In Our Chaotic Age, Some Atheists Are Rethinking Secularism
by Carl R Trueman, First Things:
It is eighty years since C. S. Lewis delivered the lectures that were eventually to be published as his remarkable book The Abolition of Man. I place it in the same category as Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Demons, Wilhelm Reich’s The Sexual Revolution, and Philip Rieff’s The Triumph of the Therapeutic: volumes whose authors could not possibly have known just how prophetically accurate their analysis of human life would prove to be. And all of them also share something else: At the core of their arguments, the point of real contention is the question of what it means to be a human being. Lewis pinpointed this as the key issue in the 1940s. In 2023, it is still the key question, only now it is far more complicated and of far more immediate political significance than Lewis could ever have anticipated.
The trans moment is the supreme symptom of this. Enabled by the incredible technological innovations of the last fifty years, which have allowed us to think of humanity as something that can and will be transcended, it has brought the fundamental question of what it means to be human to the fore. And in doing so, it is disrupting the political landscape in ways that could not have been imagined even ten years ago, particularly on the left.
Take, for example, the left’s assumption that the post-9/11 Muslim community will always be a reliable source of support, given the successful labeling of the right as “Islamophobic” and the incorporation of Muslims into the progressives’ grand litany of the marginalized. This relationship is now becoming more complicated. The aggressive advancement of LGBTQ ideology is generating serious debate within the Muslim community, especially among parents worried about what this will do to their children. Some Islamic commentators see Muslim opposition to LGBTQ matters as playing into the hands of white racists. Others see such ideology as simply another iteration of white, Western imperialism and as incompatible with Islam. Unfortunately for the left, Islam’s anthropology and ethics are not built upon the inalienable moral superiority of victimhood. And if Muslims continue protesting Pride month and LGBTQ school curricula, “Islamophobia” may prove to be something of a boomerang to those on the left who until now have hurled the term around with careless abandon.
But as the fundamental question of what it means to be human is thrown into confusion, it is not just religious communities that feel threatened.
Watch: Technocracy Can’t Answer Moral Questions – Carl Trueman Interview with Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster
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