The reason people get angry when they hear a contrary view is that, deep down, they suspect that that view may be right. The main reason people get angry in argument, and seek to suppress contrary views, is that they are hearing their own suppressed doubts, subverting their certainties. A guaranteed way of infuriarating someone is to say something they suspect might be true, but which they would never admit to being so. They have no defence against it and so seek to suppress others’ views in the same way that they have suppressed their own inner doubt. When people turn nasty, it is a sure sign that you have landed a critical blow.
I hear commentators criticising various causes and movements as a ‘new religion.’ This criticism is superficial and reveals nothing beyond the most obvious analogies. We are not dealing with religion as such but a bad religion based on the inversion of God and humanity, the conflation of the holy and the profane, and the perversion of religious practices and truths. We are in the presence not so much of a ‘new religion’ as a new Puritanism, an extension, reduction, and distortion beyond Lutheranism and Calvinism in which the heresy of justification by faith alone takes the form of justification by opinions, beliefs, and ideology – we are made good by our words rather than by our deeds. It’s not a new idea. Where once you had to have the right religious views, now you have to have the right political views, or be damned as a sinner beyond redemption.
The difference is a crucial one, and one that is entirely lost on those who are adherents to a secular faith. A great many of the political views and values expressed by those in the leading social and political movements of today are religious in essence. They have religious roots and religious modes of expression. But this is a religion in which humanity has supplanted God. Or, more accurately, some members of humanity, the elect, the few who have the knowledge, have become gods unto themselves. And they are gods at war with evil.
The crucial difference is this – as a Catholic and a Christian, I know that I am in the realm of faith and belief, I know that human beings are fallible creatures as well as fragile, and I therefore know to tread carefully on the ground in which fact and value meet. The adherents of the ‘new religion’ do not know this. On the contrary, they believe themselves to be standing on the solid ground of science, reason, logic, and evidence. And it is this that makes them dangerous, a threat to liberty and to the civic peace. Because they take a religious sensibility out of its realm and beyond its remit into politics, effectively turning a realm of disagreement and dialogue into a holy war without quarter and compromise. Whilst truth is non-negotiable, politics is a realm of negotiation. Note how often activists and campaigners for a cause assert that their points are ‘beyond debate,’ claiming that ‘the science is settled’ and that ‘there is no more debate.’ And note how those claiming ‘there is no debate’ were never much inclined to debate in the first place. Their first, and last, concern is to educate and enlighten, to inform, hector, and lecture, to proselytise and ‘tell the truth,’ as in ‘tell their truth’ in the name of their new god, ‘nature’ and ‘the science,’ empty signifiers both.
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