Following on last week’s post, here’s an essay by the Archbishop of Los Angeles, José H. Gomez, called Reflections on the Church and America’s New Religions.
The essay begins:
An elite leadership class has risen in our countries that has little interest in religion and no real attachments to the nations they live in or to local traditions or cultures. This group, which is in charge in corporations, governments, universities, the media, and in the cultural and professional establishments, wants to establish what we might call a global civilization, built on a consumer economy and guided by science, technology, humanitarian values, and technocratic ideas about organizing society.
In this elite worldview, there is no need for old-fashioned belief systems and religions. In fact, as they see it, religion, especially Christianity, only gets in the way of the society they hope to build.
That is important to remember. In practice, as our Popes have pointed out, secularization means “de-Christianization.” For years now, there has been a deliberate effort in Europe and America to erase the Christian roots of society and to suppress any remaining Christian influences.
Next, Archbishop Gomez explicitly adopts what I have called “the religious stance”:
Here is my thesis. I believe the best way for the Church to understand the new social justice movements is to understand them as pseudo-religions, and even replacements and rivals to traditional Christian beliefs.
With the breakdown of the Judeo-Christian worldview and the rise of secularism, political belief systems based on social justice or personal identity have come to fill the space that Christian belief and practice once occupied.
Whatever we call these movements — “social justice,” “wokeness,” “identity politics,” “intersectionality,” “successor ideology” — they claim to offer what religion provides.
They provide people with an explanation for events and conditions in the world. They offer a sense of meaning, a purpose for living, and the feeling of belonging to a community.
Even more than that, like Christianity, these new movements tell their own “story of salvation.”
(For a point-by-point comparison between the traditional Fall-and-Redemption story, and the ersatz version now ascendant amongst climate alarmists, see this post from 2017.)
I’ve said before that what makes religion work is that it offers a connection to the transcendent, a “skyhook”. In 2016 I wrote this:
When the supernatural basis for all of this is removed — when God dies — we’ve lost our skyhook; the warranty is void. But we are no less overborne by the chaos and mystery we face. We continue to seek the transcendent, but the sky is now empty, and the heavens have lowered. Having sliced off the apex of the sacred pyramid — the unifying presence of God — we are left with a truncated, frustrated hierarchy. God had been the Absolute from which both the natural world, and all human agency, emanated, but now the roots of both Nature and the soul of Man are exposed and disconnected.
We have not, however, lost our sense of awe, and of transcendent beauty and mystery, when we contemplate the natural world — and so in our new, sawed-off religion, we preserve Nature as a sacred object. (Indeed, with God now departed, many of us now promote Nature to fill his place.) And having lost God as the agent and guarantor of our protection and salvation, we must set our sights, and pin our hopes, upon the only thing we can still discern above us: the State.
The State! It is a low and shabby God, but it’s all that’s left. Needs must, when the Devil drives.
Archbishop Gomez sees this the same way:
Today’s critical theories and ideologies are profoundly atheistic. They deny the soul, the spiritual, transcendent dimension of human nature; or they think that it is irrelevant to human happiness. They reduce what it means to be human to essentially physical qualities — the color of our skin, our sex, our notions of gender, our ethnic background, or our position in society.
I realize that this dispute about whether Wokeness is or isn’t a religion is becoming quite useless; after all the arguing is done, most people haven’t budged. Some (like me) think it is in fact a mutated, deformed religion; the rest think that there can be no such thing as an atheistic “religion”. This is why I tried, in that earlier post, to borrow Daniel Dennett’s approach, and reframe the question by taking the “religious stance” — in other words, saying that whether or not this pernicious mind-virus is in fact a religion, it’s best understood (and its behavior predicted) by treating it as if it were one. That’s what Archbishop Gomez is doing in this essay.
Read the whole thing here.
9 Comments
Archbishop Gomez sems to be on the same page as Archbishop Vigano: https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/11/huge-exclusive-archbishop-carlo-maria-vigano-calls-people-faith-unite-worldwide-anti-globalist-alliance-free-humanity-totalitarian-regime-video/
I haven’t had time to do more than a cursory read-through of the transcript. That is to say, to even think it over other than recognize he is on to something. (I have a family member flying in tonight from living 3 years in Germany, and am so relieved to get her back in country. Have been busy preparing hospitable living quarters, while caring full time for invalid spouse. No vaccines in sight.) I have seen earlier videos he has posted, and this one indicates he has forward momentum. That is an important point. Who frames the debate sets the terms. I hope to at least be a witness to developments to come, and further, to be in some small measure a molecule or electron of additional critical momentum.
Using Wittgenstein’s theory of ‘language games’ as a lens, I can see the use of “a religion’ to be justifiable and even helpful.
What Archbishop Gomez seems to propose is a syncretic religion: a mix of Christianity and liberalism. Doing social change but with a Christian language. This is the religion of Vatican II.
But this is not Christianity, which is focused of salvation of souls and not social change. This is a heresy, which started in US Protestant Churches, the “social gospel”
Christ told us to care for the poor and to do good in general, because of the benefit of our soul, not to change society and battle discrimination. Discrimination is not a Christian sin: it is a liberal sin.
But this is not Christianity, which is focused of salvation of souls and not social change.
Yes, but mission creep is a problem.
Ambitious missionaries go off to far worlds; soon there are calls for money to buy seeds and fertilizer; adoption of the new people’s children is needed; refugees are abundant, and the needed funds are in NGO land; so we have to toe the line; hand over our coat along with our cloak, and fly the rainbow flag as we put condoms on bananas while swallowing hormones for the mandatory transitioning protocols.
Early airplanes almost always had at least some wooden primary structure. It seems to me that defining “religion” in such a way that it has to involve the supernatural is like defining an “airplane” as having to be made in substantial part of wood. By that definition, a Hawker Hurricane would be an “airplane”, but a Supermarine Spitfire would not be. We could also say that an “airplane” has to have one or more Otto-cycle engines, excluding gliders and jets. But we don’t define an airplane in terms of how it’s made, or how it works. We define it by its function, what it does.
Malcolm, is John Vervaeke on your radar? He’s a cognitive scientist at the university of Toronto. He has a YouTube lecture series called “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis”.
It’s long! About 50 hours. I really only ever digested the first half of it, which is largely a history of Western philosophy and religion from Socrates to the Battle of Kursk.
Vervaeke says that Hegel (and later Marx and Nietzsche) was explicitly trying to create a functional replacement for Christianity. That plays well with D.S. Wilson wanting a functional definition of religion, but Vervaeke is more oriented towards personal psychology.
Lecture 1:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54l8_ewcOlY
He gets into Hegel in episode 24.
My (condensed) notes on the first half of the series:
http://ptaylor.space/peter/vervaeke.htm
Hi Peter,
No, I’d never heard of John Vervaeke (though I have a friend who is a professor of history at the University of Toronto, so I bet they know each other).
Thanks for the links – I’ll have a look.
When the lies and falsehoods of Leftism (Communism, Environmentalism, Feminism) are brought low, I don’t want the fake religion to drag the true one(s) down with it.
While Leftism can fruitfully be compared to religion, it offers only void instead of salvation.
Here is Vallicella, too: “A religion such as Christianity promises a way out of the unsatisfactory predicament we find ourselves in in this life.”
ErisGuy,
Exactly right.