defending freedom and reason from such tyranny is necessary work for anybody who truly believes in democracy, human rights, and social justice—and the individual in which these universal values and needs inhere.
Second, there is a view that criticism of such theism must keep its aim on the idea system and leave alone those who advance or embrace this idea system. But this is a rather odd requirement, since, if nobody were advancing or embracing a given form of theism, then confrontation with its ideas would take a different form, namely the scholarly study of and popular interest in ancient mythology for which no significant number of contemporary devotees exist, for example Norse, Greek, or Egyptian mythology. Zeus is not the problem that Jesus is because very few people believe in Zeus while billions believe in Jesus. However, if, for example, Norse mythology and its ritual practices and social attitudes were to make a comeback (and there is some concern that it may), the problem we would be facing would not merely be myths and rituals, but people who were advancing and embracing terrible ideas. Vikings are fascinating historical subjects, to be sure. But the prospect that Vikings would be about, behaving in the ways Vikings behave, is a rather frightening one. We have the pleasure of romanticizing them because we don’t have to deal with them.
Consider fascism. Fascism is a detestable ideology, one that has all the characteristics of the most exclusive and oppressive religious doctrines. In fact, as I have shown in my writings, fascism is a quasi-religious doctrine, which incorporates reactionary Catholic and Protestant ideas. We are, rightly, eager to engage in criticism of fascism as a set of ideas and practices, albeit often, and wrongly, downplaying its religious features. At best, the Ku Klux Klan are “bad Christians.” But the sometimes anemic approach to identifying the religious dimension of reactionary ideologies is made up for by an eagerness to criticize those who advance and embrace fascist ideas. To be sure, those of us who are committed to free speech and expression and open society protect the right of persons to be fascists (I have sharply criticized those who confront fascists with violence), but we also don’t worry about being called “bigots” or “racists” for criticizing—even protesting—persons who advance or embrace fascist ideas and practices.
It is only because the religious species of ideology has been given a privilege in society that other forms of exclusive, hateful, and oppressive ideologies do not enjoy that the public not only doesn’t grasp the necessity of opposing religion with the same vigor and in the same way as we oppose fascism and other pernicious ideologies, but finds something untoward about vigorous antitheism.
This double standard is an accident of history. Religious identity was lumped with other categories of civil rights at a time when secular consciousness was still underdeveloped. Liberals were right to marginalize religion vis-a-vis secular institutions, but they allowed the concept of religious liberty to be conflated with freedom of conscience, and liberalism’s negative conception of freedom warped the understanding of freedom to religious doctrine and institutions (seen, for example, in the failure to tax churches). Religion, unlike other hateful ideologies, was cast as universal, essential, and necessary.
And so an oppressive system became confused with an oppressed category. The homophobe became the victim in the struggle against homophobia. The sexist became the victim in the struggle against misogyny. Corporal punishment was a justified as a moral practice. Moreover, ruling elites continue to find religion advantageous to controlling mass thought and behavior, taking advantage of a deep-seated and long-standing anti-democratic development, a barrier to enlightenment, a political and moral weapon primed to undercut individualism and secular control over cultural, political, and economic systems.
Anticipating what, for some, will be subterfuge, and, for many, a persistent habit of bad thinking, countering oppressive ideologies and their advocates and devotees has nothing to do with oppressing those who wish to organize their lives around absurd and self-harming and self-limiting ideas. With reason, we strive to educate them in this regard, but we should not actively move to control them. One is free to believe in and express belief in impossible things. As Thomas Jefferson noted, government can’t reach opinion. However, extending freedom and human rights to every individual does mean confronting the harm the religious cause others by banning or restricting behaviors (such as circumcision, family and community relations, forms of education, treatment of animals, and so forth), as well as preventing political and legal attempts to undermine the secular forms of government and law that the West has established. Antitheism does not require barring entry to or expelling persons belonging to religious (or other pernicious ideological) persuasions. But it does seek integration and assimilation of all persons into Western understandings of freedom, rights, and justice.
Unfortunately, there is a movement on the left, decades old now, that works at cross-purposes with the enlightenment project to liberate human beings from oppressive thoughts, practices, and relations. It is based on the postmodern notion, represented in deep multiculturalism and notions of cultural and moral relativism, that all cultures are equal in terms of their capacity to meet the universal needs of human beings and should therefore not merely be tolerated, but embraced and allowed to shape the West. This notion often comes with a self-loathing of Western values that often suggests and sometimes asserts that Western culture is evil, racist, and colonialist, and therefore wrong to defend its institutions and practices from those seek to reorganize the West along non-Western lines – that is, raising theocratic ideals, values, and practices above secular and democratic ones. This movement tells the West that it is as undeserving of its values as those who do not presently enjoy them.
One can see this tendency in Michel Foucault’s celebration of the Islamic Revolution in Iran—not a revolution at all, but a conservative and reactionary countermovement that reversed secular progress and forced Iranians back under the veil of ignorance. It was here that the term “Islamophobia” was invented, used by the all male clerical “authority” to psychologically batter women who did not want to return to the chador. The anti-humanist Foucault confused a patriarchal, antigay, and atavistic assault on human freedom and progress with a “movement from below.” But I am being too charitable. After all, Foucault writes, “It [the Islamic Revolution] impressed me in its attempt to open a spiritual dimension in politics.” As if human beings need a spiritual dimension in the rational and compassionate governance of their affairs. Although he attempts to hide his enthusiasm for tyranny, chalking up his interests to an academic fascination with “political will,” the Nietszchean element running through left French philosophy (and previously in German national socialism), pining for heroes against the forces of science and secularism, and full of self-hatred for their own contributions to humanity, pokes through. The “will” here is not so much political in any liberating sense, but rather the will to power. The nihilist rejects the possibility that human beings can design an egalitarian and democratic system from individuals, and dreams instead of supermen and the irrational. The spiritual dimension in politics. This is the mark of totalitarian thinking. This is what Walter Benjamin warned us about.
Multiculturalism, by tolerating the subordination of the individual to irrational ideologies that absorb, redirect, and drain cognitive, emotional, and moral energy, is an elite strategy designed, or at least functioning in effect to undermine class solidarity, weaken democratic possibility, and blunt human being.
freedom and reason 