Pathologizing the Pews
Postliberals aren't the only ones with blind spots.
Earlier this week, I wrote a rather lengthy essay explaining why I’m not a postliberal. To end the week, I thought it would make sense to balance that by re-upping this 2022 National Review piece on why I am a Christian Nationalist.
To be clear, I didn’t realize that until I read the survey data from sociologists Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry. It came as a real surprise, given that I’m comfortable with religious pluralism, a firm believer in religious freedom, and not very hawkish on immigration. The things you learn about yourself reading pop sociology!
Obviously, the real point is that it’s unfair to act as though postliberals are the only people parading oversimplified and intolerant views in the public square. Secularists do it too, and I’m pretty sure on balance there are a lot more of them in positions of influence. One kind of error doesn’t justify another, but we should try to keep the full field in view. There are real problems with the kind of liberal secularism that demands strict separation between church and state, with the latter potentially expanding to include all public institutions and public spaces generally.
Over time one can reach a place where traditional faiths are expected to relegate defining beliefs, practices, and imagery to strictly segregated spaces, while political ideologies (religions?) are free to take over public institutions, guzzle public funds, and censor detractors without compunction because hey! Their defining convictions didn’t come from an ancient holy book. They couldn’t possibly become repressive or illiberal!
That kind of problem is obviously very real in Western countries today. I think we should be a little careful about comparing it to, say, communism (which was clearly much worse), but it’s not a trivial problem. And it’s pretty glaring on the Christian Nationalism issue. As I note in this piece:
Fundamentally, Whitehead and Perry pathologize religious traditionalists, using vague statements to spread a wide net and then connecting everyone in it to obviously bad phenomena such as the January 6 Capitol riots. Their approach leaves no theoretical space for the possibility that some Christians might have principled, complex positions on church and state. For progressives this may be a fun exercise in confirmation bias, but they’ve probably revealed more about themselves than about the people they claim to be studying.
I should mention here that if you really want to understand more about the pathologizing of “Christian Nationalists,” the source you want is my brother, Jesse Smith.
This three-week stretch here at Christendom Reborn is dedicated to my “Three Keys,” one for each, laying some groundwork. Then I can return to explore the questions at greater length. I’m sticking with that plan, but I do feel a little sheepish moving on with such a brief dip into such enormous questions. I’ll return to them. Meanwhile, thanks for reading.
Yes, that book is ridiculous. It calls for a diagnosis rather than a refutation. How can such sloppy argumentation pass for social science?
There are reforms to academia that would help. But at some level, people just need to be more virtuous than that: more honest, more fair, more thoughtful, more truthful.
It's somewhat difficult to articulate the critique at a high level. The clumsy definitions, the random associations, the heavy normativity that's not argued for and not completely acknowledged. Any kind of response of the form "You might consider refining this concept..." or "Did you consider this other data source?..." would be utterly inadequate. Everything about the argument is ludicrously, primitive and prejudiced. It's a disgrace.
They really just need to be ignored. But they have a certain amount of undeserved institutional authority because of institutional affiliations and letters after their names, so it's hard to get around them. Substack helps, though.