Michael Hobbes questions self-censorship stats; Sheena Mason questions racial categories; Haidt and Lukianoff on Woke HR; Andrew Sullivan on Roe; Yascha Mounk queries John McWhorter; I review him
The relationship between scientists' "populations" and the U.S. official racial statistical categories is very tenuous. The racial categories do much harm, in my opinion. And I think that while populations may be interesting for tracing history (Razib Khan's work, for example), I think that for practical purposes today individual genetics are more useful than population genetics.
Why do the official racial statistical categories get to define "race"? Scientists--particularly physical anthropologists--used the term "race" for decades in a manner totally synonymous with the "populations" of geneticists. The true proof is that you can take Reich's book when it refers to populations--change it out for the word "race"--and still understand everything perfectly.
In terms of practical purposes, being aware of race/populations matters a lot for polygenic risk scores. You cannot take a PGS derived from a large sample of West Eurasian people, use it for someone of, say, East Eurasian descent, and get the same accuracy/results. Different populations/races each need their own PGS to get the same accuracy. Wikipedia on the practical upsides of polygenic scores: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygenic_score#Benefits_of_Polygenic_Scores_in_Human.
I am not an expert, but as I understand it the genetic variation *within* the African population is huge. So lumping everyone with black skin together would seem to be a pretty unscientific way of doing group classification.
The genetic variation within the overall Sub-Saharan African population is indeed huge, but this statement (I am tempted to say "talking point") overlooks the fact that an overwhelming fraction of this huge variation is contained in numerically tiny groups of hunter-gatherers such as the San, the Twa, Mbuti pygmies and so on. In terms of population numbers, most Sub-Saharan Africans are Bantus, who represent a recent demographic expansion of agriculturists, and their genetic variation is no larger than that of Europeans. See e.g. chapter 9 of David Reich's 2018 book. African slaves were imported into America from Bantu regions, and therefore lumping them all together was reasonable. Today's American blacks, despite recent immigration of educated Nigerians (themselves Bantus) and Caribbeans, are still mostly descendants of the slave population, and the standard census categories of race work reasonably well to classify them. Steve Sailer likes to point out that, according to published data from 23andMe, "the average black in America is 385 times blacker than the average white".
I don't have data by state, but my guess is that views on premarital sex in the test-case states trying to restrict abortion are not very different from the national average, so the correlation is weak. If public attitudes about pre-marital sex create support for abortion, then reversing Roe would make almost no difference in most of the country, since abortion would just be allowed by statute not just in Blue States but in most states close to or above national levels of support, which likely includes a considerable number of Red States. Maybe they are faking it and just signalling, but people are certainly not acting as if they believe that to be the case.
However, what happened was a very rapid and radical change in that and other views regarding sexuality in the late 60's and early 70's - analogous to the pace of change in attitudes about homosexuality. And having some awareness of that trend and expecting it to continue probably influenced the Justices in terms of being much bolder in their estimate of how far they could push against current public opinion and make up new rights and still get away with it. But if so, they were wrong about the trend's future path, and that mistake turned out to be a major, long-term strategic error in terms of creating a focal point around which to rally and coordinate resistance to the general project of progressive abuse of jurisprudence in pushing their broader agenda.
In 1963 (Source: NORC), 82% of respondents said that sexual relations between a man and a woman was unacceptable *even when they were engaged to be married*! The past really is a foreign country. Over 90% opposed the "casual hookup" scenario.
Even as late as 1969, still fully 68% of people said that "it is wrong for a man and a woman to have sexual relations before marriage"
Then, only four years later, in 1973 - NB: same year as Roe - only 47% said it was wrong. If one was just crudely extrapolating that collapse in opposition, one would guess that it would all but cease to exist by 1980. But it turned out that opposition just as suddenly stopped collapsing, gradually fell only to 40%, and then *held steady for two generations* losing only a few more percentage points in the next forty years.
Whatever was happening with public opinion, or however it might have influenced the decisions of the Justices, I think most lawyers will continue to try to encourage people to distinguish between the mertis of the arguments of the core controversy and the strictly *legal* matters that are actually at issue in these cases having to do with the law, jurisprudence and the proper way to interpret constitutional texts, correct procedure, valid exercise of authority, and so forth.
Roe is not solely (or for some, even primarily) "about" abortion in non-progressive legal circles. It''s about the fundamental question of the validity of judges pretending that the constitution requires taking the issue permanently off the table in a democracy, and what to do about it. The case - for reasons involving both intensely passionate moral sentiments and also just how baldly extra-legal it was, which was obvious to everyone at the time - has come to stand as no other case has as a "condensed symbol" for everything that went wrong with the Supreme Court's typical operation starting with the late New Deal and degenerating to ever-lower depths of brazenly unrestrained quasi-dictatorship by the late Warren Court. Not just everything that went wrong, but everything that must be put right, if there is to be any hope at lowering the incessantly rising stakes of each Presidential election and salvaging the traditional constitutional scheme. On the legal / intellectual right, which has thrown everything it has over 45 years at creating the kind of institutional movement to accomplish this top objective, if you can't reverse Roe, then all the other Roe-like thorns in the side are impossible too, and the whole effort was futile and all for nothing.
If public opinion about sex influenced the progressive Judges that wrote the holding in Roe, I suspect that the worry about the prospect of this particular kind of demoralization is influencing the conservative Justices in further motivating them to pare it back.
There is one more point I'd like to add that I think gets overlooked, and which would provide a reason for even progressives to hope that Roe gets overturned.
Underpinning the whole strategy of even attempting to have a conservative legal movement, originalist jurisprudence, Federalist Society, etc. is the idea that conservatives *can* achieve their objectives by normal, legitimate means, by playing the game by the rules in a civil manner within the usual bounds of respectable political conduct. That it wasn't *hopeless* because the game was totally rigged and the deck fundamentally stacked against them. That there was a potentially productive (not to mention status-raising) outlet for their intellectual and political energies in this channel of engagement, and that the "normal democracy" efforts of argument, scholarship, persuasion, and building of political coalitions could "work" to achieve conservative / non-progressive objectives and could pay off in long-term strategic victories.
I really can't overstate just how critical the esteem for and belief in this general idea is to the overall stability of our system. The rival notion, that this is all of this is hopeless, pointless, futile, wishful thinking, chasing a mirage, etc. and the only realistic possibilities are surrender and domination or else revolution is ... ahem, definitely circulating out there as an increasingly competitive line of thought.
I would say that someone on the margin who believes in the literal truth of the latter claim might still prefer most people to believe the former, in the name of peace and stability as opposed to the big potential downsides of unpredictable demons which could fly out when opening Pandora's Box.
Here's the thing: the "work within the system" camp needs a Roe-overturned win to continue to make this argument, and Roe being upheld (or mostly, practically upheld) is just *fatally devastating* to that case. Roe and Casey remaining the law of the land in the practical effect of whatever holding comes down, despite all the efforts after all these years, would be the ultimate possible evangelist for the cult of "Just Burn It All Down".
Hobbes is a FIT? I realize that over policing who qualifies is probably antithetical to the project in some way, but he comes across as a left-wing hack, not an open-minded truth seeker who would score many (any?) FIT points. Hobbes' schtick appears to be pushing back against typical FIT arguments (in fact, his substack description invokes the "gaslighting of America"--he seems to be implying that people who complain about the problems of free speech and cancel culture are creating a moral panic. While having someone push back against the argument that "free speech is in peril" is a good thing, lest we avoid getting trapped in an echo chamber, Hobbes doesn't seem like the most good faith actor. For example, Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog recently discussed him on their podcast Blocked & Reported, specifically his attempt to "debunk" the revelation that Matthew Shephard's murder was probably about drugs and not a hate crime at all. They described Hobbes as one of those "Vox-style explainers" who pretend to be coming at an issue with no agenda--but clearly have an agenda!
1) As you note, the gender stuff is actually a bigger deal to parents than the race stuff in schools. People in Loudoun were far more worked up over gender ideology than anti-racism, as they should be. It's hard to convince someone they are the devil because of their skin color, but it's a lot easier to convince confused teenage girls they need medical treatments.
2) There is something of a goal to the DEI movement. In fact there are metrics by which it judges success. For instance, our schools are supposed to achieve discipline equity by making sure that suspension rates are the same across races, and there are goals for how much more equal these are supposed to get each year.
You might think this and other goals are bad ideas that don't help people, but they are certainly clear goals with clear metrics. In fact in many ways Equity is far more straightforward.
I liked your review of McWhorter's book. I wonder if you could elaborate on this sentence "But fending off heresy is only one element of religious and political movements that we have seen until recently." What are the other elements you have in mind?
The reason I ask is that I think there are other unofficial elements happening, and no real official elements needed other than "Find scary outgroup enemy -> get people to hate them," to keep a religious movement going.
The unofficial elements are along the lines of "Get the Elect in power, both within the in group and among the outgroup until the outgroup ceases to exist within the society." The Elect this case are seeking and gaining power within institutions across the country, and using their religion to keep the competition on their terms: outsiders are right out, and insiders compete on being the least heretical.
I am not sure you need another unofficial element of the movement to justify its existence. The moral rules are there to create the distinction between the virtuous in group and the vicious, heretical out group. The morals are not created after the religion, but rather the would-be Elect adopt the morals that are solid enough to carry them through, adjusting them as the prevailing morality of their supporters changes over time to maintain a virtuous (but not too secure!) in group against an out group. That the gender identity movement has picked up on the same effective moral division that was lying around shouldn't be surprising then.
The moral story in question, by the way, is essentially the left's "weak groups are oppressed by evil strong groups," in your Three Languages of Politics. That is where the obsession with power comes in: so long as there is a power dynamic to identify as oppressing the weak, there is an out group to virtuously oppose or be condemned to. The moral story is evolutionarily stable, as there will always be a weak group to be oppressed by a strong group, and so always a group to oppose. The worst thing that can happen to a religious movement is for the devils of the out group to be defeated once and for all. You have to always be at war with Oceana to justify everyone's time, money and attention.
So, yea... I think Wokeism covers all the needed bases for a social movement, whether religious or political. What other elements did you have in mind?
I disagree with Arnold on abortion, and I think Democrats are going to be disappointed if they think overturning Roe v Wade will be a big win for them. Terri ran hard on this in VA and it didn't help him. Only 8% of people in exit polls said abortion was #1 issue and a majority voted for Youngkin. France restricts abortion to twelve weeks and I'm not seeing this as a big electoral button for the French left to push.
Nobody likes abortion. Even most of its supporters don't like it. The vast majority of people are ashamed to admit they have had one. That's not the building block of electoral victory.
Arnold is right that abortion is very wrapped up the sexual liberation movement of the 1960s. What I think he misses is that people by and large consider that movement a failure. The religious right for obvious reasons, and the left is currently on a puritan streak as well.
There seems to be a general consensus that sexual liberation led to the current breakdown in the family. The amount of sex people are having is down. Many people may not realize this, but a majority of adults will have two or fewer sexual partners their entire lifetime. Divorce is correlated with pre-martial sex, the more partners the worse it gets.
We see consistent and huge polling differences for rape and incest. These polling gaps should not exist if the question is whether the fetus is alive or not. But they do matter if "how you got pregnant was a sin or not".
To the extent abortion was tied up with some new an exciting horizon of sexual liberation that movement is exhausted.
I think that Republicans should stick their guns on this. I don't think there will be an electoral blowback. By contrast, I think this is the do or die moment for their relationship with the religious right. At a certain point you have to put up or shut up, and if you can't follow through then you're not worth having around.
When I read Michael Hobbes post it was clear to me that he doesn't work in Academia. Either that or he is a confirmed leftist. His post reminds me of posts claiming that Political Correctness is just politeness. I worked for a second tier college for twenty years. I watched the atmosphere turn poisonous, even in the STEM fields. Mr. Hobbes post is a fantasy.
It might even be worse at lower tier schools, as that is a margin they can compete on, both between schools and the faculty within the school. If faculty at top schools are pulling in enough grant money to pay for themselves and their research programs they probably have a lot of insulation, whereas faculty competing for tenure at small schools that are paying their entire salary need to be more cut throat. Likewise, the big state schools hardly have to advertise for students, but smaller second tier institutions are keen to differentiate along inexpensive lines like a "commitment to social justice".
On Sullivan. Yes, but Roe was still a bridge al little too far. It could have created the (in the last instance) right as the current Court is removing it, little by little. And to some extent having different approaches to same sex marriage DOES cause more interstate problems than differences in abortion.
There will be interstate issues. I think many states will try to make it a crime for minors in particular to cross state lines to obtain abortions in other states without the consent of one or both parents, or to 'aid and abet' a minor in so doing. In the Rittenhouse case a bunch of progressives parroted the "across state lines!" talking point as if that made any big legal difference (it didn't), but of course that all goes out the window in the case of abortion.
Ok, I guess the old html tags system does not work on Substack. Kind of annoying, but not as annoying as the fact that there is apparently no setting for "always expand everything without any "expand full comment" buttons so I can see the full text of the original post and all comments at the same time on one page".
Anyway, bleg out there for anyone who knows: links in Substack comments, how do they work?
Is there something like the href tag that one can use in a comment to make a word or short string clickable as a link to a site without having to show the whole long and ugly url?
Re: McWhorter, the power relations obsession of a certain faction on the left is indeed weird. I read someone allege that this was actually a conflict mitigation strategy imprinted in the psychology of some people via evolution, similar perhaps to Great Britain's traditional foreign policy of allying with secondary powers on the continent to deter the primary power (first France, and then later Germany), but programmed into people genetically. It's an interesting hypothesis, and if you add the closed information loops of ideologically sorted social media groups and media outlets relentlessly rage-baiting these people with stories and videos of the powerless being mistreated (I liked that feeling babies vs unfeeling robots dichotomy you presented a while back), and you could sort of see how individuals with that particular psychological, ahem...profile, become convinced that the supposedly powerless are constantly being victimized, and, they become obsessed with this particular prism through which to view society.
With that in mind, mockery alone isn't likely to work. You have to disrupt the closed information loops and remind people that there's a lot more to justice and morality than power relations.
What would be good would be to see a formal argument supporting the conclusion that "Wokeness is a religion." It's something that people enjoy asserting and partially supporting, but it's generally approached as a metaphor rather than an objective statement. Clearly, it meets some definitional points but not all of them. A cleaner definition would help us to differentiate, for example, the "Protestantism" of "Wokeness" with the specific institution associated with the broader 'religious' movement.
This would also help to clarify debates about whether or not an institution is promoting the 'CRT' doctrine, for example. A clean definition of what CRT stands for can then be applied to the doctrines promoted by certain organizations. This can then be applied to model legislation which could be applied in both broad and specific instances.
'Religion' is often ok as shorthand for public consumption, but, while some people know what you're getting at, others get hung up on the lack of traditional attributes of organized religion, a supernatural god, scriptures, temples, rituals, clergy, etc.
To me, the sine qua non of an ideological political movement having passed the threshold into a framework based on metaphysical constructs is when certain core claims about the the nature of reality become 'sacred' in the sense of being held as self-evident truths and effectively tenets or axioms which are not provisional or contingent or 'negotiable' or subject to compromise or empirical falsification in any straightforward and open-minded way.
All the complex emotional instincts and impulses and group behaviors and signals and moves in the status games (like coordinating to punish heretics) are just natural consequences of phenomena of social psychology that emerge when lots of human creatures collectively align around such super-empirical constructs because they subconsciously calculate and pick up on cues that doing so will result in their overall personal advantage.
Therefore, I would focus on the existence of de facto sacred tenets that are like a credo and tests of faith rather than that of domination moves of mob action against heretics.
I suppose the salient question would be what the minimum requirement is for a general inclination to reach the level of a valid and legally recognized cult or religion, and how related to that cult makes something a religious organization related to that cult.
The only philosophically adequate test for 'religion' is simply 'faith'. That is, belief in something and refusal to allow its falsification even in principle but without rigorous proof able to persuade a skeptic. That explains why woke progressivism - with its unfalsifiable faith in the perfect potential equality of all human groups and identities - is a religion.
There is really no good way to answer that kind of question in the abstract, that is, in a way that would help one base a claim that woke progressivism is 'a religion' in the standards of a broader framework generally accepted to address those inquiries.
The legal or regulatory tests which we do have that purport to determine how such lines can be drawn for the sake of giving special solicitude to 'legitimate' claims of freedom to engage in religious practices despite otherwise generally applicable laws are basically kludges which only 'work' at all because they are saved in practice by the historical contingency of what was the typical character and relatively narrow range of religious sects and beliefs throughout American history (at least compared to the ineffably more vast space of all possible religions and beliefs).
Or, at least, they *did* work. But as the nation becomes decreasingly religious, or if claims of religious belief become much more untraditional, disorganized, novel, volatile, vague, and individualized, the whole framework just collapses and becomes useless to adjudicate matters of conscience or to test the 'legitimacy' of applications for exemptions.
The point is, it doesn't help to answer the question to look for what would pass a test for legal recognition as 'religion'. Instead, the heart of the matter is always the existence of the metaphysically sacred, especially truths for which no possible chain of logic and evidence would be agreed in advance as acceptable for the purpose of empirical falsification, and any criticism of which signals disloyalty, generates strong passions of blasphemous desecration, and invites social ostracism and worse penalties against heretics and apostates.
For woke progressivism, the primary sacred belief is absolutist egalitarianism, which is as religiously self-evidently true as it is obviously empirically false.
That immediately gives rise to the oppressors-and-oppressed narrative of the explanation of the social state of affairs being one fundamentally described by classification of individuals as some degree of evil exploiters or holy victims, with those victims becoming increasingly immune to criticism until the potential for culpable agency disappears entirely and they become both more than merely human and less than fully human, or, in Auster's formulation, 'sacred objects'.
Most of the cases that I have found so far are regarding institutions like Scientology trying to get religious designation and being defeated because the judge says that it doesn't meet the multi-part legal test. What I'm looking for is probably closer to the school prayer cases, but it looks like all of those were related to normal "classic" religions. Even then, the fine distinctions made by courts are not necessarily favorable. The US is just more religion-friendly than a country like France with a stricter laïcité
policy.
What we have here is that we obviously have CRT organizations pushing CRT prayers, but because they are secular incantations rather than "classic religious" ones, it's not clear if you could get one rogue judge to agree with the "anti-woke" sphere that CRT is literally and not metaphorically a religious doctrine, or is at least close to a religious doctrine to be considered one. In this way it is probably more straightforward to argue that various CRT Test Acts like Diversity Statements in hiring at government-funded institutions can be construed to violate religious liberties accorded to followers of "Religion 1.0."
However, it often defers to the states and what they consider to be a valid church or religious organization. This would lead to the question of whether or not Woke organizations are religious entities which are avoiding the proper definition to avoid the proper restrictions and rights which would otherwise be accorded to them.
If you could make the definition stick, it would also make advocating for that religion using state funds illegal at the federal level. I'm just spit-balling here. Many of these entities do meet many of the guidance definitional points. They don't need to meet all of the definitional points to qualify. My research question to move on would be whether or not there have been any/many state or federal cases that have involved entities trying to escape the religious definition to get access to state funds that they would otherwise be forbidden from receiving due to our constitutional separation between church and state. There are also facilities by which religious organizations can get access to tons of government money, and I don't fully understand the nature of those 'faith-based initiative' exemptions and why they aren't unconstitutional.
It's not my area of expertise, so I don't have a lot of knowledge and experience to rely on. If these questions can be answered, it could mean that there are many ways to [legally] attack these organizations and cut off their access to state money without needing new state or federal legislation.
The point being "if Wokeness IS a religious movement, then its constituent organizations could be subject to many novel legal attacks." This would be the direction to research in, since it would have serious real world implications beyond Op-Editorializing infinitely that it is a religion and then leaving it at that.
I think many actual religions wouldn't really match the IRS criteria. In fact, I believe they were designed to actively avoid the creation of new religions specifically so people couldn't get tax breaks. Much like how the rules for religious exemptions to laws basically say "If you weren't a religion 100 years ago, nuts to you."
Looking at the list:
-Distinct legal existence: Distinct from individuals, presumably, so not a church of just your family. Check.
-Recognized creed and form of worship: Recognized by who? I can recognize the creed, and arguably the form of worship. Check.
-Definite and distinct ecclesiastical government: This is tricky, seeing as how many religions don't have a distinct ecclesiastical government. Islam doesn't hit this, since anyone can be an imam and there isn't a single ruling "church" in the manner of the Roman Catholics. Check?
-Formal code of doctrine and discipline: Dig one up from any DEI office. Check
-Distinct religious history: Does 1619 count? The whole CRT movement seems pretty keen on rewriting history to match their beliefs. Check.
-Membership not associated with any other church or denomination: I don't think this one would be too hard, besides defining what constitutes a "member". Check?
-Organization of ordained ministers: Each university has such an organization. Credentials and writings and everything. Check.
-Ordained ministers selected after completing prescribed courses of study: Check. (Also, not really a requirement since many e.g. Protestant churches don't have this requirement.)
-Literature of its own: Oh yea. Check.
-Established places of worship: Not necessary; many religions meet in people's homes, e.g. the Amish. Check?
-Regular congregations: Tricky... How regular? What counts?
-Regular religious services: Do Buddhists have regular religious services? Regular congregations? Would protests or annual DEI seminars on important anniversary's count?
-Sunday schools for the religious instruction of the young: Sunday? Hell, 5 days a week, baby. Check.
-Schools for the preparation of its members: Check.
So I'd say the Woke Movement covers at least a majority of those points, and in practice as many of the points as what people recognize as major religions do. The only thing really lacking, which the IRS amusingly doesn't mention but most people take as a requirement, is some sort of supernatural beliefs about the afterlife. Of course, looking at historic religions, those beliefs are only supernatural to those who don't believe in them. To those practicing the religion they are in fact true parts of nature.
I think the bigger problem is that we mentally put religion off into that corner of "Respectable, but still believing in unprovable ghosts that everyone else thinks is silly" far away from practical things like political and cultural movements, when in reality they are really much, much closer. Just replace "ghosts" with "beliefs about how things work". As Handle puts it above, "when certain core claims about the the nature of reality become 'sacred' in the sense of being held as self-evident truths and effectively tenets or axioms which are not provisional or contingent or 'negotiable' or subject to compromise or empirical falsification in any straightforward and open-minded way," that's when you have a religion. Then try really questioning the Woke about whether their model makes sense and matches the data... only I wouldn't recommend doing it at work.
So, right, the next step is to find some cases where questions like this have been tested in other contexts along with relevant laws. And asking who else has working definitions of churches or religious organizations, since the IRS' opinion is not actually the law; it's just their guidelines, something I threw up there because it was the most efficient way I could think of to find how at least one federal agency would define a church or religious organization.
Sorry, the last paragraph there sounded a lot more confrontational than I intended. I meant to say that while it is pretty self evident that most social movements that are non-supernaturally focused in the eyes of outsiders actually function very much like religions, convincing people that belief in the supernatural is not what makes a religion a religion, and therefore dangerous to meld with the state, is going to be really hard.
I don't think most people have a good reason for why a state religion would be bad, so long as it happened to be their preferred religion.
"I don't think most people have a good reason for why a state religion would be bad, so long as it happened to be their preferred religion."
That statement is unfortunately "not even wrong" because it assumes a faulty premise which is indeed a central intellectual pretense and core conceit of the post-enlightenment 'liberal' modern state.
But actually all states have a de facto, effective state religion, it's impossible not to have one, even if people are sincere in denying it. All states have to resort to some system of metaphysical assertions which must be accepted as logically prior to any potential refuation and that constitute its narrative of legitimacy and its 'telos' justifying its existence, goals, decisions, and actions. It is in fact philosophically impossible for any state to be truly neutral in matters of morals and 'religion' and to somehow transcend those issues with some kind of objectively derivable 'doctrine'.
Such a telos is both unavoidable and non-bootstrappable, and so, whether one makes it explicit or if an outside observer would have to deduce its ideological structure and degree of coherence by inference, it still exists as something which cannot internally justify or prove itself, relying inescapably on some set of 'sacred' claims which necessarily have as much universality as is captured by the variation of indivduals a state claims is subject to the jurisdiction of those claims.
This issue is why all supernatural religions with a deep heritage of a serious intellectual traidtion (some would say 'post-axial') resort to supernatural revelation, that is, proof from *the outside* for something that cannot prove itself from the inside. If one adopts eliminative materialism, then this leads straight away to meta-ethical moral nihilism, and all attempts and claims to the contrary have failed or been shown erroneous respectively.
What's the point? The point is, once you see that your state *already has* a state-religion, and every state always will have one as something that is inherent in its very existence, then the right framing of the question is not *whether* to have one but *which* state religion shall it be, or perhaps *what character and basis* would one prefer or choose for it.
It really isn't hard to put together the core beliefs that constitute the state religion of USG, and to see how this has evolved over time, and how it is more or less adoptive of fundamental principles of progressivism and thus always being dragged in that direction over time, making it fundamentally impossible for any genuine heretics, reactionairies, etc. to effectively wield state power in furtherance of their transgressive interests without reforms of so radical a nature as to constitute genuine regime change.
That's why this would be an extremely contentious issue. If you apply the definition too loosely, you force every nonprofit ever to reclassify as religious and make it so that every Department of Transportation has to spin out of the government because it's a Cult of the Asphalt God. Apply it too narrowly and you certainly miss some edge cases that are skirting the line of what is permissible for the state's agencies to do or for the state to fund. It's likely that there's a set of more straightforward answers to at least some of these questions. Other countries with very different sets of rules on religious groups would also have more obvious answers: in Germany, I believe, if the government does not recognize it as a religion it is not a religion -- you're either on the list or you're not, and that is the test.
Sheena Mason ain't a FITS if I remember correctly. That article manages to make my own position impossible: namely, simultaneously being a population (i.e., race) naturalist and making race a non-factor in society (what she calls eliminativism). I do not know how one can encounter the latest work in population genetics and not come away as a population naturalist. David Reich's book (and life's work) cannot exist without the existence of populations. (The term "race" was subject to the great euphemism treadmill; population geneticists came up with "population" to refer to "race".) As I said, one can think race refers to concrete, biological categories and also want to eliminate race as a category from public life. According to Mason, population naturalists tend to be "conservationist"--a position that means that racial categories should be "conserved" in public policy.
I guess it depends on what youean by adamantly anti abortion, but I think this is incorrect: "Today, I would speculate that the minority who are adamantly anti-abortion are comparable in numbers to the minority who are adamantly against gay sex. "
According to Pew, more than 60 percent of people support gay marriage, so support for gay sex is probably even higher. But Pew also estimate that 75% of Americans favor at least some abortio restrictions, so there is a sizable chunk of Americans, on the order of 20 percent, that think gay sex is morale and some abortions are not morale.
I think Arnold was referring to people who oppose all abortions: "Abortion is murder." The strongest opposition to Roe comes from them. And much of politicians' anti-Roe rhetoric takes that form. At the opposite extreme are those who think abortion is a woman's fundamental human right, up to the moment of delivery.
However, I think most people are in the mushy middle, not wanting to make abortion illegal but wanting some restrictions. A politician who has made speeches in favor of total prohibition is going to be in trouble with those people. Nowadays, a voter can dismiss such rhetoric as purely hypothetical, impossible to put into effect. That will change if the Supreme Court says there is nothing in the Constitution about abortion.
The relationship between scientists' "populations" and the U.S. official racial statistical categories is very tenuous. The racial categories do much harm, in my opinion. And I think that while populations may be interesting for tracing history (Razib Khan's work, for example), I think that for practical purposes today individual genetics are more useful than population genetics.
Why do the official racial statistical categories get to define "race"? Scientists--particularly physical anthropologists--used the term "race" for decades in a manner totally synonymous with the "populations" of geneticists. The true proof is that you can take Reich's book when it refers to populations--change it out for the word "race"--and still understand everything perfectly.
In terms of practical purposes, being aware of race/populations matters a lot for polygenic risk scores. You cannot take a PGS derived from a large sample of West Eurasian people, use it for someone of, say, East Eurasian descent, and get the same accuracy/results. Different populations/races each need their own PGS to get the same accuracy. Wikipedia on the practical upsides of polygenic scores: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygenic_score#Benefits_of_Polygenic_Scores_in_Human.
I am not an expert, but as I understand it the genetic variation *within* the African population is huge. So lumping everyone with black skin together would seem to be a pretty unscientific way of doing group classification.
The genetic variation within the overall Sub-Saharan African population is indeed huge, but this statement (I am tempted to say "talking point") overlooks the fact that an overwhelming fraction of this huge variation is contained in numerically tiny groups of hunter-gatherers such as the San, the Twa, Mbuti pygmies and so on. In terms of population numbers, most Sub-Saharan Africans are Bantus, who represent a recent demographic expansion of agriculturists, and their genetic variation is no larger than that of Europeans. See e.g. chapter 9 of David Reich's 2018 book. African slaves were imported into America from Bantu regions, and therefore lumping them all together was reasonable. Today's American blacks, despite recent immigration of educated Nigerians (themselves Bantus) and Caribbeans, are still mostly descendants of the slave population, and the standard census categories of race work reasonably well to classify them. Steve Sailer likes to point out that, according to published data from 23andMe, "the average black in America is 385 times blacker than the average white".
I don't have data by state, but my guess is that views on premarital sex in the test-case states trying to restrict abortion are not very different from the national average, so the correlation is weak. If public attitudes about pre-marital sex create support for abortion, then reversing Roe would make almost no difference in most of the country, since abortion would just be allowed by statute not just in Blue States but in most states close to or above national levels of support, which likely includes a considerable number of Red States. Maybe they are faking it and just signalling, but people are certainly not acting as if they believe that to be the case.
However, what happened was a very rapid and radical change in that and other views regarding sexuality in the late 60's and early 70's - analogous to the pace of change in attitudes about homosexuality. And having some awareness of that trend and expecting it to continue probably influenced the Justices in terms of being much bolder in their estimate of how far they could push against current public opinion and make up new rights and still get away with it. But if so, they were wrong about the trend's future path, and that mistake turned out to be a major, long-term strategic error in terms of creating a focal point around which to rally and coordinate resistance to the general project of progressive abuse of jurisprudence in pushing their broader agenda.
In 1963 (Source: NORC), 82% of respondents said that sexual relations between a man and a woman was unacceptable *even when they were engaged to be married*! The past really is a foreign country. Over 90% opposed the "casual hookup" scenario.
Even as late as 1969, still fully 68% of people said that "it is wrong for a man and a woman to have sexual relations before marriage"
Then, only four years later, in 1973 - NB: same year as Roe - only 47% said it was wrong. If one was just crudely extrapolating that collapse in opposition, one would guess that it would all but cease to exist by 1980. But it turned out that opposition just as suddenly stopped collapsing, gradually fell only to 40%, and then *held steady for two generations* losing only a few more percentage points in the next forty years.
Whatever was happening with public opinion, or however it might have influenced the decisions of the Justices, I think most lawyers will continue to try to encourage people to distinguish between the mertis of the arguments of the core controversy and the strictly *legal* matters that are actually at issue in these cases having to do with the law, jurisprudence and the proper way to interpret constitutional texts, correct procedure, valid exercise of authority, and so forth.
Roe is not solely (or for some, even primarily) "about" abortion in non-progressive legal circles. It''s about the fundamental question of the validity of judges pretending that the constitution requires taking the issue permanently off the table in a democracy, and what to do about it. The case - for reasons involving both intensely passionate moral sentiments and also just how baldly extra-legal it was, which was obvious to everyone at the time - has come to stand as no other case has as a "condensed symbol" for everything that went wrong with the Supreme Court's typical operation starting with the late New Deal and degenerating to ever-lower depths of brazenly unrestrained quasi-dictatorship by the late Warren Court. Not just everything that went wrong, but everything that must be put right, if there is to be any hope at lowering the incessantly rising stakes of each Presidential election and salvaging the traditional constitutional scheme. On the legal / intellectual right, which has thrown everything it has over 45 years at creating the kind of institutional movement to accomplish this top objective, if you can't reverse Roe, then all the other Roe-like thorns in the side are impossible too, and the whole effort was futile and all for nothing.
If public opinion about sex influenced the progressive Judges that wrote the holding in Roe, I suspect that the worry about the prospect of this particular kind of demoralization is influencing the conservative Justices in further motivating them to pare it back.
There is one more point I'd like to add that I think gets overlooked, and which would provide a reason for even progressives to hope that Roe gets overturned.
Underpinning the whole strategy of even attempting to have a conservative legal movement, originalist jurisprudence, Federalist Society, etc. is the idea that conservatives *can* achieve their objectives by normal, legitimate means, by playing the game by the rules in a civil manner within the usual bounds of respectable political conduct. That it wasn't *hopeless* because the game was totally rigged and the deck fundamentally stacked against them. That there was a potentially productive (not to mention status-raising) outlet for their intellectual and political energies in this channel of engagement, and that the "normal democracy" efforts of argument, scholarship, persuasion, and building of political coalitions could "work" to achieve conservative / non-progressive objectives and could pay off in long-term strategic victories.
I really can't overstate just how critical the esteem for and belief in this general idea is to the overall stability of our system. The rival notion, that this is all of this is hopeless, pointless, futile, wishful thinking, chasing a mirage, etc. and the only realistic possibilities are surrender and domination or else revolution is ... ahem, definitely circulating out there as an increasingly competitive line of thought.
I would say that someone on the margin who believes in the literal truth of the latter claim might still prefer most people to believe the former, in the name of peace and stability as opposed to the big potential downsides of unpredictable demons which could fly out when opening Pandora's Box.
Here's the thing: the "work within the system" camp needs a Roe-overturned win to continue to make this argument, and Roe being upheld (or mostly, practically upheld) is just *fatally devastating* to that case. Roe and Casey remaining the law of the land in the practical effect of whatever holding comes down, despite all the efforts after all these years, would be the ultimate possible evangelist for the cult of "Just Burn It All Down".
Hobbes is a FIT? I realize that over policing who qualifies is probably antithetical to the project in some way, but he comes across as a left-wing hack, not an open-minded truth seeker who would score many (any?) FIT points. Hobbes' schtick appears to be pushing back against typical FIT arguments (in fact, his substack description invokes the "gaslighting of America"--he seems to be implying that people who complain about the problems of free speech and cancel culture are creating a moral panic. While having someone push back against the argument that "free speech is in peril" is a good thing, lest we avoid getting trapped in an echo chamber, Hobbes doesn't seem like the most good faith actor. For example, Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog recently discussed him on their podcast Blocked & Reported, specifically his attempt to "debunk" the revelation that Matthew Shephard's murder was probably about drugs and not a hate crime at all. They described Hobbes as one of those "Vox-style explainers" who pretend to be coming at an issue with no agenda--but clearly have an agenda!
1) As you note, the gender stuff is actually a bigger deal to parents than the race stuff in schools. People in Loudoun were far more worked up over gender ideology than anti-racism, as they should be. It's hard to convince someone they are the devil because of their skin color, but it's a lot easier to convince confused teenage girls they need medical treatments.
2) There is something of a goal to the DEI movement. In fact there are metrics by which it judges success. For instance, our schools are supposed to achieve discipline equity by making sure that suspension rates are the same across races, and there are goals for how much more equal these are supposed to get each year.
You might think this and other goals are bad ideas that don't help people, but they are certainly clear goals with clear metrics. In fact in many ways Equity is far more straightforward.
I liked your review of McWhorter's book. I wonder if you could elaborate on this sentence "But fending off heresy is only one element of religious and political movements that we have seen until recently." What are the other elements you have in mind?
The reason I ask is that I think there are other unofficial elements happening, and no real official elements needed other than "Find scary outgroup enemy -> get people to hate them," to keep a religious movement going.
The unofficial elements are along the lines of "Get the Elect in power, both within the in group and among the outgroup until the outgroup ceases to exist within the society." The Elect this case are seeking and gaining power within institutions across the country, and using their religion to keep the competition on their terms: outsiders are right out, and insiders compete on being the least heretical.
I am not sure you need another unofficial element of the movement to justify its existence. The moral rules are there to create the distinction between the virtuous in group and the vicious, heretical out group. The morals are not created after the religion, but rather the would-be Elect adopt the morals that are solid enough to carry them through, adjusting them as the prevailing morality of their supporters changes over time to maintain a virtuous (but not too secure!) in group against an out group. That the gender identity movement has picked up on the same effective moral division that was lying around shouldn't be surprising then.
The moral story in question, by the way, is essentially the left's "weak groups are oppressed by evil strong groups," in your Three Languages of Politics. That is where the obsession with power comes in: so long as there is a power dynamic to identify as oppressing the weak, there is an out group to virtuously oppose or be condemned to. The moral story is evolutionarily stable, as there will always be a weak group to be oppressed by a strong group, and so always a group to oppose. The worst thing that can happen to a religious movement is for the devils of the out group to be defeated once and for all. You have to always be at war with Oceana to justify everyone's time, money and attention.
So, yea... I think Wokeism covers all the needed bases for a social movement, whether religious or political. What other elements did you have in mind?
I disagree with Arnold on abortion, and I think Democrats are going to be disappointed if they think overturning Roe v Wade will be a big win for them. Terri ran hard on this in VA and it didn't help him. Only 8% of people in exit polls said abortion was #1 issue and a majority voted for Youngkin. France restricts abortion to twelve weeks and I'm not seeing this as a big electoral button for the French left to push.
Nobody likes abortion. Even most of its supporters don't like it. The vast majority of people are ashamed to admit they have had one. That's not the building block of electoral victory.
Arnold is right that abortion is very wrapped up the sexual liberation movement of the 1960s. What I think he misses is that people by and large consider that movement a failure. The religious right for obvious reasons, and the left is currently on a puritan streak as well.
There seems to be a general consensus that sexual liberation led to the current breakdown in the family. The amount of sex people are having is down. Many people may not realize this, but a majority of adults will have two or fewer sexual partners their entire lifetime. Divorce is correlated with pre-martial sex, the more partners the worse it gets.
We see consistent and huge polling differences for rape and incest. These polling gaps should not exist if the question is whether the fetus is alive or not. But they do matter if "how you got pregnant was a sin or not".
To the extent abortion was tied up with some new an exciting horizon of sexual liberation that movement is exhausted.
I think that Republicans should stick their guns on this. I don't think there will be an electoral blowback. By contrast, I think this is the do or die moment for their relationship with the religious right. At a certain point you have to put up or shut up, and if you can't follow through then you're not worth having around.
When I read Michael Hobbes post it was clear to me that he doesn't work in Academia. Either that or he is a confirmed leftist. His post reminds me of posts claiming that Political Correctness is just politeness. I worked for a second tier college for twenty years. I watched the atmosphere turn poisonous, even in the STEM fields. Mr. Hobbes post is a fantasy.
It might even be worse at lower tier schools, as that is a margin they can compete on, both between schools and the faculty within the school. If faculty at top schools are pulling in enough grant money to pay for themselves and their research programs they probably have a lot of insulation, whereas faculty competing for tenure at small schools that are paying their entire salary need to be more cut throat. Likewise, the big state schools hardly have to advertise for students, but smaller second tier institutions are keen to differentiate along inexpensive lines like a "commitment to social justice".
On Sullivan. Yes, but Roe was still a bridge al little too far. It could have created the (in the last instance) right as the current Court is removing it, little by little. And to some extent having different approaches to same sex marriage DOES cause more interstate problems than differences in abortion.
There will be interstate issues. I think many states will try to make it a crime for minors in particular to cross state lines to obtain abortions in other states without the consent of one or both parents, or to 'aid and abet' a minor in so doing. In the Rittenhouse case a bunch of progressives parroted the "across state lines!" talking point as if that made any big legal difference (it didn't), but of course that all goes out the window in the case of abortion.
California is already planning to become a 'sanctuary state', i.e., the world's biggest destination for abortion tourism, even going so far as to propose using general tax revenues to provide financial assistance for travel for the pregnant women and for other costs incurred by abortion providers. See the latest "Future of Abortion" <a href="https://plannedparenthoodaction.org/uploads/filer_public/d8/e1/d8e17825-72e0-4f6f-9c57-7549bb54261e/ca_fab_council_report_.pdf">report</a> from California Planned Parenthood.
Ok, I guess the old html tags system does not work on Substack. Kind of annoying, but not as annoying as the fact that there is apparently no setting for "always expand everything without any "expand full comment" buttons so I can see the full text of the original post and all comments at the same time on one page".
Anyway, bleg out there for anyone who knows: links in Substack comments, how do they work?
I think if you type in a URL it automatically interprets it as a link
Is there something like the href tag that one can use in a comment to make a word or short string clickable as a link to a site without having to show the whole long and ugly url?
I don't think so
Re: McWhorter, the power relations obsession of a certain faction on the left is indeed weird. I read someone allege that this was actually a conflict mitigation strategy imprinted in the psychology of some people via evolution, similar perhaps to Great Britain's traditional foreign policy of allying with secondary powers on the continent to deter the primary power (first France, and then later Germany), but programmed into people genetically. It's an interesting hypothesis, and if you add the closed information loops of ideologically sorted social media groups and media outlets relentlessly rage-baiting these people with stories and videos of the powerless being mistreated (I liked that feeling babies vs unfeeling robots dichotomy you presented a while back), and you could sort of see how individuals with that particular psychological, ahem...profile, become convinced that the supposedly powerless are constantly being victimized, and, they become obsessed with this particular prism through which to view society.
With that in mind, mockery alone isn't likely to work. You have to disrupt the closed information loops and remind people that there's a lot more to justice and morality than power relations.
What would be good would be to see a formal argument supporting the conclusion that "Wokeness is a religion." It's something that people enjoy asserting and partially supporting, but it's generally approached as a metaphor rather than an objective statement. Clearly, it meets some definitional points but not all of them. A cleaner definition would help us to differentiate, for example, the "Protestantism" of "Wokeness" with the specific institution associated with the broader 'religious' movement.
This would also help to clarify debates about whether or not an institution is promoting the 'CRT' doctrine, for example. A clean definition of what CRT stands for can then be applied to the doctrines promoted by certain organizations. This can then be applied to model legislation which could be applied in both broad and specific instances.
'Religion' is often ok as shorthand for public consumption, but, while some people know what you're getting at, others get hung up on the lack of traditional attributes of organized religion, a supernatural god, scriptures, temples, rituals, clergy, etc.
To me, the sine qua non of an ideological political movement having passed the threshold into a framework based on metaphysical constructs is when certain core claims about the the nature of reality become 'sacred' in the sense of being held as self-evident truths and effectively tenets or axioms which are not provisional or contingent or 'negotiable' or subject to compromise or empirical falsification in any straightforward and open-minded way.
All the complex emotional instincts and impulses and group behaviors and signals and moves in the status games (like coordinating to punish heretics) are just natural consequences of phenomena of social psychology that emerge when lots of human creatures collectively align around such super-empirical constructs because they subconsciously calculate and pick up on cues that doing so will result in their overall personal advantage.
Therefore, I would focus on the existence of de facto sacred tenets that are like a credo and tests of faith rather than that of domination moves of mob action against heretics.
I suppose the salient question would be what the minimum requirement is for a general inclination to reach the level of a valid and legally recognized cult or religion, and how related to that cult makes something a religious organization related to that cult.
The only philosophically adequate test for 'religion' is simply 'faith'. That is, belief in something and refusal to allow its falsification even in principle but without rigorous proof able to persuade a skeptic. That explains why woke progressivism - with its unfalsifiable faith in the perfect potential equality of all human groups and identities - is a religion.
There is really no good way to answer that kind of question in the abstract, that is, in a way that would help one base a claim that woke progressivism is 'a religion' in the standards of a broader framework generally accepted to address those inquiries.
The legal or regulatory tests which we do have that purport to determine how such lines can be drawn for the sake of giving special solicitude to 'legitimate' claims of freedom to engage in religious practices despite otherwise generally applicable laws are basically kludges which only 'work' at all because they are saved in practice by the historical contingency of what was the typical character and relatively narrow range of religious sects and beliefs throughout American history (at least compared to the ineffably more vast space of all possible religions and beliefs).
Or, at least, they *did* work. But as the nation becomes decreasingly religious, or if claims of religious belief become much more untraditional, disorganized, novel, volatile, vague, and individualized, the whole framework just collapses and becomes useless to adjudicate matters of conscience or to test the 'legitimacy' of applications for exemptions.
The point is, it doesn't help to answer the question to look for what would pass a test for legal recognition as 'religion'. Instead, the heart of the matter is always the existence of the metaphysically sacred, especially truths for which no possible chain of logic and evidence would be agreed in advance as acceptable for the purpose of empirical falsification, and any criticism of which signals disloyalty, generates strong passions of blasphemous desecration, and invites social ostracism and worse penalties against heretics and apostates.
For woke progressivism, the primary sacred belief is absolutist egalitarianism, which is as religiously self-evidently true as it is obviously empirically false.
That immediately gives rise to the oppressors-and-oppressed narrative of the explanation of the social state of affairs being one fundamentally described by classification of individuals as some degree of evil exploiters or holy victims, with those victims becoming increasingly immune to criticism until the potential for culpable agency disappears entirely and they become both more than merely human and less than fully human, or, in Auster's formulation, 'sacred objects'.
Most of the cases that I have found so far are regarding institutions like Scientology trying to get religious designation and being defeated because the judge says that it doesn't meet the multi-part legal test. What I'm looking for is probably closer to the school prayer cases, but it looks like all of those were related to normal "classic" religions. Even then, the fine distinctions made by courts are not necessarily favorable. The US is just more religion-friendly than a country like France with a stricter laïcité
policy.
What we have here is that we obviously have CRT organizations pushing CRT prayers, but because they are secular incantations rather than "classic religious" ones, it's not clear if you could get one rogue judge to agree with the "anti-woke" sphere that CRT is literally and not metaphorically a religious doctrine, or is at least close to a religious doctrine to be considered one. In this way it is probably more straightforward to argue that various CRT Test Acts like Diversity Statements in hiring at government-funded institutions can be construed to violate religious liberties accorded to followers of "Religion 1.0."
What are the definitional points you have in mind?
This is my initial stab at it: the IRS has a multi-part test for whether or not something qualifies as a church. https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/churches-religious-organizations/churches-defined
However, it often defers to the states and what they consider to be a valid church or religious organization. This would lead to the question of whether or not Woke organizations are religious entities which are avoiding the proper definition to avoid the proper restrictions and rights which would otherwise be accorded to them.
If you could make the definition stick, it would also make advocating for that religion using state funds illegal at the federal level. I'm just spit-balling here. Many of these entities do meet many of the guidance definitional points. They don't need to meet all of the definitional points to qualify. My research question to move on would be whether or not there have been any/many state or federal cases that have involved entities trying to escape the religious definition to get access to state funds that they would otherwise be forbidden from receiving due to our constitutional separation between church and state. There are also facilities by which religious organizations can get access to tons of government money, and I don't fully understand the nature of those 'faith-based initiative' exemptions and why they aren't unconstitutional.
It's not my area of expertise, so I don't have a lot of knowledge and experience to rely on. If these questions can be answered, it could mean that there are many ways to [legally] attack these organizations and cut off their access to state money without needing new state or federal legislation.
The point being "if Wokeness IS a religious movement, then its constituent organizations could be subject to many novel legal attacks." This would be the direction to research in, since it would have serious real world implications beyond Op-Editorializing infinitely that it is a religion and then leaving it at that.
I think many actual religions wouldn't really match the IRS criteria. In fact, I believe they were designed to actively avoid the creation of new religions specifically so people couldn't get tax breaks. Much like how the rules for religious exemptions to laws basically say "If you weren't a religion 100 years ago, nuts to you."
Looking at the list:
-Distinct legal existence: Distinct from individuals, presumably, so not a church of just your family. Check.
-Recognized creed and form of worship: Recognized by who? I can recognize the creed, and arguably the form of worship. Check.
-Definite and distinct ecclesiastical government: This is tricky, seeing as how many religions don't have a distinct ecclesiastical government. Islam doesn't hit this, since anyone can be an imam and there isn't a single ruling "church" in the manner of the Roman Catholics. Check?
-Formal code of doctrine and discipline: Dig one up from any DEI office. Check
-Distinct religious history: Does 1619 count? The whole CRT movement seems pretty keen on rewriting history to match their beliefs. Check.
-Membership not associated with any other church or denomination: I don't think this one would be too hard, besides defining what constitutes a "member". Check?
-Organization of ordained ministers: Each university has such an organization. Credentials and writings and everything. Check.
-Ordained ministers selected after completing prescribed courses of study: Check. (Also, not really a requirement since many e.g. Protestant churches don't have this requirement.)
-Literature of its own: Oh yea. Check.
-Established places of worship: Not necessary; many religions meet in people's homes, e.g. the Amish. Check?
-Regular congregations: Tricky... How regular? What counts?
-Regular religious services: Do Buddhists have regular religious services? Regular congregations? Would protests or annual DEI seminars on important anniversary's count?
-Sunday schools for the religious instruction of the young: Sunday? Hell, 5 days a week, baby. Check.
-Schools for the preparation of its members: Check.
So I'd say the Woke Movement covers at least a majority of those points, and in practice as many of the points as what people recognize as major religions do. The only thing really lacking, which the IRS amusingly doesn't mention but most people take as a requirement, is some sort of supernatural beliefs about the afterlife. Of course, looking at historic religions, those beliefs are only supernatural to those who don't believe in them. To those practicing the religion they are in fact true parts of nature.
I think the bigger problem is that we mentally put religion off into that corner of "Respectable, but still believing in unprovable ghosts that everyone else thinks is silly" far away from practical things like political and cultural movements, when in reality they are really much, much closer. Just replace "ghosts" with "beliefs about how things work". As Handle puts it above, "when certain core claims about the the nature of reality become 'sacred' in the sense of being held as self-evident truths and effectively tenets or axioms which are not provisional or contingent or 'negotiable' or subject to compromise or empirical falsification in any straightforward and open-minded way," that's when you have a religion. Then try really questioning the Woke about whether their model makes sense and matches the data... only I wouldn't recommend doing it at work.
So, right, the next step is to find some cases where questions like this have been tested in other contexts along with relevant laws. And asking who else has working definitions of churches or religious organizations, since the IRS' opinion is not actually the law; it's just their guidelines, something I threw up there because it was the most efficient way I could think of to find how at least one federal agency would define a church or religious organization.
Sorry, the last paragraph there sounded a lot more confrontational than I intended. I meant to say that while it is pretty self evident that most social movements that are non-supernaturally focused in the eyes of outsiders actually function very much like religions, convincing people that belief in the supernatural is not what makes a religion a religion, and therefore dangerous to meld with the state, is going to be really hard.
I don't think most people have a good reason for why a state religion would be bad, so long as it happened to be their preferred religion.
"I don't think most people have a good reason for why a state religion would be bad, so long as it happened to be their preferred religion."
That statement is unfortunately "not even wrong" because it assumes a faulty premise which is indeed a central intellectual pretense and core conceit of the post-enlightenment 'liberal' modern state.
But actually all states have a de facto, effective state religion, it's impossible not to have one, even if people are sincere in denying it. All states have to resort to some system of metaphysical assertions which must be accepted as logically prior to any potential refuation and that constitute its narrative of legitimacy and its 'telos' justifying its existence, goals, decisions, and actions. It is in fact philosophically impossible for any state to be truly neutral in matters of morals and 'religion' and to somehow transcend those issues with some kind of objectively derivable 'doctrine'.
Such a telos is both unavoidable and non-bootstrappable, and so, whether one makes it explicit or if an outside observer would have to deduce its ideological structure and degree of coherence by inference, it still exists as something which cannot internally justify or prove itself, relying inescapably on some set of 'sacred' claims which necessarily have as much universality as is captured by the variation of indivduals a state claims is subject to the jurisdiction of those claims.
This issue is why all supernatural religions with a deep heritage of a serious intellectual traidtion (some would say 'post-axial') resort to supernatural revelation, that is, proof from *the outside* for something that cannot prove itself from the inside. If one adopts eliminative materialism, then this leads straight away to meta-ethical moral nihilism, and all attempts and claims to the contrary have failed or been shown erroneous respectively.
What's the point? The point is, once you see that your state *already has* a state-religion, and every state always will have one as something that is inherent in its very existence, then the right framing of the question is not *whether* to have one but *which* state religion shall it be, or perhaps *what character and basis* would one prefer or choose for it.
It really isn't hard to put together the core beliefs that constitute the state religion of USG, and to see how this has evolved over time, and how it is more or less adoptive of fundamental principles of progressivism and thus always being dragged in that direction over time, making it fundamentally impossible for any genuine heretics, reactionairies, etc. to effectively wield state power in furtherance of their transgressive interests without reforms of so radical a nature as to constitute genuine regime change.
That's why this would be an extremely contentious issue. If you apply the definition too loosely, you force every nonprofit ever to reclassify as religious and make it so that every Department of Transportation has to spin out of the government because it's a Cult of the Asphalt God. Apply it too narrowly and you certainly miss some edge cases that are skirting the line of what is permissible for the state's agencies to do or for the state to fund. It's likely that there's a set of more straightforward answers to at least some of these questions. Other countries with very different sets of rules on religious groups would also have more obvious answers: in Germany, I believe, if the government does not recognize it as a religion it is not a religion -- you're either on the list or you're not, and that is the test.
“I concluded that critical theory has a very strong hold on college culture everywhere.”
Clear evidence that DEI is alive and well at state schools too:
https://mobile.twitter.com/Mark_J_Perry/status/1467959926567931913?s=20
Sheena Mason ain't a FITS if I remember correctly. That article manages to make my own position impossible: namely, simultaneously being a population (i.e., race) naturalist and making race a non-factor in society (what she calls eliminativism). I do not know how one can encounter the latest work in population genetics and not come away as a population naturalist. David Reich's book (and life's work) cannot exist without the existence of populations. (The term "race" was subject to the great euphemism treadmill; population geneticists came up with "population" to refer to "race".) As I said, one can think race refers to concrete, biological categories and also want to eliminate race as a category from public life. According to Mason, population naturalists tend to be "conservationist"--a position that means that racial categories should be "conserved" in public policy.
I guess it depends on what youean by adamantly anti abortion, but I think this is incorrect: "Today, I would speculate that the minority who are adamantly anti-abortion are comparable in numbers to the minority who are adamantly against gay sex. "
According to Pew, more than 60 percent of people support gay marriage, so support for gay sex is probably even higher. But Pew also estimate that 75% of Americans favor at least some abortio restrictions, so there is a sizable chunk of Americans, on the order of 20 percent, that think gay sex is morale and some abortions are not morale.
I think Arnold was referring to people who oppose all abortions: "Abortion is murder." The strongest opposition to Roe comes from them. And much of politicians' anti-Roe rhetoric takes that form. At the opposite extreme are those who think abortion is a woman's fundamental human right, up to the moment of delivery.
However, I think most people are in the mushy middle, not wanting to make abortion illegal but wanting some restrictions. A politician who has made speeches in favor of total prohibition is going to be in trouble with those people. Nowadays, a voter can dismiss such rhetoric as purely hypothetical, impossible to put into effect. That will change if the Supreme Court says there is nothing in the Constitution about abortion.
But Roe and Casey are exactly about denying that middle majority the power to legislate middling rules.