Friday, March 9, 2018

An Insider’s View: The Sinister Rigidity of Upper-Middle-Class Progressivist America (Part 5)

Although some of them embrace various theologies, progressives are generally suspicious of religion. Those who do accept some manner of religious belief either tend toward institutions which place minimal intellectual commitments on participants (e.g., the Unitarian Universalist Church, or the leftist fringe of the Episcopal-Anglican communion), or they engage in some unique, self-generated, idiopathic spirituality.

Progressives distrust organized religion, and especially the organized religion of someone whose political views diverge from doctrinaire leftism.

The Judeo-Christian tradition, as it exists within Western Civilization, is a favorite target for progressives. It is assumed that such a religious belief system has a symbiotic relationship with racism, sexism, and bigotry of all sorts: in the mind of the progressive, racism causes religion, and religion causes racism.

This dogma is so deeply entrenched in the progressive mind that it is not shaken by allusions to, e.g., Martin Luther King’s founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in conjunction with the Montgomery bus boycott, or his collaboration with Billy Graham.

Likewise, the progressive’s belief that Christianity is evil is not shaken by the role of the Judeo-Christian tradition in the grand historical developments which led to the abolition of slavery and led to women’s suffrage.

When people diverge from the orthodox progressive view on any controversial social question, progressives routinely blame historical Christianity, despite the fact that large and significant numbers of Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and atheists also depart from the progressivist views on such social issues.

On religion and social issues, just as on economic matters, progressivists seem unable to see as reasonable any views except their own. The automatic attribution of racism and sexism to anyone who opposes the progressivist agenda reveals a lack of imagination.

Many progressivists also find it difficult to contemplate evidence which points to the failure of progressive policies - that programs designed to reduce poverty actually increase it, that programs designed to reduce crime really increase it, etc.

Progressivism is often characterized by the habit of dismissing both spirituality and liberty. It wrongly attributes all manner of evil to Western Civilization’s Judeo-Christian tradition, but denies the social good which this tradition accomplished. Likewise, it attributes both ill motives and ill effects to personal political liberty and to free markets, but refuses to acknowledge the opportunities which are thereby created.