The Creed of the Shallow Man
by David Larson, Crisis Magazine:
At first, it seemed the signs popping up in neighborhoods across the country had something to do with the 2020 election. But November came and went, and the signs remained. Then, some might have assumed the signs were kept up in early 2021 due to squabbles over the legitimacy of the election, to show others in the neighborhood, “this house is on the right side of things.”
But now that 2021 has come and gone, and the signs still remain, it’s clear they are a cultural and even religious statement not tethered to any election.
The continuing popularity of the “We Believe” signs show that, for many in our culture, the simple statements being displayed form a sort of creed that binds them with other co-religionists under a shared worldview. But just scratching the surface of these inane tautologies, we can see how shallow this worldview is.
Each of the statements is phrased in such a way that it seems almost impossible to refute—for example: Black Lives Matter, Love Is Love, and Women’s Rights Are Human Rights. To disagree you’d have to say that black people don’t matter, women aren’t human, and the word love doesn’t share a definition with itself. But these self-affirming statements are just a smokescreen to prevent the shallow values they attempt to smuggle in from being challenged.
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