The God Divide Within the Heterodox Community
No, we don't need religion to “save the West.”
Last November, the writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali published an essay titled “Why I am now a Christian”—an inversion of Bertrand Russell’s 1927 lecture “Why I am not a Christian.” A peculiar aspect of Hirsi Ali’s conversion—at least as she described it in her essay—is that it’s more of a political statement than a religious affirmation. She said very little about the doctrines of Christianity. She didn’t mention the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. While she briefly discussed her personal spiritual struggles, the piece was almost entirely focused on what she views as the social and political benefits of religion.
Hirsi Ali says a recommitment to Christianity is necessary to confront three threats to Western civilization: Chinese and Russian authoritarianism, the “rise of global Islamism,” and the “viral spread of woke ideology.” Similar arguments are made by the author and anti-woke intellectual Jordan Peterson, who believes the West will descend into a postmodern dystopia without the unifying narratives and values of the Judeo-Christian tradition. According to the conservative pundit Douglas Murray, meanwhile, the collapse of “grand narratives” such as the “explanations for our existence that used to be provided by religion” made the citizens of Western democracies the “first people in recorded history to have absolutely no explanation for what we are doing here, and no story to give life purpose.” And in a recent essay, the “heterodox” podcaster Konstantin Kisin described himself as a “lapsed atheist” who believes religion is “useful and inevitable.” Kisin laments the “lack of meaning and purpose that our post-Christian societies are suffering from.”
Despite the steady secularization of Western societies over the past several decades (or perhaps because of it), arguments like this are becoming increasingly common. A growing cadre of intellectuals think the decline of religious belief has created a moral and spiritual vacuum, which has been filled with surrogate religions like wokeness and political extremism. They believe there’s a crisis of meaning in Western societies as people scramble to fill the “God-shaped holes” in their lives with other objects of worship. They argue that a renewed commitment to the Judeo-Christian tradition is the only way to restore a sense of social solidarity and shared purpose—and perhaps even save the West.
The journalist Ed West describes this growing phenomenon as “New Theism,” which argues “not that religion is true, but that it is useful, and that Christianity made the West successful.” The idea that Christianity is an immovable pillar of Western civilization is one of the reasons nonbelievers like Murray embrace Christianity. West says the historian Tom Holland is “perhaps the most influential of the New Theists.” Holland is a prominent advocate of the view that Western civilization is a Christian inheritance—and that the West should return to its Christian values and identity. Hirsi Ali cited Holland’s book Dominion in her essay, arguing that Western civilization was “built on the Judeo-Christian tradition.” This is a bedrock belief among New Theists. Peterson describes the Bible as the “foundational document of Western civilization.” Holland declares: “To live in a Western country is to live in a society that for centuries—and in many cases millennia—has been utterly transformed by Christian concepts and assumptions.” Murray says “the idea of rights” and the “dignity of the individual … come from the Judeo-Christian tradition.”
It’s true that Christianity has been a formative influence in the development of Western institutions. The Catholic Church played a major role in institutionalizing the rule of law throughout Europe, as it constrained monarchs with an authority outside themselves. In his 2014 book Political Order and Political Decay, Francis Fukuyama suggests that China’s lack of a transcendental religion is one reason it “never developed a body of law that stood outside the positive enactments of the emperor.” Monotheistic religion is a powerful source of group cohesion which facilitated the establishment of large and diverse modern states. Christianity is also a universal religion, which supports the idea that all human beings have certain inalienable rights.
However, the New Theists present a one-sided history of Christianity and its role in the creation of the modern secular state. For example, Hirsi Ali declares that “all sorts of apparently secular freedoms—of the market, of conscience and of the press—find their roots in Christianity.” But one reason secular countries like the United States have robust legal protections for freedom of conscience and expression is the Enlightenment tradition of resistance to Christian domination.
Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire challenged the authority of scripture, religious dogmatism, and the power of the Catholic Church. Baruch Spinoza rejected the idea of God as a transcendent supreme being, resisted supernatural beliefs, and made the case for religious pluralism and tolerance. In his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, Spinoza said the state should hold sway over religion and argued for a rational interpretation of scripture. David Hume relentlessly challenged the moral and metaphysical claims of religion. While there were gradations of belief and unbelief among Enlightenment thinkers, a core aspect of Enlightenment thought was criticism of religion. And no wonder: the Enlightenment was in large part a response to centuries of religious oppression, dogma, and violence in Europe.
There’s a straight line from Enlightenment humanism to the liberal rights and freedoms lauded by the New Theists. Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, for instance, was a product of Enlightenment rationalism and skepticism. Jefferson noted that religious beliefs are arrived at by “reason alone” and condemned the “fallible and uninspired men [who] have assumed dominion over the faith of others.” He attacked the “tyrannical” religious persecution that was the norm in Europe for so long. He declared that “our civil rights have no dependance on our religious opinions.” The Virginia Statute laid the foundation for the First Amendment, which combines the right to free speech and assembly with freedom of conscience. Jefferson frequently criticized Christianity, and he was joined by other Founders like Thomas Paine—whose series The Age of Reason advocated deism over Christianity (particularly its role in politics); rejected miracles and superstition; and argued that the Bible wasn’t divinely inspired.
New Theists emphasize the role of Christianity in the creation of liberal democratic institutions, but ignore the influence of Voltaire, Spinoza, Hume, and other major Enlightenment critics of religion whose ideas permeate the secular democracies that exist today. Holland writes that “humanists, no less than Jews or Christians, are indelibly stamped” by the Judeo-Christian tradition. But the reverse is also true. Today’s religious believers (Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and so on) in Western societies enjoy the freedom of conscience and expression which are hard-fought legacies of opposition to religious tyranny during the Enlightenment.
This is a point the New Theists refuse to concede. In fact, they go beyond historical claims and insist that atheists don’t believe what they say they believe. To Peterson, morality is impossible without religion. Here’s how he addresses any atheist who tries to live an ethical life without God: “You’re simply not an atheist in your actions.” If you want to see true atheism, he says, look no further than Nazism and Stalinism. Holland declares that humanists are merely plagiarizing Christianity: “If there is a single wellspring for the reverence they display towards their own species,” he writes, “it is the opening chapter of the Bible.”
New Theists have a paternalistic attitude toward their increasingly secular fellow citizens. They insist that genuine irreligious belief invariably leads to social collapse, and they claim that morality itself is the exclusive provenance of Judeo-Christian thought.
But the New Theists aren’t just making descriptive claims about the historical significance of Christianity—they’re also making a case for how liberal democracies should function. According to Holland, one reason we will soon see a “changing of the global guard” from the West to emerging powers like India is the West’s unwillingness to affirm that it is a Christian civilization (never mind that the godless CCP is the West’s main rival). In a 2020 essay, Holland argued that the shift away from secularism in India and Turkey is a sign that the West is no longer able to “market its culturally conditioned assumptions as universal.” Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalism, he argued, is a return to the country’s “primordial characteristic of Hindutva: the qualities that for millennia had defined it as Hindu through and through.” Meanwhile, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is “engaged in a mighty effort to redeem Turkey from secularism, and restore it to the embrace of its Islamic past.” The West, the implication goes, should follow suit.
If Holland is correct that the future belongs to religious essentialists like Modi and Erdoğan, it will be a dark turn for humanity. Amid the Hindu and Islamic revivals in India and Turkey, religious persecution has surged in both countries. The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom observes that “violence against religious minorities” has spiked in Turkey. India’s 200 million Muslims have long faced discrimination and disproportionate levels of communal violence, and a recent law passed by Modi’s government grants a path to citizenship for some members of religious groups from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan—but excludes Muslims (the law would never be deemed constitutional in the secular United States). Modi often makes inflammatory and bigoted statements about Muslims, even as levels of prejudice and violence against them rise.
Politically, it’s also unclear what a Judeo-Christian “revival” would mean. Even Christians can’t agree on what it means to live in “one nation under God.” Some American Christians think the United States should close its borders and embrace ethno-nationalism, others want to welcome more immigrants and emphasize the universalist message of Jesus Christ. Some want tax cuts, others want a larger social safety net. Some believe the United States should abandon Ukraine, others want to confront Russia. There are hundreds of millions of Christians in the United States—and over 2 billion in the world—and their faith is no guarantee of one political position or another. During the Civil War, both warring parties believed they had God on their side. The motto of the Confederacy was “Deo Vindice,” which means “God will vindicate.” There are ample Biblical justifications for slavery, but abolitionists such as Sojourner Truth, John Brown, and Frederick Douglass were Christians who condemned the way their faith had been used to perpetuate the slave trade. Even during the United States’ greatest national trauma, Christianity wasn’t a source of solidarity—if anything, it was a force multiplier.
The recurrent “crisis of meaning” is a natural externality in open societies—a consequence of the freedom and pluralism offered by liberalism, which can be destabilizing and make people feel like atomized individuals rather than members of a community. But the solutions to this problem are worse than the problem itself. The rise of populist nationalism and authoritarianism in the United States and Europe, for instance, is a reaction to what many citizens view as a rootless and bloodless form of politics in modern liberal societies. In the same way, a reversion to the Judeo-Christian tradition as the main source of national or civilizational solidarity isn’t a step toward some lost renaissance of cultural cohesion in the West. It’s a return to familiar forms of tribalism, prejudice, and dogma in a society that has become increasingly fractured.
Building a liberal society that can accommodate many religious traditions, cultures, political movements, and conceptions of the good life is difficult, which is why the lure of a return to old ways and faiths will always hold some appeal—especially in an age of internal polarization and mounting external threats. But the only way to go back to those traditions is by sacrificing or diluting core aspects of liberalism that enabled diverse Western societies to flourish for so long in the first place. This is why our national solidarity must be built around values and institutions that transcend religion: democracy, pluralism, individual rights, free speech, and of course, freedom of conscience.
Matt Johnson is an essayist and the author of How Hitchens Can Save the Left: Rediscovering Fearless Liberalism in an Age of Counter-Enlightenment.
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What's shocking is that Johnson's point is not perfectly obvious to any educated American. Yes, Judeo-Christian principles provide an important interpretative backdrop for our Constitution. But much more fundamental to our republic is the concept of freedom of thought, which flows directly from the Constitutional prohibition on the establishment of a state church or religion. Freedom, not subscription to a religion, is the secret of our success.
We don't need religion to save America, strictly speaking (insofar as it relates to doctrinal practices), but we sure as hell DO need faith. More than ever, we need humility, gratitude, awareness and reverence. Too many "educated" people shun God because they focus on the harms done, often in the distant past, in the name of faith. They equate religion with being stiff, intolerant and small-minded, and imagine that the faithful exercise their belief primarily in a punitive fashion. Of course, such examples exist, and surely in the past were far more prevalent, but these are the fault of man, not God. It's ok to be uncertain, and it's only human to doubt - that's why it's called the "mystery of faith". But the rights we enjoy in Western, Judeo-Christian culture all spring from the belief in the divinity of man. We possess these unalienable rights because humans are different than the rest of the animal kingdom - we are children of God, created in his image, and thus are divine. Freedom of thought, speech, conscience . . . all those hallmarks of our culture which provide the medium for humanity to flourish are our divine inheritance. Reason, empathy, the idea of the human soul - all gifts from a kind and loving creator. The Founding Fathers didn't just hint at these ideas, they said, quite out loud in the Declaration of Independence "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That part about being "endowed by their creator" is kind of a dead giveaway. The Constitution lays-out the structure of government specifically to "secure the blessings" of this divine liberty. And though they separated church and state pretty clearly, they were quite explicit that such freedoms could not be sustained in the absence of faith and the role it plays in public morality. I am religiously non-practicing, i.e. don't go to church, have certain doctrinal quibbles with mainstream religion, etc. But I am a man of faith. I dont understand how you can't be. I am surrounded every day by miracles beyond my comprehension, by beauty so profound that it sits like a weight upon my chest, and by forces so vast and immutable that I am reduced to nothing. Nobody has an adequate explanation of "how" or "why", we're just left to marvel.
Judeo-Christian tradition is not an interpretive backdrop to the Constitution or a just, orderly society, it is the wellspring. Everything we have flows from the central premise. To reject that, like rejecting God, is extraordinarily arrogant and thoughtless. When faith is in short supply, man is bound to suffer