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Alright, this thread is long and might get me in some trouble, but here goes. A lot of conservatives (both political and religious) have been sharing @JohnHMcWhorter piece from @JoinPersuasion in which he argues that the new Anti-Racism is "a religion."
I'm going to set to the side the question of anti-racism itself as a phenomenon and focus upon McWhorter's account of religion and why religious conservatives, rather than sharing it because he's taking shots at their enemies, should actually find it deeply troubling.
Near the top of the piece, McWhorter writes that the self-contradictions inherent in anti-racism reveal that it is "not a philosophy but a religion." The implicit claim: religion fosters or at least permits rational incoherence. Further down, McWhorter writes that religion
"has no place in the classroom, in the halls of ivy, in our codes of ethics, or in deciding how we express ourselves, and almost all of us spontaneously understand that and see any misunderstanding of the premise as backward." Finally, "The problem is that on matters of societal
procedure and priorities, the adherents of this religion—true to the very nature of religion—cannot be reasoned with. They are, in this, medievals with lattes." In sum: religion fosters contradictions, has no place in civil society, and religious people cannot be reasoned with.
To understand why this is so troubling, it is helpful to look at an article by the sociologist José Casanova, "The Secular and Secularisms," published in the journal *Social Research* (Johns Hopkins Press). At the outset of the article, Casanova argues for a distinction in
the definition of secularism. There is secularism as statecraft principle and secularism as ideology. In short, secularism as statecraft principle is the establishment of a separation between religious and political authority (this can be done for any number of reasons, including
conscience rights or disestablishment). But secularism as an ideology entails a "theory of what 'religion' is or does." Secularism as an ideology creates the category "religion," and it tends to do so in one of two directions. One variant
holds that "religion is either an irrational force or a nonrational form of discourse that should be banished from the democratic publish sphere." This is, almost verbatim, the kind of charge McWhorter is leveling against anti-racists and, implicitly, religious people.
In short, for religious conservatives (or even religious progressives, although they tend to be more sympathetic to anti-racism) to celebrate McWhorter's takedown of the anti-racists on the grounds that anti-racism is a religion is to celebrate their *own expulsion* from
democratic and reasoned discourse, precisely on the grounds that they are non-rational actors whose views cannot be reasoned with.
