The False Choice Between Identity Politics and Christian Nationalism
Despite the animosity that left-wing identity politics ideologues have toward members of the MAGA coalition, and vice-versa, these adversaries share a common antagonism toward Enlightenment values. This is a matter of grave concern. I submit that the values of the Enlightenment have been indispensable for the advancements in science, material well-being, personal autonomy, and respect for human rights that the West, and the world, have experienced over the last two centuries.
What are the values that the Enlightenment has bequeathed to us? At the core of Enlightenment thought was the rejection of the claims of special authority claimed by the church. Truth was determined through empirical evidence and sound reasoning, not through revelation. Because no institution or person can claim special authority, no statement made by anybody has any more validity than the reasoning and evidence offered in support of it. The Enlightenment notion that truth is available to all, provided they have sufficient support for their assertions, had further implications. One, it placed a value on empirical inquiry, giving further impetus to the scientific revolution that was already underway. Two, it placed a value on a culture of free speech. If no one is in a privileged position to discern the truth, then criticism of knowledge claims must be open to everyone. Three, it lent support to democratic government. Again, if no one has a position of special authority, then everyone should have a say in decisions about governance, and political authority is derived from the people through their consent.
Three other Enlightenment values are also significant. Religious dogma had insisted on the notion of absolute truth. Enlightenment thinkers accepted the idea of probabilistic truth and were prepared to live with uncertainty. This idea fostered greater tolerance for diverging opinions. Enlightenment thinkers placed value on personal freedom, at first principally with respect to religious and political freedom. However, once the value of personal freedom was recognized, the scope of personal autonomy increased over time. Many people today have more say over the direction of their lives—what career to pursue, whether and whom to marry, whether to stay married, whether to bear children—than any other sizeable group in human history. Along with the value of personal freedom, the Enlightenment thinkers promoted the notion of universal human rights, a notion alien to almost everyone prior to the eighteenth century. These rights were natural and equal—held by all and held by all equally, as reflected in the Declaration of Independence, an article of Enlightenment values.
Let me pause here to address one obvious objection to my overview of Enlightenment values, and that is that equal rights for Enlightenment thinkers meant only equal rights for white male property owners, as indicated by the continuation of slavery in the United States and the continuation of the subordination of women throughout the Western world. Moreover, some Enlightenment thinkers held racist views, with support from “scientific” racial classifications. This is one reason some on the Left disparage Enlightenment values as merely an expression of white supremacy. But this criticism fails on two counts: it fails to distinguish between ideals and the flawed individuals who advanced these ideals, and it fails to give sufficient weight to the fact that science is always a work in progress. Anthropological science, if one can even call it that, was in its infancy in the 1700s, and given limited data and existing prejudices, it is not surprising that some thinkers arrived at incorrect conclusions. And, yes, it would have been lovely if slavery had ended immediately at the time of the Declaration, but longstanding institutions and practices do not necessarily come tumbling down overnight. Slavery had existed from time immemorial in almost all human societies, in the Americas, Africa, Europe, and Asia. Apart from some isolated, sporadic musing by some philosophers through the ages, slavery was almost everywhere accepted. Jesus did not denounce it; Moses, Confucius, and Mohammed all advocated it. The slave trade to the Americas in the 1500s, 1600s, and 1700s depended on African sellers as much as European buyers. Organized opposition to slavery only began to materialize—that’s right, in the late 1700s, in Europe, that is, at the time of the Enlightenment. The tension between the ideals of the Enlightenment and the existence of slavery was not resolved in the United States until the Civil War, but it was resolved, in favor of freedom. Had it not been for the Enlightenment, slavery may well have continued, as indicated by its stubborn persistence in various nations that were untouched by the Enlightenment. Saudi Arabia did not ban slavery until 1962.
Similarly, with women’s rights, recognition of their equal standing was delayed by the endurance of the ages-old belief that women are in some sense inferior to men, especially with respect to reasoning ability. It took time to overcome this prejudice—time and willingness and opportunity to question and challenge this prejudice. Again, Enlightenment values facilitated this process. It is hard to imagine anything like the 1848 Seneca Falls women’s rights conference taking place in Asia, Africa, or the Middle East.
The two greatest moral revolutions in the history of humanity were the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of women. Neither would have happened absent the Enlightenment.
The importance of Enlightenment values for human progress and happiness is why the dogmas on the Left and Right pose such a danger. Christian nationalists, of course, reject the core Enlightenment principle that no one has special epistemic authority. Christianity, as is true with most religions, is predicated on the notion of revelation. Under orthodox Christian doctrine, God has spoken to a special cognitive upper class of prophets, and the rest of us just must accept these prophets’ pronouncements as absolutely true. From the Left, we have the claim that the oppressed have special insight and we must defer to them when they speak from their lived experience. Lived experience is simply the identity Left’s version of revelation. And just as clergy preach the need to accept revelation, today’s practitioners of priestcraft, our DEI bureaucrats and trainers, demand obeisance to lived experience.
In part, because neither the identity Left nor the Christian nationalists on the Right accept the Enlightenment view that no statement made by anybody has any more validity than the reasoning and evidence offered in support of it, they do not support a culture of free speech. They already possess The Truth. They do not need to hear from anyone else, and they certainly do not want to hear from you if you challenge their dogmas. If you are not fully committed to the doctrine of systemic racism, good luck finding an academic position or any job of importance in a corporation, and, of course, you are not going to be invited to speak on campus. Moreover, the announcement by some academic journals that they will not publish articles deemed harmful is just the Left’s version of the Christian nationalist position that error has no rights and heretical views must be suppressed because they can harm the believer. And not unexpectedly both the identity Left and the Christian nationalist Right are avid censors; the identity Left does not want high school students to read To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Christian nationalists object to Beloved, among many other books. The curious thing is that according to most mainstream media, only the Right favors book banning—but that misleading reporting is itself an example of how facts can be suppressed.
Neither the identity Left nor the Christian/authoritarian Right are friends of science. The animosity of the latter group is obvious. They deny any scientifically established set of facts that conflict with their religious tenets, e.g., evolution. The identity Left’s opposition to science is more subtle, but just as pernicious. As indicated, the identity Left wants to circumscribe scientific research so it does no harm to their version of social justice. Any study that might call into question the doctrines of the identity Left must be suppressed. Furthermore, by declaring that objective, rational thinking, cause and effect reasoning, and emphasis on the scientific method are all attributes of “whiteness,” the identity Left deprecates the scientific enterprise, which has given us material well-being unimaginable to prior generations. In place of the “white” scientific enterprise, the identity Left apparently wants to substitute insights derived from lived experience, narratives, and cuentos. Instead of objective truth, there is “my truth.” Try developing a vaccine based on “my truth.”
But perhaps the most troubling, disheartening, and ironic assault on Enlightenment values is the identity Left’s rejection of the universality of rights. That development is ironic because, as stated above, the identity Left excoriates Enlightenment thinkers for their failure to implement their ideals fully, with “universal” in practice meaning “white men.” Yes, it has taken some time for the Enlightenment ideal of universal rights to reach fruition, but it happened by the early years of the twenty-first century, with equal rights largely achieved for gays and lesbians, on top of the equal rights already recognized for racial minorities and women. But it is precisely when social and legal significance are no longer attached to one’s group identity that the identity Left wants to turn the clock back and reinstate social and legal significance to group identities. When policy is expressly designed to deny equal benefits to individuals because of their race—and this is what the identity Left’s racial equity means in practice—then the ideal of universal human rights has been abandoned.
By elevating group identity over universal human rights, the identity Left is also erasing the individual. When human rights are truly universal, one’s group identity does not matter; each person is regarded as and treated as an individual. By classifying people based on their group identity, the identity Left seeks to impose a rigid conformity on individuals. They claim, for example, that there is a “voice of color.” But there is no uniform voice of color. Black individuals and Hispanic individuals are just like white individuals; they have a range of opinions about various public policy issues. To deny this reality, the identity Left exiles dissenting black and Hispanic individuals to the realm of “whiteness.” Only the identity Left could come up with the paradoxical neologism “multiracial whiteness.” And successful Asians who provide embarrassing counterexamples to notions of oppressive “white supremacy” are dismissed as being “white adjacent” or “white equivalent.” The identity Left thus relies on bewildering gibberish masquerading as profundity all with the aim of dismissing opposing views without engaging with them.
It is obvious, of course, that the Christian Right also denies universal rights. They are candid about this at least. One of the principles of Christian nationalism is “the primacy of Christian peoplehood” which entails that certain viewpoints must be excluded from the public square, including “political atheism,” anything tending to subvert Christianity, opposition to Christian morality, “heretical teaching,” and anything tending to promote the political and social influence of non-Christian religions. The Puritan commonwealth updated for the twenty-first century.
So, both the identity Left and the Christian/authoritarian Right threaten the Enlightenment values that have provided people in the United States, specifically, and the West, in general, with more political and religious freedom, protections against discrimination, personal autonomy, and prosperity than anywhere else in the world. Immigration to the United States and Europe is a problem in the sense that it needs to be managed better, but it is a problem that attests to the success of Enlightenment values. People of all races and ethnicities risk their lives to get into the United States and Europe; they are not beating down the doors to get into Russia, North Korea, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, or China.
Were Christian nationalists to gain control of the United States, that would be a catastrophe for our democracy. But because most Americans recognize the obvious danger in this prospect, the likelihood that a takeover by the authoritarian Right would happen is small, although not negligible. The only way this could possibly happen is if enough Americans see the authoritarian Right as the only way to resist the identity Left. Much more likely is the slow rot to our democracy that will follow the further entrenchment of the tenets of the identity Left as it secures control over universities, corporations, and the government. Equity will triumph over equality of opportunity, merit will be discarded as a basis for selection or advancement, public policies will be expressly tailored to promote the interests of this or that “marginalized” group regardless of whether this serves the interests of the public as a whole, allegedly harmful and offensive speech will be denied any public platform, scientific research will be limited to conform to the prevailing ideology, and every conceivable aspect of culture and public life will be inspected to see if it is tainted with “whiteness.”
However, this is not inevitable. Furthermore, the answer to the identity Left is not to seek refuge in the equally pernicious nostrums of the authoritarian Right. We cannot save liberal democracy from the identity Left by destroying it. Liberalism, the liberalism that is based on universal rights and other Enlightenment values, can still be saved; however, it needs vocal defenders. Those who recognize the importance of Enlightenment values need to speak up. They need to speak up at school board sessions, at meetings with politicians, at corporate DEI trainings, at chats among friends and colleagues. Sure, doing so is and will be uncomfortable, and one must be prepared to be called a “racist” or accused of shedding “white tears” or labeled a “multiracial white” if one is a person of color; challenging dogmas is not easy or pleasant. But remaining silent is to acquiesce in these divisive dogmas and be a mute witness to the nation’s self-destruction. The choice is stark: we can either have a liberal democracy that allows us to transcend our differences or a fractured nation where our group identities define and divide us.
This essay is excerpted from Against the New Politics of Identity: How the Left’s Dogmas on Race and Equity Harm Liberal Democracy—and Invigorate Christian Nationalism, which is available for purchase at these paid links: Amazon, Bookshop, and Pitchstone.
Ronald A. Lindsay is editor of Free Inquiry magazine and former president and CEO of the Center for Inquiry and of its affiliates, the Council for Secular Humanism and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. He has a PhD in philosophy from Georgetown University, with a concentration in bioethics, and a JD from the University of Virginia. He lives in Northern Virginia.