Why we should discuss religion and politics more openly

The challenging yet rewarding way to approach tough conversations

This year, I will be kicking off the Culture, Religion and Technology podcast (aka CRT podcast). I’ve already conducted a few as a way to understand how to format such a show. Thanks to James Lindsay, Duncan Davidson and Erik Bethel for joining me in those early conversations. Thanks to Peter Thiel and Paul Martino for being part of the first CRT events in 2021 and 2024 as a way to start these conversations.

The reason I want to host these podcasts is to create a forum in which religion and politics are more openly discussed. This is largely because to our own peril, religion and politics have been considered forbidden conversations to have in polite company.

If we talk about either religion or politics, we are meddling with someone’s version of what it means to be human, whether they’ve contemplated their anthropological and ontological origins or not. Most people don’t contemplate humanity so their views are often hard to defend. They only viscerally know that their position is deeper than their preference for movies, wine or home decor. It’s just not so easy to articulate. 

It is why countless how-to essays and books are written about the best ways to approach politics or religion with family and friends.  

When these topics are ignored

Religion is our view of what is true about the world and human nature. It’s either been passed down to us and accepted or rejected, or purposefully searched for and embraced. Whatever the situation, it’s always a delicate subject. Politics is the governing system created based on those touchy religious views of humanity. Debating both have led to far too much violence in the world. Not debating both have led to intellectual stultification and the festering of lies.

Therein lies the hazard: once these falsehoods are seeded, they are met with indifference because they’re small and irrelevant and of no negative consequence. But when ignored, they become obfuscated and harder to detect. That is why Luke 12:56 is the underpinning of this blog. It is to unravel the lie or to call it out for we cannot allow such deceptions to be embedded into culture and rationalized as reason that is elevated to enlightened knowledge, let alone scientific bedrocks.

Look no further than what’s happening with gender ideology – the lie that children can be born in the wrong body. In other words, sex is not binary because it is emotions and not biology that ultimately determine one’s sex. The absurdity reaches its paradoxical apex when people who believe this lie that biology doesn’t matter also believe one needs to be a biologist to distinguish between the two sexes. Recall Ketanji Brown Jackson’s response: “I am not a biologist” when asked to define a woman. 

In the early aughts, it would have been unfathomable and risible to think a question to a supreme court justice nominee would be as simple as that. Yet already at that time, weaving its way into the cultural tapestry was the seed of sophism that our bodies were mere clay and man, not God, the potter. In 2014, under then President Obama, Medicare began covering sex-reassignment surgery. Until then, it was considered cosmetic surgery, which is not covered because it is considered unnecessary and gratuitous. Today, mutilating and sterilizing a child’s body is not only billed as necessary, but life-saving. 

In 2015, Obama also established the first non-gender bathroom to recognize transgender people, notwithstanding the number of people suffering from gender dysphoria being less than a percent of the population. At the time, while others saw this act as innocuous, I saw this as insidious and made this known through a comical post that cynically asked if women were truly being elevated, why were their bathrooms being taken away? It was met with indifference because the lie that gender is on a spectrum was still a seed - small, irrelevant, and at the time of no negative consequence.

In hindsight, as we see the explosion of vocabulary from skoliosexual to enboric to maverique (which was apparently coined in 2014) to describe someone’s sexual orientation, it’s easier to see that gender ideology is the biggest con being perpetrated in the 21st century, and it is one that the scientific, academic and medical industrial complex is being built upon. Operations to disfigure bodies are expected to grow 11% compounded annually over the next decade to a near $3.5 billion industry. The market for hormone therapy drugs is expected to hit $3.8 billion within the same time period. It is unclear how long this lie will continue or how it evolves.

The big lie during the Enlightenment 

One way to understand how underlying untruths mature is to consider the Enlightenment. During this age of rationality, there was another deception that duped men for centuries. According to French literary theorist Rene Girard, the big lie of the Enlightenment was the social contract - the idea that men can rationally avoid war by coming to agreement. In other words, the idea that humanity is naturally good and the entire world through rational conversation could reach a Kumbaya moment.

This social contract and generous view of man was espoused by Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau who famously said, “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.” It is the oppressive systems and circumstances that bring out the worst in man. Therefore political systems must be more appeasing toward less fortunate countries whose systems have left men in the proverbial chains. Modern political and liberal thought viewed wealth transfer to underdeveloped nations would create a global world order of peace. It’s more of a give men fish versus teach men how to fish point of view.  

On the surface it sounds worthy of trying until we realize that not all men are good, especially if their religion tells them that evil only resides in others. In light of 9/11 this became shockingly apparent to Peter Thiel, who criticized this policy of appeasement by observing in his essay The Straussian Moment, “one wonders how policymakers could have been so naive. Let us set aside the inconvenient fact that the wealth transfer apparatus never works as advertised.”

Peter noted in that same essay, that westerners were in essence ambushed by this violence because political philosophy since the 17th and 18th centuries abandoned questions deemed so central to man. “The death of God was followed by the disappearance of the question of human nature” and “questions about the nature of humanity would be viewed on par with the struggle among the Lilliputians about the correct way to cut open an egg” - they were “too perilous a question to debate.”

Yet 9/11 showed that this debate should not have been ignored. Those who were pacifists were blindsided when they should have known that in the game of governance, not everyone has the same definition of human nature. One must own up to their definition of humanity and then take sides. 

“Politics is the field of battle in which that division [different view on human nature] takes place, in which humans are forced to choose between friends and enemies,” according to German legal scholar Carl Schmitt. 

We can choose to ignore this division of humanity, or choose to believe that we can reconcile – that we all want the same thing. The latest evidence that we don’t want the same things was made most clear during the current Israel-Hamas war, which many argue was aided by Obama’s appeasement policies in 2015.

Absolutism vs relativism

So now we see. Not debating religion and politics, has led to intellectual stupor and the festering of lies that inherently good people want global peace for all mankind. That has led to religious wars that ambushed Westerners thinking all men can be secularly rational and set aside their religion and politics. Think 9/11 and Oct 7. On the other hand, debating human nature has also led to violence and religious wars. Think The Crusades or The Thirty Years War. 

Either way, a religious war finds us. Therefore should we be nihilistic and prepare for endless wars or stick our heads in the sand and accept whatever reality postpones the katechon? How do we steer a “middle course between the ‘Scylla of absolutism and the Charybdis of relativism,” as Leo Strauss, a 20th century political philosopher, would put it. If there is any hint as to how he would proceed, it is that whatever approach is taken to discourses of religion and politics, society must recognize the fragility of its values when one cannot defend them. “If the modern liberal state is impartial to questions of value, how then does the liberal state justify its own value?”  

From a Christian perspective, there is no place to be timid and fragile when it comes to the defense of values, which are formed by the veracity of the living word. There is no room for a non-defense of what is true. There is no middle course between absolutism and relativism, there is only truth and gentleness. 

As it says in 1 Peter 3:15 - 1 Peter 3:15 says, “Always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope, but do it with gentleness and reverence"

The Bible says we are to be truthful and we are to stand our ground with gentleness. 

In Ephesians 4:25, Paul writes: “Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another.”

Zechariah 8:16, the prophet writes: “These are the things that you shall do: Speak the truth to one another; render in your gates judgments that are true and make for peace.”

The Bible also says we are to speak with gentleness:

Proverbs 15:1: “A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.”  

Proverbs 15:4: “A gentle tongue is a tree of life.”

Philippians 4:5: “Let your gentleness be evident to all.”

2 Timothy 2:24 And the Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness.”

To bring this to a close, will you speak in polite company about religion and politics? This is what this new podcast is about. I think it’s our duty, and I hope I can find enough brave people to explore these topics of truth in a polite and gentle way. 

(Image source: hc.edu)