There's only one version, the Apostolic Biblical one.
It's the post-war liberal enlightenment version where people forgot the spiritual world is real that needs to be discarded. Demons are quite real and active in this world and everyone should have been able to grasp that after Covid.
I don't know where you get the idea that “the religious right” is dead.
On the contrary. Faith writ large is resurgent.
The Minneapolis tragedy is a poignant illustration of the horrible downside of the demise of faith.
In a moral vacuum, the inherent evil within us can emerge and manifest in horrible atrocities. We saw this in the Holocaust.
Pace’ the secular humanists and postmodernists, there is good and evil in the world because it is within us. Faith is a necessary guardrail, which we learn when we remove it.
On a less gruesome level, take AI. The tech brk asks, “Why shouldn't I eliminate all jobs?” A Catholic would never ask that question, because of a doctrinal understanding that work is “Ad majorem dei gloria”, “for the greater glory of God”, as is human life itself.
Is this literally true? Does it really matter? At the bottom of the scientific rabbit hole are simply more and more questions without answers, other than that men are mere beasts, insignificant accidental cultures that somehow arose out of an insensate universe that is one of an infinite number of omnidimensional….
Well, you get the idea. Cosmology and particle physics make Christianity look quite plausible by comparison.
So you can buy into whatever theory that arises from the mind of man that you want. You can pick the one that gives meaning and dignity to your existence, or the one that leaves you feeling worthless and enraged enough to slaughter innocent believers and yourself to boot.
'The religious right is dead' was an objective observation based on their inability to score a single real victory in recent politics. Meanwhile your flowery, indignant comment just proves out the rest of Scott's thesis.
I agree with the spirit of your (flowery) comment, but ignoring the objective decline in popularity of the religious right is just silly. Despite its resurgence among a small group of young people online, religious conservatism is a shrinking portion of the Republican base and has been for decades. MAGA will throw it bones here and there to keep the big tent together, but it’s obviously not core to the movement.
The online resurgence among young people is interesting and perhaps promising, but it’s too soon to tell how promising, and regardless it’s completely numerically insignificant in nationwide electoral terms.
The relative diminishment of the Christian Conservative movement is a sign of triumph not tragedy from their perspective, as was the broadening of Christianity from the 12 apostles. Arguably that old moral majority base is still there. One of the many puzzles the Democrats are frustrated by is why those Bible thumpers don't reject Trump for his moral failings. What they don't realize is that you can find any number of rationales for overlooking the flaws of the king in scripture.
They also fail to ask themselves, where could they possibly go? To the den of iniquity that is the modern Democrats?
I don’t really follow this. The relative diminishment of the Christian conservative movement is a sign of the diminishment of Christianity, full stop. Catholics have declined from about 1/4 to 1/5 of the U.S. population in two decades (impressive given the substantial amount of Hispanic immigration). Protestants declined from 51% to 40% (the real picture is more dire, as a dramatic decline among whites has been counterbalanced by surging popularity of charismatic Protestantism, particularly Pentecostalism, among Hispanic immigrants). The major victory of the last five years has been that the above %’s haven’t continued to decline, but have stayed stable. But that’s small comfort given that adherence numbers among young people continue to look bleak.
Christianity is still true even if no one followed it.
"And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil." - John 3:19
I wrote a whole article on how progressivism really is a demonic force. The metaphor was created in ancient time to describe the soulless monsters intent on destroying innocence and human civilization that now occupy the political position of the Radical Left: https://alwaysthehorizon.substack.com/p/every-religion-is-haunted-by-the?r=43z8s4 Take a look and give me a restack.
The evidence that the religious right is dead: legalized abortion and weed have been winning at the ballot box (even in "red" states), no one is even trying to stop sports gambling or gay marriage anymore, attempts to moderate explicit violent and sexual content in movies and music are non-existent, weekly church attendance has remained around 30%, fertility rates continuing plummeting. Even if a growing number of people online are claiming to have faith, it's not bearing any fruit in the real world.
Roe v. Wade was struck down. Internet porn is under siege. Religious faith is on the ascendant. Trump is in the White House. Kamala is singing by the dock of the bay. These facts seem inconsistent with your hypothesis. But denial of reality is quite popular on the left these days.
1. You’ll note that Trump hardly gloated at all about Roe’s overturning in the 2024 campaign, in pretty sharp contrast to 2020. This was clearly an informed decision made with advisors given the unpopularity of restrictive abortion laws among fringe Trump voters. The most he was generally willing to say in 2024 was that abortion “is an issue for the states”
2. The porn-restriction movement is a bit of an interesting coalition, generally its most successful rhetoric for building support has been left-coded or center-coded concerns about human trafficking and child exploitation. Puritanical rhetoric about stopping adults from watching porn is still not very popular.
Otherwise, you haven’t really addressed the several accurate observations made in the comment you’re replying to. Delusional confidence does not make a political movement
Overturning Roe was one of the worst things that could have happened to the GOP politically because they lost a great fundraising and turnout driving issue, kind of like the dog chasing the car that catches it.
The potential of porn due to online age restriction implementation liability is the biggest potential victory for the moral majority in 50 years.
Note that both of these are reversals of half-century-old catastrophic defeats.
Trump is busily eradicating woke, DEI antclerical moral collapses on a daily basis.
Your closer sounds like “Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”
Mental illness is the necessary prerequisite, but a lot of recent school shooters were basically groomed into it by satanic internet groups. It’s a bit of a boy who cried wolf thing, I guess. You scream about demons in your iPhone for long enough, and nobody pays attention when a satanic panic is actually warranted
Great read. For me, I've been writing about the "aliens are demons" hypotheses for some time. It's interesting how it's part of even the Religious Dissident Right, though it has solid overlap with the regular Dissident Right.
This is a frustrating trend. The Minneapolis shooting is low hanging fruit that the right could use to push back against insane gender ideology. However politicians and local activists are using this to mobilize support for gun control. Chalk up another L for the right.
Some heterodox proponents of Integral Theory (not Catholic integralism) have proposed that in evolutionary psychology, the human instinct toward social cooperation and altruism within a given clan/tribe sometimes goes wrong when a psychological/spiritual ARTIFACT of collective awareness takes on a life of its own.
Historically, traditional, mythic religion is a mixed bag that was used to both justify oppressive, Feudal and Absolutist politics in some cases, and in others, freedom and liberty.
Leonard Liggio made the case that classical liberalism was medieval in its origins, under conditions of decentralized politics. After 1492, centralized politics and empire led to the decline of medieval liberalism (freedom and liberty, peasant's rights) and the rise of Absolutism and empire building.
---> Anyone that attempts to support traditional religion has to clearly differentiate between those two uses of religion if they want to be coherent.
(Again, as a libertarianish centrist, I mostly accept the idea that radical leftism is materialist and evil.)
From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, the idea that social order could be increased by the reununciation of evil and sin had a specific historical origin, very late in human evolution, around the end of the Bronze Age Collapse. Early, "pagan" (nature worshipping) civilizations were being disrupted by climate change and techno-economic disruption. Tribal war and violence was pervasive. Mythic monotheism, the idea of a transcendent God, was a powerful way to politically unify tribes in common defense via city-states. But to do so, "pagan", embodied spirituality had to be demonized. (thus the power of the politics of demonization.)
By the industrial revolution, which few religion conservatives want to reverse as far as I can tell, the Church's early ban on cousin marriage had created an outbred gene pool that replaced the power of clans with high-social-trust in social institutions (Constitutional order, etc. see Joseph Henrich's WEIRD model of the origins of modernism).
Mythic religion declined historically because it could not adequately explain emergent phenomena (biology, etc.), and rationalism/(classical) liberalism provided, in some important cases, better explanations.
Mythic religion also declined historically because it was used to justify keeping the peasant classes from joining the expanding middle classes, and to try to limit the expansion and freedom of the middle classes (see Leonard Liggio on the medieval origins of classical liberalism).
Just as Enlightenment values, capitalism and classical liberalism doomed mythic orthodoxy and Feudalism because of techno-economic disruption, leftism is similarly doomed and can only exist as social parasitism and mental dysfunction.
So, something beyond the left-vs-right narrative is needed that honors the "partial truths" of both.
Postmodernism, and social-spiritual fragmentation and atomization: the meaning crisis.
Here is one attempt at defining something beyond left-vs-right (the author is an atheist, Buddhist and AI scientist).
"At the bottom of the scientific rabbit hole are simply more and more questions without answers..."
Science isn't a "rabbit hole"*. In itself it doesn't have the capacity to provide meaning and purpose beyond finding material truth (objective facts understood rationally). Anyone that thinks that replacing spirituality/religion with rationalism makes any sense is ignorant or brainwashed by secularist propaganda (as a centrist, I accept that leftism is usually a mental dysfunction).
Iain McGilchrist's decades of brain research and evolutionary psychology is "scientific proof" that materialism is a failed idea.
---
note: Wilber wrote this something like 20 years ago, so some of the specifics are outdated.
* I don't completely agree with Ken Wilber (he leans toward new age kookery sometimes), but I think this perspective is worth considering:
The way it is now, the modern world really is divided into two major and warring camps, science and liberalism on the one hand, and religion and conservatism on the other. And the key to getting these two camps together is first, to get religion past science, and then second, to get religion past liberalism, because both science and liberalism are deeply anti-spiritual. And it must occur in that order, because liberalism won’t even listen to spirituality unless it has first passed the scientific test.
...
In one sense, of course, science and liberalism are right to be anti-spiritual, because most of what has historically served as spirituality is now prerational, magic or mythic, implicitly ethnocentric, fundamentalist dogma. Liberalism traditionally came into existence to fight the tyranny of prerational myth and that is one of its enduring and noble strengths (the freedom, liberty, and equality of individuals in the face of the often hostile or coercive collective). And this is why liberalism was always allied with science against fundamentalist, mythic, prerational religion (and the conservative politics that hung on to that religion).
But neither science nor liberalism is aware that in addition to prerational myth, there is transrational awareness. There are not two camps here: liberalism versus mythic religion. There are three: mythic religion, rational liberalism, and transrational spirituality.
The main strength of liberalism is its emphasis on individual human rights. The major weakness is its rabid fear of Spirit. Modern liberalism came into being, during the Enlightenment, largely as a counterforce to mythic religion, which was fine. But liberalism committed a classic pre/trans fallacy: it thought that all spirituality was nothing but prerational myth, and thus it tossed any and all transrational spirituality as well, which was absolutely catastrophic. (As Ronald Reagan would say, it tossed the baby with the dishes.) Liberalism attempted to kill God and replace transpersonal Spirit with egoic humanism, and as much as I am a liberal in many of my social values, that is its sorry downside, this horror of all things Divine. Liberalism can be rightfully distrustful of prerational myth, and yet still open itself to transrational awareness. Its objections to mythic forms do not apply to formless awareness, and thus liberalism and authentic spirituality can walk hand in hand into a greater tomorrow. If this can be demonstrated to them using terms they find acceptable, then we would have, I believe for the first time, the possibility of a postliberal spirituality, which combines the strengths of conservatism and liberalism but moves beyond both in a transrational, transpersonal integration. The trick is to take the best of both, individual rights plus a spiritual orientation, and to do so by finding liberal humanistic values plugged into a transrational, not prerational, Spirit. This spirituality is transliberal, evolutionary and progressive, not preliberal, reactionary and regressive. It is also political, in the very broadest sense, in that its single major motivation, compassion, is pressed into social action. However, a postconservative, postliberal spirituality is not pressed into service as public policy, transrational spirituality preserves the rational separation of church and state, as well as the liberal demand that the state will neither protect nor promote a favorite version of the good life. Those who would transform the world by having all of us embrace their new paradigm, or particular God or Goddess, or their version of Gaia, or their favorite mythology, these are all, by definition, reactionary and regressive in the worst of ways: preliberal, not transliberal, and thus their particular versions of the witch hunt are never far removed from their global agenda.
“More recently, a 2024 study using over 300 U.S. families from the Sibling Interaction and Behavior Study found that higher IQ scores and polygenic markers (genetic predictors) for cognitive performance predicted left-wing beliefs, including social liberalism and lower authoritarianism.  The within-family design controlled for shared environmental factors, suggesting a causal link where genetic predisposition to higher intelligence leads to liberal orientations—even after adjusting for socioeconomic variables.” I think this is self explanatory why conservabergs believe that demons or nominalism or the Protestant reformation are the reasons why we are have political issues.
I don't believe the study. Leftists are soulless creatures intent on hurting as many innocent people as possible. In ancient times, the metaphor of demonic possession was created to describe situations just like this. I wrote a whole article on it: https://alwaysthehorizon.substack.com/p/every-religion-is-haunted-by-the?r=43z8s4
I don’t often learn things when reading (non-economics) Substack.
With this excellent piece, I learned interesting facts of which I was unaware at the same time I got a well-written take on the issue.
Kudos to you.
The (continually slowly shrinking) center-left frequently try to claim that the (entire) right is made up of ideologues every bit as bad as the opporessor-oppressed zealots on the left, and use that - along of course with “Orange Man Bad” - as justification both for remaining allied with their illiberal radicals as well as not “punching left” at them.
Here for the first time you describe a fraction of the right that do seem to be not-that-religious “religious” zealots much like their counterparts on the left.
Even more kudos to you for calling them out and being willing to “punch right” where it is called for.
Tucker is also doing his share to get people on the Demon noticing.
The New Right forgets why people have been moving away from Christianity. Doubling down on a Medieval version of it will not revive it.
If anything, Christianity will survive as a "heretical" sect like the Mormons, or a mere public therapy session like Evangelism.
There's only one version, the Apostolic Biblical one.
It's the post-war liberal enlightenment version where people forgot the spiritual world is real that needs to be discarded. Demons are quite real and active in this world and everyone should have been able to grasp that after Covid.
I don't know where you get the idea that “the religious right” is dead.
On the contrary. Faith writ large is resurgent.
The Minneapolis tragedy is a poignant illustration of the horrible downside of the demise of faith.
In a moral vacuum, the inherent evil within us can emerge and manifest in horrible atrocities. We saw this in the Holocaust.
Pace’ the secular humanists and postmodernists, there is good and evil in the world because it is within us. Faith is a necessary guardrail, which we learn when we remove it.
On a less gruesome level, take AI. The tech brk asks, “Why shouldn't I eliminate all jobs?” A Catholic would never ask that question, because of a doctrinal understanding that work is “Ad majorem dei gloria”, “for the greater glory of God”, as is human life itself.
Is this literally true? Does it really matter? At the bottom of the scientific rabbit hole are simply more and more questions without answers, other than that men are mere beasts, insignificant accidental cultures that somehow arose out of an insensate universe that is one of an infinite number of omnidimensional….
Well, you get the idea. Cosmology and particle physics make Christianity look quite plausible by comparison.
So you can buy into whatever theory that arises from the mind of man that you want. You can pick the one that gives meaning and dignity to your existence, or the one that leaves you feeling worthless and enraged enough to slaughter innocent believers and yourself to boot.
I recommend the former.
'The religious right is dead' was an objective observation based on their inability to score a single real victory in recent politics. Meanwhile your flowery, indignant comment just proves out the rest of Scott's thesis.
“The Church is a perpetually defeated thing that always outlives her conquerers”
I disagree on both counts.
Now what?
I agree with the spirit of your (flowery) comment, but ignoring the objective decline in popularity of the religious right is just silly. Despite its resurgence among a small group of young people online, religious conservatism is a shrinking portion of the Republican base and has been for decades. MAGA will throw it bones here and there to keep the big tent together, but it’s obviously not core to the movement.
The online resurgence among young people is interesting and perhaps promising, but it’s too soon to tell how promising, and regardless it’s completely numerically insignificant in nationwide electoral terms.
The relative diminishment of the Christian Conservative movement is a sign of triumph not tragedy from their perspective, as was the broadening of Christianity from the 12 apostles. Arguably that old moral majority base is still there. One of the many puzzles the Democrats are frustrated by is why those Bible thumpers don't reject Trump for his moral failings. What they don't realize is that you can find any number of rationales for overlooking the flaws of the king in scripture.
They also fail to ask themselves, where could they possibly go? To the den of iniquity that is the modern Democrats?
I don’t really follow this. The relative diminishment of the Christian conservative movement is a sign of the diminishment of Christianity, full stop. Catholics have declined from about 1/4 to 1/5 of the U.S. population in two decades (impressive given the substantial amount of Hispanic immigration). Protestants declined from 51% to 40% (the real picture is more dire, as a dramatic decline among whites has been counterbalanced by surging popularity of charismatic Protestantism, particularly Pentecostalism, among Hispanic immigrants). The major victory of the last five years has been that the above %’s haven’t continued to decline, but have stayed stable. But that’s small comfort given that adherence numbers among young people continue to look bleak.
Christianity is still true even if no one followed it.
"And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil." - John 3:19
I wrote a whole article on how progressivism really is a demonic force. The metaphor was created in ancient time to describe the soulless monsters intent on destroying innocence and human civilization that now occupy the political position of the Radical Left: https://alwaysthehorizon.substack.com/p/every-religion-is-haunted-by-the?r=43z8s4 Take a look and give me a restack.
The evidence that the religious right is dead: legalized abortion and weed have been winning at the ballot box (even in "red" states), no one is even trying to stop sports gambling or gay marriage anymore, attempts to moderate explicit violent and sexual content in movies and music are non-existent, weekly church attendance has remained around 30%, fertility rates continuing plummeting. Even if a growing number of people online are claiming to have faith, it's not bearing any fruit in the real world.
Roe v. Wade was struck down. Internet porn is under siege. Religious faith is on the ascendant. Trump is in the White House. Kamala is singing by the dock of the bay. These facts seem inconsistent with your hypothesis. But denial of reality is quite popular on the left these days.
1. You’ll note that Trump hardly gloated at all about Roe’s overturning in the 2024 campaign, in pretty sharp contrast to 2020. This was clearly an informed decision made with advisors given the unpopularity of restrictive abortion laws among fringe Trump voters. The most he was generally willing to say in 2024 was that abortion “is an issue for the states”
2. The porn-restriction movement is a bit of an interesting coalition, generally its most successful rhetoric for building support has been left-coded or center-coded concerns about human trafficking and child exploitation. Puritanical rhetoric about stopping adults from watching porn is still not very popular.
Otherwise, you haven’t really addressed the several accurate observations made in the comment you’re replying to. Delusional confidence does not make a political movement
Overturning Roe was one of the worst things that could have happened to the GOP politically because they lost a great fundraising and turnout driving issue, kind of like the dog chasing the car that catches it.
The potential of porn due to online age restriction implementation liability is the biggest potential victory for the moral majority in 50 years.
Note that both of these are reversals of half-century-old catastrophic defeats.
Trump is busily eradicating woke, DEI antclerical moral collapses on a daily basis.
Your closer sounds like “Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”
The disconnect is because I'm talking about political power and influence, not church affiliation numbers.
Beautifully said
“who may or may not learn their theology from memes and Wikipedia”
This describes so so many people
Sorry scott the commentariat here is pretty retarded
Validates hannania/karlin EHC theory
So Ted Bundy was just a very, very bad boy.
There is effective rhetoric and there is truth.
There is a clear spiritual component to much of the madness we see.
Mental illness is the necessary prerequisite, but a lot of recent school shooters were basically groomed into it by satanic internet groups. It’s a bit of a boy who cried wolf thing, I guess. You scream about demons in your iPhone for long enough, and nobody pays attention when a satanic panic is actually warranted
Great read. For me, I've been writing about the "aliens are demons" hypotheses for some time. It's interesting how it's part of even the Religious Dissident Right, though it has solid overlap with the regular Dissident Right.
This is a frustrating trend. The Minneapolis shooting is low hanging fruit that the right could use to push back against insane gender ideology. However politicians and local activists are using this to mobilize support for gun control. Chalk up another L for the right.
there really are literal demons though, Scott
Last:
ARE EGREGORES "REAL"?
Some heterodox proponents of Integral Theory (not Catholic integralism) have proposed that in evolutionary psychology, the human instinct toward social cooperation and altruism within a given clan/tribe sometimes goes wrong when a psychological/spiritual ARTIFACT of collective awareness takes on a life of its own.
https://hwfo.substack.com/p/memespace-egregores-and-google-maps
Historically, traditional, mythic religion is a mixed bag that was used to both justify oppressive, Feudal and Absolutist politics in some cases, and in others, freedom and liberty.
Leonard Liggio made the case that classical liberalism was medieval in its origins, under conditions of decentralized politics. After 1492, centralized politics and empire led to the decline of medieval liberalism (freedom and liberty, peasant's rights) and the rise of Absolutism and empire building.
---> Anyone that attempts to support traditional religion has to clearly differentiate between those two uses of religion if they want to be coherent.
(Again, as a libertarianish centrist, I mostly accept the idea that radical leftism is materialist and evil.)
From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, the idea that social order could be increased by the reununciation of evil and sin had a specific historical origin, very late in human evolution, around the end of the Bronze Age Collapse. Early, "pagan" (nature worshipping) civilizations were being disrupted by climate change and techno-economic disruption. Tribal war and violence was pervasive. Mythic monotheism, the idea of a transcendent God, was a powerful way to politically unify tribes in common defense via city-states. But to do so, "pagan", embodied spirituality had to be demonized. (thus the power of the politics of demonization.)
By the industrial revolution, which few religion conservatives want to reverse as far as I can tell, the Church's early ban on cousin marriage had created an outbred gene pool that replaced the power of clans with high-social-trust in social institutions (Constitutional order, etc. see Joseph Henrich's WEIRD model of the origins of modernism).
Mythic religion declined historically because it could not adequately explain emergent phenomena (biology, etc.), and rationalism/(classical) liberalism provided, in some important cases, better explanations.
Mythic religion also declined historically because it was used to justify keeping the peasant classes from joining the expanding middle classes, and to try to limit the expansion and freedom of the middle classes (see Leonard Liggio on the medieval origins of classical liberalism).
Just as Enlightenment values, capitalism and classical liberalism doomed mythic orthodoxy and Feudalism because of techno-economic disruption, leftism is similarly doomed and can only exist as social parasitism and mental dysfunction.
So, something beyond the left-vs-right narrative is needed that honors the "partial truths" of both.
Postmodernism, and social-spiritual fragmentation and atomization: the meaning crisis.
Here is one attempt at defining something beyond left-vs-right (the author is an atheist, Buddhist and AI scientist).
https://meaningness.com/meaningness-history
"At the bottom of the scientific rabbit hole are simply more and more questions without answers..."
Science isn't a "rabbit hole"*. In itself it doesn't have the capacity to provide meaning and purpose beyond finding material truth (objective facts understood rationally). Anyone that thinks that replacing spirituality/religion with rationalism makes any sense is ignorant or brainwashed by secularist propaganda (as a centrist, I accept that leftism is usually a mental dysfunction).
Iain McGilchrist's decades of brain research and evolutionary psychology is "scientific proof" that materialism is a failed idea.
---
note: Wilber wrote this something like 20 years ago, so some of the specifics are outdated.
* I don't completely agree with Ken Wilber (he leans toward new age kookery sometimes), but I think this perspective is worth considering:
https://www.lionsroar.com/liberalism-and-religion-we-should-talk/
excerpt:
The way it is now, the modern world really is divided into two major and warring camps, science and liberalism on the one hand, and religion and conservatism on the other. And the key to getting these two camps together is first, to get religion past science, and then second, to get religion past liberalism, because both science and liberalism are deeply anti-spiritual. And it must occur in that order, because liberalism won’t even listen to spirituality unless it has first passed the scientific test.
...
In one sense, of course, science and liberalism are right to be anti-spiritual, because most of what has historically served as spirituality is now prerational, magic or mythic, implicitly ethnocentric, fundamentalist dogma. Liberalism traditionally came into existence to fight the tyranny of prerational myth and that is one of its enduring and noble strengths (the freedom, liberty, and equality of individuals in the face of the often hostile or coercive collective). And this is why liberalism was always allied with science against fundamentalist, mythic, prerational religion (and the conservative politics that hung on to that religion).
But neither science nor liberalism is aware that in addition to prerational myth, there is transrational awareness. There are not two camps here: liberalism versus mythic religion. There are three: mythic religion, rational liberalism, and transrational spirituality.
The main strength of liberalism is its emphasis on individual human rights. The major weakness is its rabid fear of Spirit. Modern liberalism came into being, during the Enlightenment, largely as a counterforce to mythic religion, which was fine. But liberalism committed a classic pre/trans fallacy: it thought that all spirituality was nothing but prerational myth, and thus it tossed any and all transrational spirituality as well, which was absolutely catastrophic. (As Ronald Reagan would say, it tossed the baby with the dishes.) Liberalism attempted to kill God and replace transpersonal Spirit with egoic humanism, and as much as I am a liberal in many of my social values, that is its sorry downside, this horror of all things Divine. Liberalism can be rightfully distrustful of prerational myth, and yet still open itself to transrational awareness. Its objections to mythic forms do not apply to formless awareness, and thus liberalism and authentic spirituality can walk hand in hand into a greater tomorrow. If this can be demonstrated to them using terms they find acceptable, then we would have, I believe for the first time, the possibility of a postliberal spirituality, which combines the strengths of conservatism and liberalism but moves beyond both in a transrational, transpersonal integration. The trick is to take the best of both, individual rights plus a spiritual orientation, and to do so by finding liberal humanistic values plugged into a transrational, not prerational, Spirit. This spirituality is transliberal, evolutionary and progressive, not preliberal, reactionary and regressive. It is also political, in the very broadest sense, in that its single major motivation, compassion, is pressed into social action. However, a postconservative, postliberal spirituality is not pressed into service as public policy, transrational spirituality preserves the rational separation of church and state, as well as the liberal demand that the state will neither protect nor promote a favorite version of the good life. Those who would transform the world by having all of us embrace their new paradigm, or particular God or Goddess, or their version of Gaia, or their favorite mythology, these are all, by definition, reactionary and regressive in the worst of ways: preliberal, not transliberal, and thus their particular versions of the witch hunt are never far removed from their global agenda.
...
“More recently, a 2024 study using over 300 U.S. families from the Sibling Interaction and Behavior Study found that higher IQ scores and polygenic markers (genetic predictors) for cognitive performance predicted left-wing beliefs, including social liberalism and lower authoritarianism.  The within-family design controlled for shared environmental factors, suggesting a causal link where genetic predisposition to higher intelligence leads to liberal orientations—even after adjusting for socioeconomic variables.” I think this is self explanatory why conservabergs believe that demons or nominalism or the Protestant reformation are the reasons why we are have political issues.
I don't believe the study. Leftists are soulless creatures intent on hurting as many innocent people as possible. In ancient times, the metaphor of demonic possession was created to describe situations just like this. I wrote a whole article on it: https://alwaysthehorizon.substack.com/p/every-religion-is-haunted-by-the?r=43z8s4
I don’t often learn things when reading (non-economics) Substack.
With this excellent piece, I learned interesting facts of which I was unaware at the same time I got a well-written take on the issue.
Kudos to you.
The (continually slowly shrinking) center-left frequently try to claim that the (entire) right is made up of ideologues every bit as bad as the opporessor-oppressed zealots on the left, and use that - along of course with “Orange Man Bad” - as justification both for remaining allied with their illiberal radicals as well as not “punching left” at them.
Here for the first time you describe a fraction of the right that do seem to be not-that-religious “religious” zealots much like their counterparts on the left.
Even more kudos to you for calling them out and being willing to “punch right” where it is called for.