E-Pluribus | April 19, 2024
What good is religion? Well, quite a bit; new National Public Radio CEO's words catching up with her; and no one expects the DEI Inquisition! Actually, many do.
A round-up of the latest and best musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Christina Behe: What Traditional Religion Offers the World
Has humanity outgrown its need for God? There are those today who argue that modern man has developed many adequate or even superior ways to provide the meaning and community that traditional, organized religions offer. Christina Behe at Discourse Magazine disagrees and suggests that religion, or more precisely, God himself, by his very nature, offers things nothing of this earth can ever deliver.
Earlier this month, Discourse published a thought-provoking piece by frequent contributor Robert Tracinski entitled “What Replaces the Biblical Cinematic Universe?” In it, he states that human beings have a deep need for a worldview that makes sense of our lives, that gives us meaning and purpose. He argues that because of Americans’ declining belief in traditional religions, we must look to alternative sources, specifically to a kind of secular spirituality. He proposes that the shared narratives of fictional franchises such as Star Trek, Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter “deal with the same spiritual issues as religion” and can give us “the sense of loyalty and personal identity that used to be the hallmarks of religion.” In other words, we can replace the religious universe with the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
This piece sparked a fascinating conversation among the Discourse editorial team, and it’s given me a lot of food for thought (obviously I am still mulling it over!). I agree with Tracinski that humans have an innate spiritual need, and if traditional religious belief can’t satisfy that need, it makes sense to search for alternatives. But as a religious person myself, I’m just not sure I accept his basic premises that religious belief is necessarily fading and, even if it is, that fictional franchises will be an adequate substitute.
For starters, there is quite a bit of evidence that Americans still long for some kind of transcendent meaning. While the number of adults in the United States who say they belong to a traditional religion such as Christianity, Judaism or Islam is declining, a significant majority (about 7 in 10) still do self-identify with a religious tradition; and even more (nearly 9 in 10) still claim to believe in some version of God, a higher power or spiritual forces in the universe. Even a friend of mine who’s a staunch atheist keeps an open mind about ghosts. In other words, there still seems to be a collective sense, or at least a collective desire to believe, that there’s a spiritual dimension to our existence.
Further, I believe traditional religion is quite different, in important and beneficial ways, from secular shared narratives such as the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Tracinski talks about our spiritual need for meaning, purpose and identity, and I do recognize all those needs inside myself. But at my core—though this feels embarrassingly personal and difficult to admit—I discover an even deeper, more fundamental need: the need to be loved. All of us, I think, seek love and acceptance from the people around us—and if we’re lucky, we get it in some measure. But no imperfect human being can fully satisfy our endless hunger for love. As C.S. Lewis points out in his seminal work “Mere Christianity,” “The best of them will make mistakes; all of them will die.”
But traditional religions teach that our infinite desire for love can be satisfied by an infinitely good and loving God. Here I can only speak knowledgably of my own religious tradition, Roman Catholicism, but I believe the same is true of all the major Western religions. The Quran continually speaks of Allah as “the merciful, the compassionate,” and both the Hebrew and Christian Bibles are full of statements like “God is love” (1 Jn. 4:8) and “His mercy endures forever” (Ps. 118:1) and “I have loved you with an everlasting love” (Jer. 31:3). If these statements are true—if we are really, personally, unconditionally loved by God—they are a clear and complete answer to this great need in each of us. And the shared secular narratives of pop culture are a poor substitute: The Force doesn’t love you, and neither does Captain Kirk or Captain America.
Read it all here.
Christopher F. Rufo: Quotations from Chairman Maher
Most of us who post regularly online have had our words thrown back at us on more than one occasion. The new CEO of National Public Radio, Katherine Maher, is experiencing this in spades in the wake of Uri Berliner’s recent expose of NPR’s leftward bias. Christopher Rufo has been an active participant in the online excavation and writes at City Journal of his findings.
Katherine Maher has a golden résumé, with stints and affiliations at UNICEF, the Atlantic Council, the World Economic Forum, the State Department, Stanford University, and the Council on Foreign Relations. She was chief executive officer and executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation. And, as of last month, she is CEO of National Public Radio.
[. . .]
What you notice first about Maher’s public speech are the buzzwords and phrases: “structural privilege,” “epistemic emergency,” “transit justice,” “non-binary people,” “late-stage capitalism,” “cis white mobility privilege,” “the politics of representation,” “folx.” She supported Black Lives Matter from its earliest days. She compares driving cars with smoking cigarettes. She is very concerned about “toxic masculinity.”
[. . .]
Next, you notice the partisanship. Maher was “excited” about Elizabeth Warren in 2012. She “just [couldn’t] wait to vote” for Hillary in 2016. She once had a dream about “sampling and comparing nuts and baklava on roadside stands” with Kamala Harris. She worked to “get out the vote” in Arizona for Joe Biden but slightly resented being called a “Biden supporter”; for her, it was simply a matter of being a “supporter of human rights, dignity, and justice.”
[. . .]
Americans, even CEOs, are entitled to their opinions and to their own life decisions, of course. But the personal and psychological elements that suffuse Maher’s public persona seem to lead to political conclusions that are, certainly, worthy of public criticism.
The most troubling of these conclusions is her support for radically narrowing the range of acceptable opinions. In 2020, she argued that the New York Times should not have published Senator Tom Cotton’s op-ed, “Send in the Troops,” during the George Floyd riots. In 2021, she celebrated the banishment of then-president Donald Trump from social media, writing: “Must be satisfying to deplatform fascists. Even more satisfying? Not platforming them in the first place.”
[. . .]
. . .Maher said that, in relation to the fight against disinformation, the “the number one challenge here that we see is, of course, the First Amendment in the United States.” These speech protections, Maher continued, make it “a little bit tricky” to suppress “bad information” and “the influence peddlers who have made a real market economy around it.”
Read it all.
Robby Soave: NPR's Uri Berliner Has Shown That DEI Is About Punishing Heresy
At least some of the staff of NPR seem intent on confirming, if inadvertently, what former NPR editor Uri Berliner wrote last week at The Free Press. Reason’s Robby Soave says the internal response to Berliner’s piece will ensure that NPR has even less real diversity, equity, and inclusion than it had before.
Uri Berliner, a long-time editor at National Public Radio (NPR), has resigned from the media organization.
[. . .]
For writing about his own outlet without seeking permission from his bosses, Berliner was suspended for five days without pay. But ultimately, he has chosen to resign.
"I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very problems at NPR I cite in my Free Press essay," he said, referencing statements made by NPR CEO Katherine Maher—whose considerable history of tweeting woke nonsense is now under public scrutiny as well.
And he is quite correct. Berliner's article for Weiss concludes with this thought: "What's notable is the extent to which people at every level of NPR have comfortably coalesced around the progressive worldview. And this, I believe, is the most damaging development at NPR: the absence of viewpoint diversity."
[. . .]
Some 50 of Berliner's colleagues signed a letter to Maher demanding that she enforce NPR's current editorial line by weaponizing all available tools at her disposal.
"Staff, many from marginalized backgrounds, have pushed for internal policy changes through mechanisms like the [diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)] accountability committee, sharing of affinity group guidelines, and an ad-hoc content review group," they wrote. Elsewhere in the letter they put the term diversity of viewpoints in scare quotes.
It certainly does not sound like the DEI accountability committee works to broaden NPR's ideological perspective. On the contrary, the employees who are obsessed with DEI seem to care first and foremost about rooting out anti-DEI heresy.
[. . .]
The acronym DEI ostensibly stands for diversity, equity, and inclusion—and the public is learning precisely what those terms really mean.
Read the whole thing.
Around Twitter (X)
Emma Camp of Reason with an observation about pro-Palestinian protesters. Click for video.
Inez Stepman with the latest on the Biden Administration’s Title IX changes. Three years into his presidency and seven months before the election. Clever strategy, or miscalculation? Ross Douthat weighs in.
And finally, Jeffrey Sachs with a droll observation on how the reactions of some to violence depend on whom the violence is directed at.