The Limits of Our Anti-Woke Allies

Source: Lew Rockwell | VIEW ORIGINAL POST ==>

British evolutionary biologist and prominent atheist Richard Dawkins has regrets about describing himself as a “cultural Christian” last year in an interview. “I imprudently said I was a ‘cultural Christian,’ and I haven’t heard the end of it,” wrote Dawkins in a recent piece for The Spectator.

Though standing by his earlier comments—in which he expressed appreciation for certain cultural elements of the Christian tradition—he quickly added: “but none of that undermines my conviction that what they believe about the nature of reality is nonsense.” Moreover, Dawkins labels the “God-shaped hole” thesis—which posits that absent organized religion, society will descend into moral chaos—“patronizing” and “insulting” to humanity.

In recent years, Dawkins has joined a cadre of other public intellectuals who are causes célèbres for their repudiation of various ideological expressions of the Left. Dawkins, for example, has called trans ideologies “a form of quasi-religious cult, based on faith, not evidence,” which “denies scientific reality,” “mercilessly persecutes heretics,” and “abuses vulnerable children too young to know their own mind.” Jordan Peterson made a name (and a career) for himself by criticizing a Canadian law that prohibited discrimination against gender identity and expression. Evolutionary biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying gained notoriety for resisting woke policies at Evergreen State College. Brown University economist Glenn Loury returned to the Right after decades away, attacking Black Lives Matter and other racial grievance movements.

Yet as much as conservatives (and Christians) may enjoy common cause with such prominent figures, Dawkins’ recent comments are a sobering reminder of the limits of making political alliances with those subscribing to worldviews antithetical to the Faith. Brilliant of a scientist as Dawkins may be, he is no friend to Christianity, calling religious faith “one of the world’s great evils.” And as such Christian thinkers as Ed Feser and David Hart have observed, his criticisms of Christianity are typically little more than puerile, bad-faith caricatures.

Dawkins is perhaps in a class of his own when it comes to his relationship with Christianity. Peterson, in contrast, though not exactly a person of faith, is at least sympathetic to the Bible and Christianity, as evidenced by his recent book applying his now-famous psychoanalytic approach to interpreting the Old Testament. Though his wife recently entered the Church, Peterson told EWTN he was “unlikely” to convert. And having read and reviewed Peterson’s book, I confess I’m not sure he even believes in God, at least not in the theistic sense.

Don’t misunderstand me. I’m very grateful for Peterson leveraging his incredible rhetorical gifts to counter the madness of sexual and racial ideologues who, in their seemingly limitless desire to foster victim narratives and grievances, would remake the world into a dystopian nightmare far worse than the “white supremacist” and “patriarchal” Western civilization they aim to supplant. And as much as Dawkins desires to attack the trans movement for its errant attempts to refashion the very idea of male and female, irreparably damaging thousands if not millions of people in the process, more power to him.

But we should remember that many of our allies originating from the secular, liberal academy embrace principles and premises demonstrably wrong and irreconcilable with our Catholic Faith. Anyone subscribing to materialism (the rejection of any transcendent reality) or promoting freedom of speech or personal self-realization as the highest goods is inhabiting the same philosophical worldview as our shared political enemies. Thus, whatever assistance they may offer in the battle against the evils of transgenderism or racial grievance are of little help in the broader war to re-foreground the highest, most important natural goods (e.g., virtue, friendship) and supernatural goods (e.g., grace, communion with God).

For many such secular personalities, their alliance with us is ad hoc: for them, woke sexual and racial ideologies are bad not because they inhibit man from achieving his telos as one enjoying the imago Dei but because they obstruct the false individualistic and materialist promises of modernity. This is why we hear far less from many of them regarding other issues just as degrading or damaging to the human person, such as abortion, surrogacy, in vitro fertilization, or contraception. All of these, even anti-woke secular intellectuals believe, are integral to the protection and promotion of individual rights and the freedom to live as we best see fit.

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The man known as Bunker is Patriosity's Senior Editor in charge of content curation, conspiracy validation, repudiation of all things "woke", armed security, general housekeeping, and wine cellar maintenance.

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