“Man, who has found only the reflection of himself in the fantastic reality of heaven, where he sought a superman, will no longer feel disposed to find the mere appearance of himself, the non-man, where he seeks and must seek his true reality.” —Karl Marx (1843)
More and more, organizations critical of religion, or that demand the separation of religion and government, have become advocates for religion. We see this with the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the latter from which I resigned a few years ago for this very reason. That these orgs don’t appear to understand what constitutes religion is part of the problem. But, more than this, they have become captured by an ideological tendency that advances belief systems that share with religion the key characteristics that define this social phenomenon. Indeed, religion is a species of ideology, a chief characteristic of which is alienation from reality.
On December 28, 2024, in a letter published on Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution is Real, Steve Pinker resigned from the Honorary Board of the FFRF. Pinker wrote “With sadness, I resign from my positions as Honorary President and member of the Honorary Board of the Freedom from Religion Foundation. The reason is obvious: your decision, announced yesterday, to censor an article by fellow Board member Jerry Coyne, and to slander him as an opponent of LGBTQIA+ rights.” I left the embedded link so readers can read for themselves the way those who defend the ideological corruption of science twist language, perhaps in part to convince themselves, but in effect if not in intent to disorder the thinking of the general populace, which prepares them also for ideological corruption.
I want to reproduce here the first paragraph of that organization’s justification for censoring and slandering Coyne to convey my point: “The Freedom From Religion Foundation is dedicated to protecting the constitutional principle of state/church separation, which ensures religious beliefs do not dictate public policy. While advocating for LGBTQIA-plus rights is an indirect component of our mission, we recognize that many attacks on these rights are rooted in attempts to impose religious doctrines on our secular government.” Do you see what FFRF did there? In reality, the imposition comes from queer praxis demanding that government (which includes academic) institutions respect the establishment of religion, which is expressly forbidden by the First Amendment. FFRF does this by failing to recognize or obscuring the fact of queer theory as religious faith.
We also see this corruption in the actions of academic institutions retarding the progress of science by permitting religious belief to determine how, for instance, anthropologists and archeologists go about their work. Consider the case of Elizabeth Weiss. Weiss is an anthropologist and professor emeritus, formerly associated with San José State University (SJSU), whose work on the study of human remains, particularly in the context of indigenous repatriation laws and ethical considerations in archaeology and anthropology, has been made controversial. Weiss is known for her outspoken criticism of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), a 1990 US law that requires institutions to return certain cultural items, including human remains, to affiliated indigenous tribes. Weiss has argued that restrictions imposed by laws like NAGPRA hinder scientific research, particularly studies that rely on skeletal remains to advance forensics (useful for criminalistics, for example) and our understanding of health, human history, and human evolution.
In 2021, Weiss posed with a human skull on social media to promote her book (coauthored with bioethicist James Springer) Repatriation and Erasing the Past, which critiques NAGPRA and raises concerns about what Weiss describes as the politicization of science and the loss of research opportunities due to government policies. This image and her commentary was portrayed as insensitive and framed as part of a long history of desecration of indigenous burial sites in the name of scientific research. Because her discipline has been captured by ideology, Weiss’s actions and views have drawn criticism from scholars who advocate for ethical and respectful treatment of human remains, particularly those remains belonging to what are described as marginalized and historically oppressed communities.
Weiss’s stance and that of her opponents represent incommensurable standpoints, providing a paradigm of why the separation of science and democratic government, on the one hand, and religion and other ideologies, on the other, is vital for the progress of knowledge and technology.
I must digress here and note that Weiss was married to J. Philippe Rushton, a Canadian academic widely condemned for his research on race, intelligence, and behavior. I suspect this relationship had something to do with the controversy over Weiss’s work. Rushton, who served as president of the Pioneer Fund, a foundation known for supporting research on heredity and eugenics, is best known for his application of r/K selection theory to human populations. In his work, Rushton argued that racial groups differ in traits like intelligence, reproduction, and social behavior, attributing these differences to genetic factors. His research has been widely criticized for the promotion of scientific racism, perpetuating stereotypes and misrepresenting the complexity of human diversity. Many scholars have condemned Rushton’s work as pseudoscience.
I am not here to condemn Rushton’s work. However, readers should know that when I cover it in my course on criminological theory, I am critical of it. That’s my job as a teacher. I am here to defend science from ideology, and in this regard it is relevant to note that, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Rushton’s work became the subject of an investigation by the University of Western Ontario, where Rushton was a professor, to determine if it constituted misconduct or violated academic standards. The investigation ultimately concluded that while Rushton’s research was controversial and offensive to many, it fell within the bounds of academic freedom.
The fact that there was even an investigation, and the fact that the university distanced itself from his views (as a public institutions, they should have no position on the matter other than to defend the academic freedom of their faculty, as well as uphold the principles of the First Amendment, namely the freedoms of conscience, speech, and publishing) testifies to the ideological corruption of our academic institutions. Moreover, in 1989, Rushton was investigated by the Ontario Provincial Police under Canada’s hate crime laws. No charges were filed, but the fact that such laws exist have a chilling effect on free speech and scientific practice. It is not the role of government in a free society to police speech and research interests. Public institutions free of ideology do not behave this way.
Returning to Weiss’s situation, in 2021, she was removed as curator of the university’s skeletal remains collection and had her access to these materials revoked, actions she perceived as retaliation for her stance. How could she not? In response, Weiss filed a First Amendment lawsuit against the university, alleging that her academic freedom was being infringed upon. After a legal battle lasting more than a year, she reached a settlement with the California State University Board of Trustees in June 2023. As part of the agreement, Weiss agreed to retire at the end of the 2023-2024 academic year, with included being granted emeritus status. Following her departure from SJSU, Weiss has continued to advocate for academic freedom and scientific inquiry. She joined Heterodox Academy, an organization that promotes viewpoint diversity in academia, and remains active in public discussions about the influence of sociopolitical factors on scientific research. (A brief account of her situation was reported on in Higher Education.)
One objection to my argument in this essay is that some of what I have identified as religion in my writing is not in fact religion, or even ideology, but ways of being that exist outside of those parameters, often accompanied by reference to homosexuality, assuming that homosexuality and gender identity are commensurable rather than oppositional. It is therefore important to determine what counts as religion. In my career as a sociologist, I am not merely well read in the area of religion studies, but have taught sociology of religion and published in journals and presented in conference sessions that center the study of this social institution. Moreover, as an undergraduate, I minored in anthropology and could have, with a few additional courses, declared a major in the field. I want to give you the definition of religion I have derived from these disciplines, both of which are purported to be scientific disciplines.
Religion, from both anthropological and sociological standpoints, is broadly understood as a system of beliefs, practices, and symbols through which individuals and groups relate to the sacred or transcendent, often providing cohesion, meaning, and structure to human existence. Religion encompasses the moral codes, narratives, and shared rituals that shape social organization and cultural identity while addressing existential questions about being, as well as life and death. Both disciplines emphasize the embeddedness of religion in social and cultural contexts, examining how religion informs and shapes, and is shaped by human interaction, power dynamics, and historical processes. Religion is a social institutions, and both history and prehistory suggest the existence of a need in humans to seek the transcendent and to ritualize their behavior. We might put it this way: religion is the sublimation of human instincts and primal fear, acts of reification foreign to other animals because they lack the depth of reflexive consciousness common to humans.
The obvious examples of religion in the Western world are Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, collectively known as the Abrahamic traditions. But Scientology, with its notion of the thetan, a being that exists in all of us that must be revealed through acceptance of doctrine and participation in a ritual (auditing), is also a religion. There are others that I will come to, and one of these—the matter of queer theory—lies at the heart of Coyne’s situation. All of these doctrinal systems have at their core nonfalsifiable propositions, i.e., claims that are by their very instantiation not subject to empirical confirmation or refutation. Examples of such claims are angels and devils, heaven and hell, and souls and thetans. When a person testifies to an otherworldly experience that requires that you accept or affirm their claims based on faith, i.e., belief without evidence, then you have been provided with such an instantiation.
Gender ideology, or queer theory, shares all of the characteristics of religion. The construct of “gender identity” is the analog to the soul in Christianity or the thetan in Scientology. Seeing this is really just a matter of swapping out terms: Queer theory is a system of beliefs, practices, and symbols through which individuals and groups, seeking transcendent experience, typically framed as the enlightened seeking of euphoria (the religious experience), manifest in the desire to transform bodies to achieve this state, related to what is defined as the sacred, that is the queer person, a living fetish or totem, which in turn provides cohesion, meaning, and structure to their existence, as well as to those who have chosen the queer person to be their totem, an existence said to be fraught with dysphoria, understood as the unbearable discomfort of being trapped in the wrong body, thus demanding sympathy and allyship.
The associated ritual moves beyond mere agreement among congregants to this church that these claims contain truth to involve the medical-industrial complex, where doctors serving as a priesthood apply drugs and surgeries in an alchemic manner to release the trapped gender identity by altering the physiology and modifying the apparent morphology of the physical body of the congregant. Moreover, demonstrating imperialist ambition, the church of gender demands that those who disbelieve the doctrine nonetheless observe it and participate its its sacraments, such as treating sex and gender as distinct phenomenon, referring to men as women and vice-versa (or as capable of having both, other, or no gender at all), and tolerating men in activities and spaces reversed for women (thus assaulting the institution of women’s rights). Those who resist doctrine and oppose the associated ritual are subject to censorship and other punishments. In this way, queer theory is highly similar to militant Islam (which explains why the former has become allied with the latter).
That gender ideology advances falsifiable claims does not it return to the brink of religious status. In the past, I have characterized queer theory as “religious-like” and “quasi religious.” Sometimes I still do. But close examination of the ideology reveals it to be a full-blown religious system. The claim that a man is a woman is indeed a falsifiable claim, since gender is a scientific term denoting gametes, sex-determining chromosomes (or other systems of sex determination), and reproductive anatomy, all of which can be confirmed or disconfirmed through objective examination of the claim. However, those who subscribe to the doctrine of queer theory attempt to side-step falsification by redefining gender as something other than a synonym for sex and disappearing it into the subjective realm. One is the gender one say he or she is, and that is all that is needed to demonstrate the existence of gender identity.
The nonfalsifiable character of gender as so rendered by the religion is why congregants to the church of gender either cannot or refuse to provide a definition of gender beyond the mantra that a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman, a tautological formula common to religious claims. We see this in the Orwellian chant “Transwomen are women” (a slogan that at once denies its purported truth). Readers will have confronted such tautological forms before. How do we know there is a soul? God told us there is. How do we know there is a God? Because the Bible tells us so. Why should I accept the Bible as an authoritative source on the matter? Because the Bible is the inspired word of God transmitted through men. Rinse. Repeat. Apply the same tautologies to Islam, Mormonism, or any other religion. Indeed, where such formulas appear, it suggests the presence of religious thinking.
For the record, a woman is an adult female member of the species Homo sapiens. As a scientific matter, gender is binary in mammals (and other classes of animals) and immutable. That means there is neither third or other genders, nor individuals without gender. It also means that mammals cannot change their gender; only simulations of other genders may be manufactured (occasionally convincing copies), simulations made possible by technologies made possible by science taken up by ideologically-captured and profit-generating institutions—in the same way the doctors in Nazi Germany enlisted science in the commission of atrocities during the Holocaust.
These facts constitute a brutal truth, one that a person only escapes (but not really) by resort to religious thinking, however twisted to make it appear that they are working from a rational standpoint. Denial of truth is a sure sign of anti-science sentiment. This is why it is so bizarre to see self-identified humanist and rationalist organizations like FFRF and the ACLU embracing queer theory and censoring those they find have committed the offense of working from a gender critical standpoint, that is the stance that accepts the truth of gender as I defined it above.
For those who accuse me of merely claiming the truth of the matter, they can do this by having assumed the post-truth stance of postmodernism and critical theory corrupted by its nihilism. I can’t claim the truth really, as this crowd sees it, because what pretends to be the truth is only a narrative constituted by power—and power means there is an “oppressor” and an “oppressed.” Lurking there is the “truth” of the “epistemic privilege of the oppressed.” Hence we have governments working with indigenous people to retard the progress of science. Ironically, the postmodernists tell us that there is in fact truth—but their truth, the one they claim they have the power to make it so.
Alongside post colonial studies and queer theory is critical race theory (CRT), which also constitutes a religion. I have written about CRT many times before (as I have about post-colonial studies and queer theory), arguments that are usefully summarized here. CRT as with post-colonial studies and queer theory, form the doctrines that underpin the dissemination of diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI (perhaps arranged alphabetically, but perhaps so arranged so as to avoid an acronym that spells out an undesirable conveyance, one that itself conveys a truth, as we can see by the collapse of complex systems across the West).
CRT constitutes a religion for the following reasons. First, it treats individuals as personifications of abstract demographic categories. In this way, it makes a pretense to science. To be sure, abstractions can be useful for scientific work. For instance, they can identify areas requiring further inquiry. For example, if the average median income for black men is significantly lower than it is for white men, then we might then try to determine why we see this. It is an important question. But the disparity is not in itself an explanation of anything. Moreover, it does follow that every actual black or white man has an income identical to the group average. To quote Karl Marx from his critique of Georg Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, an essay that begins with a critique of religious consciousness, “man is no abstract being squatting outside the world.”
Second, CRT advances correctives to the social injustices it calls into existence based on abstraction-as-explanation that are characteristic of many religions, namely the doctrines of collective and intergenerational guilt, responsibility, and punishment, the adjudication of which is left to DEI and civil rights law, places these doctrines have not place to be in. Indeed, the government respecting the establishment of the religion of CRT is a major source of injustice with respect to actual people. To wit, the practice of collective guilt, responsibility, and punishment finds individuals experiencing treatment on the basis of race and ethnicity (the latter often conflated with race in this ideology) and not on the merits of their accomplishments, aptitudes, character, and talents. The great diversity of these merits in any given demographic category are ignored such that individuals from purportedly disadvantaged and oppressed are given opportunities and dispensations based on selected attributes that construct the abstraction rather than those that should merit their include. Likewise, intergenerational guilt, responsibility, and punishment holds individuals responsible for things they did not do but rather on the basis of assigned membership in an arbitrarily (albeit not randomly) selected abstract demographic category.
Gender ideology, as informed by queer theory, mirrors the essential characteristics of a religion, built on non-falsifiable claims, tautological reasoning, and ritualized practices that demand both personal transformation and societal adherence. Central to this system is the construct of “gender identity,” functioning as an analog to the soul in traditional religious frameworks, upheld through institutional mechanisms such as the medical-industrial complex, which facilitates its physical and symbolic manifestations. Like other belief systems rooted in abstraction, queer theory, alongside critical race theory and postcolonial studies, elevates subjective narratives to the level of sacred truths, enforcing conformity through social penalties and institutional power.
This ideological framework, by rejecting objective scientific inquiry in favor of relativism and power-centered epistemologies, fosters anti-scientific sentiment and undermines reason, even as it paradoxically claims alignment with progressive, humanist values. The imposition of its doctrines, from redefining language to reordering societal structures, reflects a broader cultural regression that prioritizes group identity and ideological purity over individual merit and empirical truth. As with other ideologies that take on the trappings of religion, this movement demands scrutiny. Its unchecked influence risks eroding the foundational principles of rational discourse, scientific progress, and individual liberty.
There is no better time to proactively exclude religious ideologies from our public institutions than right now. It is way past time to do this, which the current situation testifies to. As bad as it is, it will get worse if we don’t fight harder. Once ensconced in bureaucratic arrangements, ideologies determine the organic appetites of once-democratic institutions meant to serve us and not our masters. This is true also for corporate arrangements. The longer religious ideologies—or any ideologies, for that matter—are permitted to define our respective statuses and determine the workings of public and sense-making institutions, the more they determine us, and the greater the negative consequences are for societal progress and the paramount necessity of making sense.
freedom and reason 