The New Religion of America's Elite

When I started teaching at a large secular university in 1984 I quickly learned that my  Christian faith was not welcome. In fact, I was informed, it’s illegal to proclaim it in a public educational venue. To proclaim Christianity in a secular setting was to breech the wall separating church and state. I discovered something else. Professors on the Left felt no such restraint. They were perfectly free to preach their ideology in the classroom. In fact, they felt obligated to do so. One day one of my colleagues was walking out the door of our department building to a class. He said, “I need to obliterate the religious beliefs of some of my students.” I asked him, “George, what do you intend to replace them with?” His answer, “Why Marxism, of course.” George felt it was perfectly fine to preach his views in the classroom, a freedom he would not grant to me.

I very quickly saw religion needs to be defined differently. I would ask my students this question: Is “I believe in God” a religious statement? Of course it is. OK. How about this statement: “I don’t believe in God.” Is that a religious statement? If not why not? It’s a statement of the same kind. A religion does not require a belief in God to be a religion.  Let’s define religion: 

·      It has a worldview. Or, a comprehensive view of reality. 

·      It has a list of doctrines to which it adheres,

·      It has a framework for making moral decisions.

·      It has some source of authority 

·      It has a type of salvation or righteousness and a way of achieving it. 

·      It has an eschatology—a belief in where the world is headed and how it will end. 

·      It defines what gives life meaning. 

·      Courts have concluded that a religion has some sort of community expression. It is a group of people not just individual conscience. 

What I was confronted with in my university was a religion. It had many of the same characteristics as Christianity but was virulently anti-Christian.

At one time in American culture it was to your advantage to call yourself religious. No longer. Today to be religious is to be a moron. Denouncing religious faith is a mark of intelligent decision making. To admit to being any kind of Christian is to invite ridicule, rejection and persecution, especially as one moves up the ladder to greater and greater social status.

However, rejecting traditional religion does not mean you cease to be religious. We return again to Chesterton: When a man stops believing the God of the Bible he does not then believe nothing. He then believes anything. Or as Jacob Hess puts it, “ceasing to trust or love the Divine is not to cease to trust or love anything at all. Instead of a dissolution of trust and love, these internal devotions almost always end up getting transferred to something else.”

As I observed in a recent video many westerners are returning to paganism as though it’s some new thing. It is not and no one doubts it’s a religion. But a lot more people have joined the faith of the Progressive Leftists. It’s the new Marxist religion and you have to adhere to it if you are going to accepted in polite company.

Recently the British journalist Helen Lewis, herself an atheist, wrote a fascinating article on how social justice has become a new religion.  She rightly observes that, “For some activists, politics has usurped the role that religion used to play as a source of meaning and purpose in our lives, and a way to find a community.”

People like to brag that they have left religion behind. When a pollster asks them for their religious affiliation they answer, “none.” But they are deceiving themselves.  Man is incurably religious. Men and women are replacing traditional religions with what I call “God substitutes.”  The list is long. For some the new gods are political leaders, fictional superheroes, even entertainers or sports figures. Others try to replace god with assorted addictions--drugs, alcohol, work, romance, sex.

But the biggest new religious substitute is politics. Many years ago the chairman of the political science department at a major university told me bluntly, “Politics is my religion.” 

This worship of politics is a lot more likely to be found on the left. The political right has serious competition from Christianity. Christians with any level of commitment do not allow politics to become their religion. Even right-wingers with very little Christian faith still have divided loyalties. Not on the Left. There is no competition. A person committed to Left-wing Progressivism can go all in. There is no competition for his loyalty.

So, to understand the Progressive Left we must understand it as a religious competitor to Christianity. In future videos I will describe this relatively new religion in greater detail.

May the God of the true faith that comes through Jesus Christ, bless you this day in a mighty way.

More: Ten Characteristics of a Cult: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IL9RA2QgSf8

What is religion? https://www.firstthings.com/article/2023/06/defining-religion-in-the-court

Tom Stringham: https://publicsquaremag.org/dialogue/persuasion/the-other-religion/

The Most Popular Religion in America: 

https://publicsquaremag.org/dialogue/social-justice/invisible-religion-popular-religion-america/