By DOUG SHAVER
September 17, 2020
I'm not the first to observe that the political left has become very like a religion in its demands for strict adherence to a set of dogmas, nor to object more specifically that some of its ideas look very similar to the Christian doctrine of original sin.
Now some commentators are taking the next step. It's not a new step. For as long as I can remember, some conservatives have accused Communists of turning their political philosophy into a religion. This was usually done, though, to make a rhetorical point about the hypocrisy of Communists' denunciation of all things religious. But the current move is not about hypocrisy. It's about the very nature of the belief system.
The linguist John McWhorter, in an interview a few days ago with Bret Weinstein, said the new progressivism is a religion, adding for emphasis: I don't mean it's like a religion; I mean it is a religion. (Close paraphrase, not an exact quote.)
OK, a professional linguist ought to know something useful about what a word can mean. But I've studied the philosophy of language, and I think I can justify my disagreeing with him. This is not a debate I'm interested in winning, though. I'm more interested in noting that reasonable people can have the debate. If modern progressivism has come to so closely resemble a religion that we can even be having this argument, does it really matter which ideological taxon it belongs to?
If this is just an instance of semantic warfare, the progressives haven't left themselves much room to complain. They have already redefined racism, violence, and equity beyond all communicative utility. But, let's see if we can take this discussion beyond a tu quoque duel.
The objection "Now you're just arguing semantics" is sometimes a valid counterargument, and sometimes it's a just smokescreen for an evasive maneuver. When someone commits the fallacy of equivocation, consciously or otherwise, then semantics has become precisely what the argument is about. The validity of any argument depends on how its key terms are defined, and if the two sides are not defining those terms the same way, then they are literally not talking about the same thing. Once that becomes clear—perhaps because one of the disputants points it out—then the semantic dispute is an evasion until the dispute is resolved.
Sometimes this is by design. It might not be intentional design, but it is a kind of intelligent design. It can be an effective way to prove, not that you are right, but that your adversary is wrong, and in today's political climate, that is often the primary if not sole objective. It's a strategy that can work quite regardless of any conscious planning by its advocates. If you think you've won just because your opponent appears, from your perspective, to have lost, then you get to declare victory.
This looks a lot like how Christians have waged their doctrinal wars through most of their 2,000-year history. None of them has had a logical leg to stand on, but that has seldom mattered. The greatest sin has always been heresy. Murder, rape, and torture are more easily forgiven than dissent from orthodoxy.
(There is an unforgiveable sin, "blasphemy against the Holy Spirit," but Christians have never agreed on what it refers to. Many think it means apostasy, and nobody thinks it means heresy; but in practice, apostates are rarely condemned as severely as heretics, in either religious or political movements.)
I used to be a Christian. I was initially converted to a generic evangelical fundamentalism but was then recruited into a Pentecostal sect. (I add some details in my deconversion story.) As my luck would have it, it was a fringe within a fringe. While my local church was officially unaffiliated, it was informally associated with the United Pentecostal Church, one of a few denominations collectively referred to as Oneness Pentecostals. The "Oneness" referred to their rejection of the Trinity doctrine.
Of course, Unitarians deny it, too, but Oneness Pentecostals deny it differently. Trinitarians say there is one and only one God comprising three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Unitarians say yes, there is only one God, but the Son was a human, and a human cannot be God, so the Son couldn't have been God. (Nobody participating in this debate has ever, to my knowledge, worried much about how to fit the Holy Spirit into whatever formulation they've come up with.)
Oneness Pentecostals go the other way. No matter how you slice it logically, they say, three persons means three gods, and that is tritheism, not monotheism. The Son was God incarnate, OK, but still just God, period, not another person in any triune godhead.
The semantics of this debate get convoluted beyond measure, of course, and I'm not about to try analyzing them here, but one thread is of special personal interest to me.
I left the Pentecostals in my late teens and became a liberal Christian, no longer concerned with figuring out in what sense, if any, Jesus was divine. What mattered was what he said, not what he was. By my mid-20s I'd become an atheist and any debate about the godhead was moot. There was (very probably) no God of any sort, and that settled all of that.
A few decades went by. Along came the World Wide Web, and I came aboard it in 1999. Right away I gravitated toward some forums where atheists could spend hours every day debating with Christians.
There is an adage about knowing your adversary. (It's usually said "Know your enemy," but I've never thought of Christians as enemies.) Having been a Christian, I thought I knew Christianity, but I soon discovered the vastness of my ignorance, and I set about trying to remedy that. The Internet made it as easy as I could have wished.
One of my earliest discoveries was that no modern debate, either within Christianity or between Christians and their detractors, was actually modern. All of the arguments, with rare and trivial exceptions, have been going on for practically as long as any people have called themselves Christians.
I already knew, of course, that Christians were arguing about the Trinity almost from Day One. What I had not known was that some in those earliest days were advocating a doctrine that sounded just like what I'd been taught by the Oneness Pentecostals. And, they had a name for it. But it wasn't called oneness. It was called modalism. Apparently, then, Oneness Pentecostals were just modalists.
Or, were they? As far as I had ever heard during my years with the church, they never called themselves modalists. But then, this was a small church in a small town. There were no scholars among my acquaintances, and the church's leaders rarely encouraged serious scholarship. We were given a version of Christian history in which the Catholic church played a seriously negative role, one and only one of its sins being the invention of the doctrine of the Trinity. We needed to know that much, and we didn't need to know any more.
My church was saying, in other words: "The first Christians believed what we believe, but then those evil Catholics hijacked the church leadership. The true believers then had to go underground, where they were persecuted as heretics for most of the next 2,000 years." The Catholics, of course, have always had a different history to tell—the story told by Eusebius, more or less.
But, never minding who showed up first on the historical stage, I got very curious about whether the modern oneness doctrine was just a revival of ancient modalism. And, if you ask a Oneness Pentecostal, the apparent answer is usually: Not really. But, almost everybody else says: Of course it is.
Generally, in cases like this, I'm inclined to privilege the advocates of a doctrine over its adversaries. In this case, though, I was an advocate, and when the historians say "The modalists believed X," I notice that X is exactly what I believed. And so as far as I can tell, having been there myself, the Oneness doctrine is modalism.
So, what about all the Oneness believers who say it isn't? Well, I have spent quite a bit of time with a search engine looking for one of them who explains just how the Oneness doctrine differs from modalism, and I have yet to find an intelligible explanation. Possibly, that is just a consequence of my ignorance of theological subtleties. So be it. If they are one and the same, I cannot believe it, and if they are different, I cannot believe either of them. Construe it or interpret it however you will, I cannot believe that Jesus of Nazareth was God incarnate, because I cannot believe there ever was a God for him to be the incarnation of. The semantic quibbles, in this instance, are irrelevant to credibility.
In a similar way, it matters little whether some political ideology ought to be called a religion. If it looks so much like a religion that some people have a hard time seeing a difference, that ought to tell us something, because nobody who says they're the same thing means it as a compliment. The point is not that anyone's disapproval of religion proves anything. It would be fatuous to argue "X looks just like Y, and Y is bad, therefore X is bad." The point is the existence of similarities that make it so hard for some people to see an important difference.
For people who think religion is a good thing, there should be no problem. They can just say, "Your hostility against religion is unjustified, and so your hostility to us is likewise unjustified." Most progressives cannot take this tack, though, because they're not keen on defending religion in general. They'll make an exception for Islam, but they don't like orthodox Christianity at all. They especially don't like being compared with evangelical Christians, most of whom are Trump supporters.
This leave them two options. One is just to deny the similarities, saying, "No, we're not like that at all." The other is special pleading. This is when they say, "Yes, these are bad arguments when religious apologists use them, but when we use them, they are perfectly valid." Of course, neither strategy actually works. They are like that, and the arguments are bad no matter who uses them.
But the ideologues don't usually bother with either. When accused of being a religion, or like a religion, they ignore the observation. Because that is where political discourse has gotten to. There is no debating these issues any more. There is only preaching. One side says "You must believe these things" while the other says "No, you must not believe them" and the reasons offered for believing or not believing those things are logically irrelevant to those things. You should believe them if they make you feel good, and you should not believe them if disbelieving them makes you feel good.
Whether this is religion or just sort of like a religion doesn't matter. It is a really bad way to argue about our differences, and it is why the arguments are becoming violent.
Next: Apolocalypse soon
(This page last updated on September 17, 2020.)