The new religion: Affirmative Action Joins Climate Change

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said "This is mine," and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.

― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755)

Everything made by man may be destroyed by man; there are no ineffaceable characters except those engraved by nature; and nature makes neither princes nor rich men nor great lords.  

― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile (1762)

Here we talk about equity (affirmative action) and environmentalism (climate change). Are they part of a single, humanist-type religion? They did join in the person of the 18th Century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He taught that man’s invention of private property led to the inequity affirmative action’s equity would in an ideal world eliminate. And Rousseau also suggested that nature’s original state, environment without people, was the ideal world threatened by human-caused climate change.

Rousseau was a Deist. Deism asserted that reason and observation of the natural world are sufficient to establish the creator of the universe’s existence.

Hannah Arendt, the mid-20th Century philosopher steeped in the origins of Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism, described Rousseau's “general will” as stifling public opinion in favor of the passion that bred French Revolution excesses. In On Revolution, Arendt called the French Revolution a disaster that, in contrast to the American Revolution, was led by those who rejected freedom to focus on compassion for the masses, choices paralleled by both Soviet and Nazi rejection of democracy in favor of totalitarianism’s “gifts.”

Daniel J. Mahoney, Joshua Mitchell and author/blogger Rod Dreher recently joined to explore how identity politics is displacing Christianity.

In The Idol of Our Age, Mahoney argued that social-justice ideology represents an “ersatz secular religion” that casts aside traditional Christian concepts of forgiveness, repentance, and conversion. This ideology is blind to the idea that good and evil run through every human heart. To Mahoney, social justice contains “all the impetus of religious fanaticism” with “none of the dignity or grandeur of revealed religion.” Mahoney traces this attempt at “a comprehensive transformation of the world” back to the anti-clerical positivist Auguste Comte, who in 1851 crowned himself the emperor of humanity in Paris’ Notre-Dame cathedral.

“liberty without law”, [t]he religion of humanity promotes the toleration of everything but “hate,” or anyone who has the slightest disagreement with its latest doctrines and dogmas.    .    . this new religion “undermines moderation and sober political thinking” in favor of a “dreamy, utopian cosmopolitanism” .   .   . a Manichean ideology that pits racial groups against one another, at odds with the very idea of “e pluribus unum.”

In Mahoney’s view, Jesus “offered a call to repentance.” Repentance, not a Rousseau/Comte/Marxist utopia, “is the greatest revolutionary force in the world.”

Joshua Mitchell’s book American Awakening describes an America made up of two opposing tribes, “each an amalgamation of many races, resolved unto death to live in different regimes.” To Mitchell, identity politics is a distortion of Christianity that transfers innocence, sin, and guilt into the political realm. Updating the classic sermon by Calvinist Jonathan Edwards, Mitchell calls the impure “irredeemables in the hands of an angry mob.” Our progressive elite must achieve moral purity by scapegoating these unclean — whites, climate-change deniers, others — who have polluted the world. To the pure, Christ, the “lamb without spot or blemish,” cannot atone for the sins of the people’s oppressors. His meaningless humiliation upon the cross is simply an “embarrassment.”

Rod Dreher believes identity politics is our “secular Left-wing religion” seeking to fill “the God-shaped hole in the body politic.” Its catechism rejects objective truth, which is unsuited for a society divided between oppressor and oppressed. Guilt is based solely on social status. Non-oppressors can work to purify themselves by becoming allies of the woke in what Dreher calls “social justice ecumenism.”