Is Liberalism a Religion?

Conversations That Matter

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Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. We have an important question to answer today, and that is whether or not liberalism is a religion, whether liberalism, cultural and political liberalism, is a religion.

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I was asked this today on a podcast. The host had read my book, "'Against the Waves, Christian Order in a

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Liberal Age," and there's a chapter entitled, "'The Religion of Liberalism,' and I talk about this.

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So if you want more details, you can go check that out. But in the book, I make the argument that liberalism, and that is the default setting of our world, especially here in the

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United States now and in other parts of the West, liberalism is, in a sense, the religion of our time.

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There are certain things that just cannot be questioned. And so one of the things that I highlighted was the fact that in liberalism, and this is,

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I think, a good way to understand liberalism in basic terms, liberalism kicks God out of the public square. It kicks order out of the public square, any divine transcendent moral order, and it replaces it with human aspiration.

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So humans, as individuals, are pursuing their own good, what they determine to be good for themselves in the public square.

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And no one should put a limitation on this, of course, unless they are inhibiting others from pursuing their own purpose.

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Now, you can be someone who is a Christian, who is actually very pious in your personal life, who has adopted the

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Christian order and virtue, and you live by that and you go to church, but also be a liberal because as soon as you enter the public square, that is where the rubber meets the road.

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That is the test to see if you really are a liberal or not. And if you think that once you enter the public square, you ought now to defend some kind of a neutrality or a multiculturalism or a religious pluralism, you're giving away the fact that you're a liberal.

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So if you're David French and you say, you know what, drag queen story after, that's just the blessing of liberty. People can do that.

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You're essentially saying, some people choose to go to church, some people choose to go to strip clubs. Who am I to say?

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I mean, as long as they're not hurting anyone else, then it's perfectly acceptable. That is a liberal mindset.

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God has been kicked out, transcendent purpose has been kicked out, and now what you're left with is humans pursuing their own purpose or making their own purpose or self -actualizing on a journey to realize who they really are.

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And no one should interfere with this. In fact, some liberals will go so far as to say that you and I should pay for this journey.

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If there's economic situations that inhibit someone from pursuing what they want, they want a transgender surgery and they're in the military or something.

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There's people who think we should pay for that because they're pursuing their own choice and choice then gets elevated into this mechanism it was never intended to be.

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It can violate the moral order. It can violate the social good, but anyone who chooses is now essentially untouchable.

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That choice is sacred. What they're doing with that choice is sacred. And as long as they're not inhibiting anyone else's choice in the minds of liberals, then they ought to be able to do it.

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That's the liberal scheme, if you will. And there's some guys who try to say, well, you know, it's principle pluralism.

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You keep all your beliefs, but in the public square, you kind of joust with others on this neutral plane.

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But that's still liberalism. There's all kinds of forms and varieties, but it's still liberalism. Libertarianism says, don't take my money to pay for your choices.

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I got my own choices and I want to use my money for that. I agree with that more. I mean, it's closer to the means are better, but the thing is the telos or the purpose, the end, it's the same.

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It makes choosing and choosing in a vast array called the marketplace, the highest good.

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And the marketplace is more than just dollars and cents, although it includes that. It means the choices that you make.

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It could mean that you want to go and, I don't know, you don't want to run the family business anymore.

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You want to go out West and climb mountains, right? That's your choice. You want to pursue whatever you find to be fun and fulfilling, right?

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That's your choice. And I think, you know, as Christians, there is a place in God's moral order for fulfilling responsibilities

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God has given and enjoying the things God has given and therefore exercising choice.

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But liberalism takes that choice and it severs it from the ends. It severs it from the ends of living in God's world and fulfilling

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God's purposes. Now it's just whatever purpose you want. And so vice can come in, vice and virtue really don't mean anything in this, as long as people are like bubbles that they bounce into each other, but they never actually inhibit the other one from going the direction they want to go.

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That's the liberal framework. And so this elevation of the human spirit, human aspiration in replacing

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God and God's purposes has trickle downs. It actually leads to, as I have already really said, but I'll just kind of put a cap on it.

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It leads to this religious pluralism and it leads to multiculturalism.

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So now you have, and this is kind of where we are right now, you invite all these people that don't believe that anymore.

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Go to Dearborn, Michigan, right? We invite all these people in thinking, well, as long as they assent to the common creed, they believe in equality, they believe in freedom, congratulation, you're

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Americans, and of course these terms are now nebulous, but we get these groups and they come in and then they want their own in -group preference and they want their own moral order in their own society and they want to make something completely different.

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And it violates the liberal order, but they came in under the liberal order. And now they're using mechanisms of the liberal order like democracy, which is another sacred thing, again, because it's choice.

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They use democracy now to actually fight against liberalism. So I think liberalism in the end, it actually, it eventually defeats itself.

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And these mechanisms, many of them actually are able to exist in a Christian order. You can have

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Republican forms of government and democratic process if people have high virtue and there's somewhat of a very solid, consistent society.

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But once you don't have that anymore, these mechanisms start breaking down and they get weaponized against the very people who set them up in the first place.

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And that's where we are right now. But you're not allowed to question any of these things because that would be questioning liberalism.

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And liberalism, because it makes individual choice so sacred, all the mechanisms attached to that are also sacred.

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And if you question any of those things, you are drummed out of polite society. You're a heretic. This is another way in which it's like a religion.

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You end up becoming a blasphemer, a heretic, someone whom no one should ever associate with because you question the prevailing narrative that supposedly holds society together.

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And you are, I think, inculcated with this. You are catechized into this at a very young age. Think about all the slogans you might've heard growing up, like diversity is our strength, or a nation of immigrants, a melting pot.

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There's the diversity stuff or the choice stuff. You know, my body, my choice, or you can do anything you want as long as it doesn't harm others, or you can be anything you wanna be.

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And now that means, I guess, changing your gender. I mean, all these vast array of choices. No wonder young people are confused, right?

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They've all these unlimited choices. They can choose where they want to work, where they wanna live, how many kids to have.

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Like, everything's a choice. Their gender's a choice. I mean, it's an overwhelming thing and they don't get any direction on it because to interfere with their individual choice, to give them that direction, well, that wouldn't be right.

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They need to make their own determinations. Well, no, there's a moral order out there, guys. There's a moral order God has laid down.

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That's the point of my book. And you ought to conform yourself to that. And if you do that, you will find purpose.

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You will find fulfillment and you'll actually find real freedom. Now, of course, it's an ordered liberty, but it's the kind of freedom that is attached to obligation and fulfillment and purpose.

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And what we've lost is purpose. We have taken freedom and we have made it something it was never intended to be, something the founders would not have recognized even in our own country.

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And now it is the acid that is eating us away. So these are some ways I think of liberalism as being a religion.

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You can't question it. You're not allowed to have blasphemy laws anymore. That's archaic. You're not allowed to have anti -pornography laws.

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That's archaic. People ought to marry whoever they want and divorce whoever they want. And there's no penalty for adultery or anything like that.

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I mean, New York, where I live right now, just got rid of their archaic adultery law. I mean, these are all inhibitors to choice.

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So we shouldn't have any of these things. They're remnants of the dark ages. But then one of the things we don't often recognize because we live in it is we have our own blasphemy laws.

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You are not allowed in society to say certain words that would create a barrier or identify a difference between groups of people, for example.

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It's seen as bigotry. You know, if you identify it, it has to be superficial. The differences between us must be superficial, like icing on the cake.

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But you can't ever notice something that is morally different or even differences of nationality.

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Like you can't use words that would describe some of these things without running a lot of risks.

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So we have our own blasphemy guidelines that are already set up. I think most of you know what I'm talking about. Even I am, in the course of producing this video,

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I'm thinking through what words do I wanna say because I know that there's a liberal order out there. Now, some things under a

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Christian framework are also just jerky things to say and you shouldn't say them. But my point is, though, that there is such severe consequences for someone who calls people who practice homosexuality a certain word or people who are of different ethnicities certain words.

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They get in trouble for these things at a very severe level, but you can blaspheme Jesus Christ all day.

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You can blaspheme God. You can do whatever you want against Christianity. It's because we have, this is a country that used to have blasphemy laws.

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Can you believe it? This is because we've kicked God out of the equation. And because now man is the measure of all things and we should have the unlimited pursuit of individual choice as much as possible and people should recognize this.

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This is one of the things about liberalism I find interesting. And I kind of critique Karl Truman on this in his book, Rise and, was it

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Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self? You can't escape God's world, right? So you can say it's all about my individual choice and so forth.

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But then people who make these decisions want everyone else to recognize their choice and authenticate it.

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Like you can't make a choice to be even transgender supposedly in a free way, unless other people recognize your choice.

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Society must conform. So ultimately, even this, all this stuff about individualism and it's all about choice and so forth.

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I don't know if I even buy it because at the end of the day, people end up wanting social approval.

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So the group or what society thinks or how society treats these choices ends up becoming such a big part of liberalism.

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But in theory, and this is what liberals will retreat into and this is what they'll say is it's all about the individual and what the individual wants to do.

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So I think this is a religion. I think it functions that way. I think that it's, you can see this even in individual lifestyles, the way that religion has become so secondary, the way that like even laws like blue laws and Sabbath breaking, being penalized in the past.

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It wasn't even that long ago you had laws like this. Now, of course, that's viewed as immoral.

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Of course, you should be able to buy as much alcohol as you want on a Sunday, no matter where you are. That's your choice. And so people now are spending their

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Sundays shopping. It's the biggest shopping day. They're spending time that used to be set aside for religious observance and they're going golfing.

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And then our president does that, right? And I think, there's a lot of things I like about our president, but he reflects some of these liberal tendencies.

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I think to some extent, perhaps we all do. Now, I don't wanna make, I guess a blanket statement, but most of us probably do.

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And I think it's kind of like the woke stuff in this way. When social justice came about, it was easier to recognize it because we were kind of used to recognizing

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Marxism. I'm the last generation of the Cold War generation, I suppose. And so like Marxism was bad, communism bad.

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And then you see these folks that say, we're trained Marxists from BLM and they're adopting critical race theory.

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And it's a little easier to pinpoint. But you had Christians who were going along with it at different levels.

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You had guys who had bought in full force. They were just going the whole nine yards as activists. And you had guys who might've posted a black square, but they didn't know about, they didn't think reparations were a good idea.

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They deviated at other points and they got out of it pretty quick. And there's all kinds of levels of participation.

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And I think that's kind of what liberalism's like, except that it's less obvious to us because we're so used to it.

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And some of the things liberals value are just, you can trace them back to traditions.

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For example, even today I was looking at, there's another debate online about, can the state punish false religion and that kind of thing?

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Well, there's a tradition in America that says, by and large, the state should stay out of those things, unless there's human sacrifice going on, or of course abortions, maybe even an exception to this.

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But unless it's like a death cult, or unless 2020 was an exception, unless people are going to church when they shouldn't be in the minds of the state, or unless it's like David Koresh, and supposedly the

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ATF says they have all these guns. In general, the government, at least on the national level or the general level, they shouldn't interfere with these things.

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That's an American tradition. It goes back to, I think, the conditions that even were in place during the

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American Revolutionary War. And there was a lot of fear that there would be a national kind of state religion.

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Canada was, there was a threat that Canada would be this Catholic province, this Catholic country, and the colonists were very afraid of this.

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There was a lot of anti -Catholic sentiment at that time. And of course, they're breaking away from a country that has an official state religion, many of whom fled that state religion.

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And so there's a suspicion of the government doing those kinds of things. So there's a tradition there, but this has been freeze -framed and then made into a universal principle for all times and places.

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You wonder sometimes when Christians talk about it, whether they even think it was right in the Old Testament for the arrangement that happened in those conditions at that time.

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And so this is, I think, liberalism is an ideology. It's a universal kind of all times, all places, final state that every country should conform itself to and switch all their arrangements to meet this new arrangement.

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And it's essentially, it functions in a religious way. It's like your pinch of incense to Caesar, I suppose.

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When you... So the ancient Christians, they could say

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Jesus is Lord and practice their religion, but they were expected to pinch incense to Caesar to just make sure that they weren't rebels against the prevailing order.

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And the Christians who wouldn't do that were punished in some way. There was disincentives for this. And I think today we're in a similar state.

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In this way, you can be a Christian, you can do all your Christian things. We have actually a tremendous amount of freedom to practice our

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Christianity because we can go to a public square with it along with all these other religions. But you must agree that everyone has this equal access and that everyone should be able to make their choices.

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And as soon as you start to deviate from this and say, actually, I don't know, maybe we should have some laws that challenge this kind of neutrality and people shouldn't be able to make every kind of choice that they wanna make.

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Maybe it's bad for society to have no fault divorce. You're a bad person at that point. And you're drummed out of society.

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And that standard keeps changing, right? Now, even gay marriage can get you in trouble in polite society, in the upper echelons of professional life.

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You can't question these kinds of things without major blowback. You will be canceled, essentially.

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Even now, that's true. You will be. There's maybe a few places where you still can do that, but it's pretty rare.

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And the elites who control things generally uphold these standards. And those standards keep getting more and more aggressive and against Christianity.

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So you have to do your pinch of incense. And I think as we go, now, these four years might be a reprieve and hopefully aid of advance gets in on the general national level.

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But on the state level, on the local level, on the company level, I don't know what's gonna happen because the pinch of incense used to take the form, it was starting,

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I should say, to take the form of Gay Pride Month. When you had Gay Pride Month or maybe even Transgender Visibility Day, you had to pinch the incense.

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You had to essentially say that you could not go against it. We'll put it that way.

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Like you could not raise a ruckus about it. You had to go along with it in many places in corporate

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America and even the military. I have friends in these places, so I know. I know the stories. There's a lot of moral dilemmas going on at that time.

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To maybe a lesser extent, you even see this with like Juneteenth and Black History Month, maybe not as much, but there is,

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I have heard of stories of people who, like if they didn't wanna participate in these things or MLK Day or whatever, like they end up, they are viewed with suspicion.

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And like, what is that? Is it because, oh, you must be such a bigot or is there something else going on or also going on here, which might be the fact that you aren't celebrating diversity.

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And this is one of the main pillars of liberalism. It's individualism and then a pluralism, which diversity, pluralism, and multiculturalism.

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Like this is what liberalism is. And mechanisms like the democratic process and the market as uninhibited as possible for people to participate in.

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And in some forms, high taxes to pay for those who can't participate in the market and these kinds of things.

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And even I would say a globalist flare, because if that is the final state, if that is the final arrangement, if that's the universal law that's good for everyone, then why not make sure that everyone's included in the boundaries of this great liberalism?

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Why not expand the European Union, expand all the Western liberal democracy mechanisms for forcing even other countries to adopt liberalism?

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We've been doing that in the United States on a certain level. USAID has been doing this and DOJ has figured out some of it, but imposing art and plays and things in these foreign countries, these more traditional or pre -modern societies where things like transgenderism isn't very accepted and now we're forcing art on them so that they will accept it.

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Forcing contraception and things like, there is a revolutionary spirit,

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I hesitate to say colonizing, but it definitely is a revolutionary spirit at the very least and a globalist spirit to try to conform everyone to this.

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And that would make sense, especially if it's a religion, that would make sense, right? In Christianity, Christian missions efforts have primarily been, at least in the recent past, missionaries going out to these countries, sometimes getting killed, but teaching the people, raising up people to form churches in these other countries and so forth.

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Islam has tended to spread more by the sword even in recent years, but that's the kind of thing, like religion is a universal kind of thing, right?

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There's different forms in different places, but religion is a universal truth and that's how liberalism works.

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It's this universal truth that it's gotta be good for everyone. And so when you go into Iraq or Afghanistan, we just gotta give them the mechanisms we have and the constitution we have and all the things we have interpreted the way that we now interpret them.

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And they're just gonna spit out liberalism. There's gonna be, women are gonna be in leadership and we're gonna overcome gender disparities and it's just gonna be great.

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And of course it doesn't happen because these countries are less suited for it than even we are, but we're not even suited for it because it is something that does not reflect the created order that God laid down.

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And it's going to come crumbling down and there's really no avoiding it because of whatever elements of a previous

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Christian society might remain in liberalism, they've been tortured beyond anything that's recognizable.

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They've been absolutized and ripped out of the context in which they made sense to suit a different context and a different mission.

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And that revolutionary mission is the expansion of humans, human choice.

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I mean, this goes along with the transhumanism agenda and all of that. And it's all liberalism.

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It's all comes down to this liberalism. Now different people have different words for describing what I'm talking about here.

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I mean, it's enlightenment rationalism, it's modernity. I think of modernity as encompassing other ideologies too, but post -war consensus, whatever you wanna call this,

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I think the most clear way and probably the most accurate and helpful way in our context to describe it and help especially other

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Christians understand what's going on is to call it, I think what it is. It's liberalism, it's a religion and it's something

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Christians should reject. So if you have any other questions about that or you wanna dive in more, check out my book,

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Against the Waves, Christian Order in a Liberal Age and go to the chapter, The Religion of Liberalism and there's a lot there.