IT IS JUST HYPE TO CALL ELECTISM A RELIGION?
Some think it's just that I don't like religion and haven't studied it. And they're right. But that doesn't mean we haven't watched a religion emerge since last year.
I am flattered to see that a person or two out there has actually taken it upon themselves to review my postings of excerpts from my The Elect, as if it were already an actual book. And from these reviews, I can see what a major strain in reviews of the actual book, Woke Racism (out from Portfolio in October) will be. I will be roundly slammed for seeming disrespectful of religion, and for not knowing enough about it to sully it with a comparison to Elect ideology.
I get it. I can see how insufferable I will seem in my take on religion, despite that Woke Racism will pull considerably back on the tone I often took in The Elect. I am, indeed, an atheist. Not an agnostic, but an atheist. And I openly admit that religious commitment perplexes and sometimes even irritates me. It’s partly a matter of personal history.
Want a bit of that dirt? First, the fact that many black Americans are devoutly Christian puts a barrier between them and me that I wish weren’t there. Second, it kept me from being able to share much of my life with a very good childhood friend when he decided to embrace an especially conservative branch of Christianity.
However, those biases acknowledged, my point that Electism has become a religion stands. My point is that religion typically includes a wing of belief that must stand apart from empiricism, that at a certain point one must just “believe.” This is not to dismiss the reams of profound, cosmopolitan close reasoning that theology has produced over the millennia, nor is to dismiss devout people as unintelligent.
Rather, it would seem to me that religious belief requires a person to sequester a part of their cognition for a kind of belief that is not based on logic. Yes, the theologian can slice and dice brilliantly in seeking a rational basis for the faith – but at a certain point, you hit that wall: one must “just” believe, “take that jump and” believe, one must believe … “.. (I don’t know) …”.
My point about The Elect is that its ideology involves – and actually is founded significantly upon – that type of religious thought. No devoted spectator of the emergence of this way of thinking could miss that it has morphed from a sociopolitical stance infused with religion (as in what I pointed out in 2015 here) into a straight-up religion.
The difference is that believers have actually started saying it outright.
Sometimes it’s where the people don’t think they’re being heard beyond their flock. A memo went around in one department at New York University last summer actually laying out “Our first guiding principle is that participation in political movements such as Black Lives Matter is analogous to a decision to attend a religious or spiritual gathering.”
One might picture this written by a black theologian. But it was an especially rich thing to see coming from a white statistician!!! This was a sign of a new era.
(This was not, however, written from the mathematics department, for those who might want to sniff it out, which will be futile – but I guarantee you it was real.)
Another example is the status that Michael Brown, killed by white officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, has taken on among some people of this world. The issue is that difference between fact and “belief.”
The fact is that Michael Brown was not killed with his hands up by a marauding white bigot who couldn’t perceive his humanity. Brown tried to take Wilson’s gun, hit him, and then – for reasons we will likely never fully understand – repeatedly charged at Wilson until Wilson finally fired. This has been corroborated beyond any reasonable doubt by the forensic evidence as well as by neighborhood observers.
What, then, do we make of a theologian who thinks Michael Brown was a modern Jesus?
“As with Christ, the flesh of Michael Brown, Jr. made him imminently killable in the eyes of many and mitigated any claim of empathy on the hearts of too many others,” Stephen J. Ray informs us. “Michael Brown Jr. is and will be our shining Black Prince for from his death God has brought Life to us all and in his gaze we are enveloped in its power.”
Now, the Elect defense here is to say “Oh, this guy is just some ….” – but watch it! He’s “just some” black President of the Chicago Theological Seminary, penning a serious article called “Black Lives Matter as Enfleshed Theology” in this book.
Try again, Elects. “Well, you understand that black people have a special sensitivity to a case like Ferguson because of the long history of cops’ mistreatment of black people in this country.” I do get that, but I question whether we are to give black people a pass on sheer logic because of even that history. It’d be one thing if Ray had written this years ago (some would be surprised at how in line with the Common Consensus on Ferguson I was until the facts came out). But this is from just a couple years ago.
And besides, one also encounters things like this: “God endows Black flesh with the power to communicate life to others in Black Lives Matter. That resembles the plot of Good Friday to Pentecost: the Holy Spirit gathers a new community around the body of Jesus.” That’s from another book. By Eugene F. Rogers.
Another black theologian, of course? But no – he is white, despite the “black” air lent by the middle initial, the name Eugene, and the content of the quote. And no, he’s not “just some …” – he is a celebrated Professor of Religious Studies who has done work at Princeton, Tübingen and Yale who has been awarded a Fulbright, an NEH grant, and … well, I’ll stop. Point being: serious people are thinking this way, and it’s religious.
This stuff just goes on and on. Listen to this Elect white teacher at Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School. Here’s another grand old academy being choked by CRT ideology, while smart media types stand by claiming nothing’s going on because legal theorists forty years ago had no such things in mind and thus it isn’t CRT and thus if you don’t like it, * you’re a racist and … (note that this is religious thought as well, in that sharp break with sequential logic at the point I marked with an asterisk).
Anyway, listen here to this person who openly likens white people to alcoholics, who need to meet and cleanse themselves:
The strong religious component in AA meetings needs no explanation, and this teacher is openly calling for him and his colleagues to, essentially, come together and pray, self-flagellate – complete with dismissing those in disagreement as not belonging in the setting, having no place among them. Just imagine this blithe, tribalist kind of dismissal coming from anyone you had as a teacher in your life, and yet now, zealots like this man are normal in institutions of instruction. This man likely doesn’t realize that he, despite likely happily guffawing at the thought of Jerry Falwell and looking upon Ultra-Orthodox Jewish people as curiosities, is on the vanguard of a religious faith himself.
If this kind of thing is just “like a religion” rather than being one, then I assume that those who feel that way would comfortably classify Roseanne Barr’s likening of Valerie Jarrett to apes as “like racism,” Donald Trump’s referring to black people as “the blacks” and regularly assigning the label of “dumb” to black people as “like racism.” Why the binary logic with racism but suddenly an almost aesthetic sensitivity to gradations when it comes to religion?
What we have been seeing over the past year in terms of how serious people are comfortable presenting themselves and their thoughts is analogous to watching creationism taught alongside evolution. It’s scary, whether or not I’m an atheist and whether or not I’m up on my Thomas Aquinas, Augustine, and Niebuhr.
How about this, for meeting my religious detractors – of which there will be increasingly more – halfway? An alternate-universe version of The Elect would be forging, even with a certain smug impatience with real questions, real change on the ground for real people who need help. That religion would be fine with me. In a way, it is the Catholicism of, say, Dorothy Day.
However, the this-universe version of The Elect make a pretense of being about activism when what really gets them going is shaming people and virtue signalling, while exploiting black people they don’t truly respect as tools for the former - as actual black people join them unaware of the profound dismissal that pity entails.
So the problem is not that The Elect is a religion. It’s that it’s a shitty religion.
Unlike you John, I have studied religion in depth for over 30 years now. A large part of my focus has been on christianity and its early emergence and development over the past two thousand years. Those you call the Elect are continually expressing many of the underlying assumptions within christianity, especially prostestantism. To get a clearer idea of the similarity between the behavior of the Elect and the early christians in the Roman world, the best source is The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World by Catherine Nixey who just happens to be a devout christian. What is true is that if the christians (and muslims) had not engaged in conversion by the sword (killing or threatening to kill those who did not accept their religion as the only true religion) there would be no dominance of either christianity or islam in the world today. Whenever their pressure on subject populations decreases, people leave both religions in droves or else become go to church on sunday christians, not true believers.
The Elect have a fundamental belief in original sin (whiteness), being saved (unbelievers accepting the one true religion), conversion by the sword (massive social pressure and threats of and sometimes actual violence), that they and only they know the true and righteous path, and to question it is heresy. A great many movements in our time have absorbed this essentially christian structure, including science and medicine (for more on this see Mary Midgley). Science is in essence a protestant sect, one of the most powerful ever formed. It kept everything but god, however if you pay attention to the language scientists use, it is revealing. "I found something new to science." We do it for science." I serve science." "Science says that . . . " In fact science is not a living being. It is instead a tool, like a hammer. A way of investigating the natural world to understand more clearly how it works. "I found something new to hammer," makes just as much sense.
To parse your points, there are religions that do not insist on blind belief; it is primarily the two large monotheistic religions that do so. A number of other religions consider both christians and muslims to be idolators because they are people of the book; they worship the physical book and in the case of christians the body of christ (they have little crosses with a dead guy on them). Further to many other peoples, christians continually engage in ritual cannibalism, eating the body of christ and drinking his blood. To some it is a fairly primitive and bloody religion. I happen to agree, a look at its two thousand year history reveals its continual brutality and murderous behavior toward others who do not believe as they do. oh, well, enough of that . . .
In any event, the CRT and intersectionalilty movement has all the elements of a religion; what it will not have is staying power. the underlying belief systems are not sustainable. it is merely giving people who are enraged an avenue to express that rage. It can't build, can't form genuine coalitions, can't offer salvation, for even if a white person believes they will still be tainted by their genetic history and skin color. People of color will still be victims. Without that white/black dynamic, the whole thing falls apart. And as with all movement like this, its main movers and shakers are in it for the power, fame, and money; they will move on once it begins to grow stale and once they have their nest egg safely sequestered in property or investment portfolios. I have seen it all before in the 1960s. The pattern is as old as civilization. The only question is how much damage will they do before it fades away and how much power will the conservative right gain because of the radical left's attacks on the more moderate members of our liberal tribe.
I hope this isn't waay pushy, but the AA reference led me to post here as a comment an op-ed piece of mine that ran on another website:
From Self Help to Societal Harm: The Woke Co-Option of the Language of Personal Improvement and Therapy
John McWhorter, the distinguished linguist, has an ecclesiastical term for the members of the current woke/progressive/CRT movement: The Elect. He has chosen that term to emphasize the fact that the movement is not just like a religion, but actually is a religion (or at least a cult).*
All religions are alike in certain ways, especially in the need for a common terminology, a series of definitions and words that make it possible to function within said religion. Sometimes these terms are spun out of whole cloth, appearing sui generis either at the beginning or as time goes by. Sometimes these terms are taken from “the outside world” and may, or may not, retain a close relation to their original meaning.
With The Elect (capitalization intentional), much of the terminology is actually taken directly from the self-help and therapy movements. This usurpation gives the terms a feeling to the public of general familiarity, lending a certain comfort when encountering them. By taking what, in many cases, was non-confrontational “feel good” terminology and warping it for their own purposes, The Elect can, and so far sadly successfully, “Trojan Horse” their belief system into society as a whole.
To start, take for example the term “trigger.” Essentially this word originally arose from self-help groups as a kind of shorthand to remind people to avoid situations that could lead to a relapse into whatever problematic behavior they wish to stop. Triggers were past activities one closely associated with that behavior – don’t hang out at the local bar every day because that makes drinking easier, don’t argue politics with your idiot brother-in-law because that makes going to jail again for no matter how justifiable assault more possible, don’t go down the ice cream aisle at the supermarket because that literally puts weight gain back on the table, etc.
Those triggers varied wildly from behavior to behavior, from individual to individual. What did not vary, though, was the sense that it was incumbent upon the individual to take responsibility for avoiding those triggers, to stay out of harm’s way, as it were.
But, as currently defined, “trigger warnings,” while bearing a facile resemblance to the original meaning, have mutated from an individual responsibility to a societal one. What was once a personal self-improvement tool has become a way for individuals to demand that society refrains from exposing them to anything that could cause even mild discomfort, real or even self-induced, under any circumstances.
If the term still had its original meaning, just as walking into a bar can “trigger” an alcoholic’s relapse, apparently discussing slavery in a college classroom could somehow trigger a relapse into the practice of slavery on campus.
Other examples of this type of dishonest co-option abound:
• Safe Space – Once a term for an environment that allowed its members to express themselves honestly and openly (think group therapy) without fear of judgement is now held to be an environment in which only thoughts and actions that are pre-approved by the group (no matter how that group is delineated) are allowed. Again, seemingly similar but in fact radically different.
• Doing the Work – In self-help groups, it means a constant personal process of self-evaluation, of being careful of addictive or other problematic behaviors. Now, in the current context, it means permanently and eternally attempting to atone for the Original Sin of whiteness, or maleness, or straightness, or any perceived trait that is defined by The Elect as inappropriately advantageous and/or putatively powerful.
• Speaking Your Truth – In many therapeutic settings, speaking from a very personal perspective about how one perceives the world is a useful first step in better understanding oneself and, therefore, be better able to move forward. It is, however, specifically not immutable and to be taken, in the long run, as final and actual truth. In The Elect version, personal truth is just as valid and is to be given the same cloak of universality as actual, real-world truth and therefore cannot be questioned. This has the effect of moving society’s goalposts from “speaking truth to power” to “speaking your own truth to gain power.”
• Crosstalk – Depending on a particular group’s norms, crosstalk can range from asking someone to clarify a statement, to asking if that person knows the reason for his actions, to directly challenging another person’s version of events. This last is usually at least frowned upon if not banned from the environment. The Elect has lifted this premise entirely and foisted it onto society as a whole because it is convenient to use it to silence dissent, disagreement, or mere questions. Doing any one of these things is deemed counter-productive and, according to The Elect, reflects the dissenters’ tacit admission of continuing fault, or at least their purposeful denial of the problem (as they define it).
• Inclusivity – Self-help and therapy groups are inclusive of anyone wishing to get help with whatever problem they may be facing. However, such inclusivity can lead to insularness and an unwillingness to look at those with similar issues who have chosen not to join the group as others, people to be wary of. The Elect take this occasional negative off-shoot of selective inclusivity and extend it to its absurd but in a way logical conclusion – anyone who they think should join the group and has refused is, therefore, by definition less of a person.
• Ridding of Toxic Elements – Hearkening back somewhat to the discussion of triggers, in a therapeutic setting this means to not just avoid potential recovery pitfalls but to also actively seek out and eliminate certain things from your life. The Elect define toxic elements as anyone or anything or any idea that you either do not agree with or could possibly change your way of thinking. (If you remember the many, many articles advising people on how they should handle discussing any even vaguely political issue with their old, out-of-touch, angry, less than progressive parents at a holiday meal – and whether or not they should even attend - you get the drift).
• Lived-In Experience – Like “your truth,” the idea is that everyone’s statement of their own lived-in experience cannot be questioned. Not only is it “your truth,” it actually has the merit of being supported by “your experience,” or at least how you perceived them. The Elect have morphed the “walk a mile in someone else’s shoes” aphorism into a way to silence any criticism while simultaneously denying the very existence of the human empathy that makes the coming together of discrete individuals to form a society possible.
By using the cudgel of familiarity, the slippery slope of “that rings a bell, so it can’t be that weird,” The Elect have bastardized these terms to advance their political and social agenda. This dishonest slither of co-option needs to be seen for what it is – a very narcissistic wolf in a very trusting sheep’s clothing.
*McWhorter's book, The Elect, is due out this fall, but he has been serializing the work on his “It Bears Mentioning” Substack site which can be found here. It's really worth checking out.
Author’s Note: None of the above is meant to denigrate using self-help groups and therapy when appropriate or their possible efficacy. And I’m sorry this trigger warning is at the end of the article.