The Theistic Argument from the Failure of Liberalism

How the Rise of Wokeness Is Leading Liberals to God

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What I found most difficult about evangelism as a child was the disinterest of my audience. Those whom I was supposed to evangelize - secular liberals in an affluent society - saw no need of the message I peddled.

But today, secular ex-liberals approach me from every direction, desiring to talk about the failures and inadequacies of liberalism and secularism. Their minds are open to a word of wisdom from the Christian faith.

And some even have open hearts.

In Christian apologetics, the traditional arguments for God’s existence appeal to universal features of the world: Causality, design, beauty.

But in our moment, a new, historically-contingent theistic argument is made available: The argument from the failure of liberalism.

The political philosophy of John Lennon’s Imagine has been tried. Its outcome has been censorship, political tribalism, new forms of genital mutilation, sky-rocketing rates of anxiety and depression, and increasing racial division.

The victims of the liberal experiment are looking for a new paradigm. And the Christian paradigm, if we are willing to translate it anew, has a ready audience.

Which Liberalism Failed?

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In 2018, Notre Dame professor of political science Patrick Deneen argued that liberalism had failed. Deneen identified liberalism with both the contemporary target of conservative sneers (“Liberals.”) and the classical liberalism of the American founding and contemporary American conservatives.

On this perspective, both “the rights of man” and “drag-queen story-hour” have their origins in the classical liberal political philosophy of John Locke and company.

But my target is not the classical liberalism of the 17th and 18th century, which, whatever its claims of philosophical paternity, was nothing like contemporary liberalism in its social application. My target is the mainstream cultural liberalism of American life in the late twentieth to early twenty-first century.

This cultural liberalism promised freedom and prosperity for all people regardless of skin color, political affiliation, religious beliefs, or sexual identity. It emphasized toleration, with an implicit intolerance for political conservatism or traditional religion. However, that intolerance was the - by today’s standards, innocuous - political correctness of the ’90s and ’00s.

This liberalism culminated in the presidency of Barack Obama, especially in the racial universalism of his first presidential campaign and term and the victories for the gay rights movement of his second term.

If we knew nothing about what had happened thereafter, we might think that the story of liberalism had had a happy ending.

How Liberalism Failed

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Yet that is not what happened.

On February 26, 2012, a young black man, Trayvon Martin, was shot by a neighborhood watchman. That shooting, along with those of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, galvanized the “Black Lives Matter” movement. Martin’s shooting, occurring in the year of Obama’s second campaign, inspired his comments, “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.”

From what I understand, this shooting was correlated with a change in Obama’s rhetoric on racial matters. Whatever the causal story, Americans’ stated opinions of the health of race relations in the US have plummeted since that year, in spite of little evidence that trends toward racial equality have changed.

Since then, galvanized also by the perception of a white backlash in the Trump election and presidency, a large portion of liberal America has come to believe that America is a systemically racist country, that whites are congenitally racist, that so-called “anti-racist” ideology and training must be widely enforced, and that DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) departments must be instituted at universities and corporations.

This was further expedited with the 2020 death of George Floyd and widespread “Black Lives Matter” protests in response, this time with the participation and support of almost all the major institutions and corporations of American life.

It is now widely believed by liberal Americans that color-blindness is racism, that reverse discrimination is not only allowable but necessary, and that America is a country that is systemically racist against blacks and other dark-skinned, non-Asian minorities.

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On June 26, 2015, the US Supreme Court, including two Obama appointees, decided that traditional marriage was unconstitutional and that gay marriage was the law of the land. The gay rights movement had won. An American majority supported gay marriage, and prejudice against gays and lesbians was only declining further.

But only two months before, in April 2015, Bruce Jenner had announced that he would henceforward be known as “Caitlyn.” Without much public opposition, one would have thought that the “T” might have been quietly smuggled in with the “L,” “G,” and “B.” But instead, a new civil rights struggle began, with fights over bathrooms, the normalization and popularization of manifold gender identities, and the pushing of gender ideology onto young children.

Men began to enter women’s sports, women’s colleges, and women’s prisons. In the UK, secular feminists began to raise alarm bells: The sex-based rights of women would not be defended if the definition of woman expanded to include a great number of men.

Across the Western world, stories of detransitioners who regretted their “sex-reassignment” surgeries - and having the irreparable wounds to prove it - began to speak up, often facing violent opposition from trans-activist groups, manned (literally) by “trans women” exhibiting characteristically masculine strength and force in favor of their ideology.

Again in the UK, the British gay rights group Stonewall was split over the issue of transgenderism, with defectors founding the LGB Alliance. They raised alarm bells over the conversion of young effeminate gay men and butch lesbians into heterosexual trans women and trans men - what gender transition effectively does.

While gender transition for minors became only more available in the US, the Nordic countries were already beginning to wind down gender clinics. Eventually, the UK Tavistock clinic was shut down given concerns about the scientifically untested character of hormone “therapies” and surgeries being offered to minors. Opposition to such medical abuses has begun to mount in the US, though it has only recently begun to be permitted on the mainstream left.

Liberalism had hoped to create a world in which a black man can be president and gays can marry one another. But it was unable to produce a successful, liberal end-state. What is less evident is why.

Why Liberalism Failed

Some deck chairs to be rearranged. Photo by Nicolás Gutiérrez on Unsplash

There are two explanations: Some people say that we left liberalism behind and just need to return to it. Others argue that liberalism was the problem in the first place.

There was a phase from 2016 to 2019 in which public intellectuals mostly argued for a return to liberalism. Individuals from Dave Rubin to Jordan Peterson to Bari Weiss called themselves “classical liberals,” taking up the term of political philosophy or the British sense of “liberal.” The Intellectual Dark Web was the home of these liberal defectors from the left.

Classical liberal criticisms of wokeness focused on its departure from liberal norms. Woke censorship was undermining freedom of speech. Equity, i.e., equality of outcome, was undermining equality of opportunity. Racial tribalism, and even segregation, were replacing a focus on our common humanity.

Individuals often made appeal to what being a liberal or a Democrat had meant to them a decade or two before. This dovetailed with the critique of wokeness as a religion. Bill Maher had mocked religion in his documentary Religulous; he now found himself critiquing the religion of wokeness for these same qualities of tribalism and irrationality.

Even the religious elements of the Intellectual Dark Web argued that religion provided justification for classical liberalism. Peterson mainstreamed this argument, that the recognition of the image of God in each individual, mythologically represented in Christian teaching, was the foundation of Western liberalism. Ben Shapiro, himself a classical liberal in the sense of the American right, argued this same perspective in The Right Side of History. (I made it the central claim of an unpublished book I penned at the time, The New Idealism.)

For a variety of reasons, the defense of classical liberalism has not been able to hold a new political center. While there remain defenders of this liberal approach, public discussion has shifted in a new direction.

It was liberals and their moral intuitions, after all, that wokeness hijacked. Trans rights, for instance, appealed to liberals’ concern for oppressed minorities, just as gay rights had. Black Lives Matter tugged at the heartstrings of liberals, whose moral imagination is shaped by the black-white conflict of the civil rights movement. A return to liberalism would arguably be susceptible to the same problems all over again.

Also, liberalism has no tools to adjudicate the claims of competing minorities. Trans rights, for instance, have come into conflict with women’s rights and even gay rights. Being a good liberal does not tell you how to square that circle.

Some classical liberals want to use science to adjudicate those claims. For instance, instead of religious fundamentalists, today it is evolutionary biologists who defend the sex binary, not to mention the empirical differences in personality and behavior, on average, between the sexes.

But again, it was secular liberals who “believe in science” who fell for this ideology in the first place. This suggested that religious thinking was endemic to human beings. While a small number of professional scientists appear capable of being liberals but not woke, the masses are not.

This, in turn, suggests a new moral to be taken from the failure of liberalism and secularism alone: That only a religious alternative could withstand wokeness.

The problem with liberalism, on this view, is that it tries to do without religion, at least in public life. Yet it appears that without religion, human beings merely create their own, but without the time-tested character of traditional religion. Like communism and fascism before it, wokeness was a secular religion with an ideological fury.

The death of God left a vacuum. Political ideology backfills it with a vengeance.

Ex-Liberals’ Religious Hunger

Christianity as gustatorily true. Photo by Atharva Lele on Unsplash

The failure of liberalism has left politically-engaged and intellectually competent Westerners searching for a religious answer. What more substantive set of ideas and ways of being can fill the void at the heart of liberalism?

Strikingly, this group of thinking people, many of them ex-liberals themselves, are more interested in civilizational Christianity than the dogmatic claims of the faith. This is because recent events have revealed the civilizational consequences of abandoning Christianity for secular liberalism. But as ex-secular liberals, they still find it difficult to believe in the supernatural or to adopt an exclusivist religion.

This fact colored, for example, the evangelical reception of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s conversion. Her Unherd article about her conversion focused on the civilizational challenges to the West and the way in which a society needs a religious core. Evangelicals accused her of being a merely civilizational Christian, of advocating Christianity not because it is true, but merely because it is useful. (In fact, her conversion was also spiritual and personal.)

However, this ignores both the legitimate concerns of ex-liberals like Ali and the valid evidence the failure of liberalism provides of humanity’s need of God.

While the failure of liberalism does not show deductively that God exists, it suggests that the West’s hypothesis that society could survive without God is returning negative results. The West left God behind, and some of what has happened is exactly what Christianity would have predicted - a loss of moral direction and a susceptibility to political ideology.

What is more, if religion is useful, it raises the further question whether it is useful in spite of its falsity or because of its truth. This is why, once again, the obsession with whether Jordan Peterson really believes is beside the point. Jordan Peterson has argued for the goodness of Christianity and its pragmatic or psychological truth.

This conclusion raises the further question of why Christianity is so darn useful. Unsurprisingly, many of Peterson’s listeners, not to mention his wife and daughter, have gone further than Peterson, concluding that Christianity is not only useful, but also true.

Short of conversion, the failure of liberalism provides much common ground for conversation. It is this kind of unthreatening conversation that is preparatory to receptiveness to Christianity’s truth. The fact that this argument does not compel belief is one of its most powerful features.

Locating the Good Soil

Soil in the tractor-trails of modernity. Photo by Dylan de Jonge on Unsplash

When I first discovered the argument from the failure of liberalism, I set out looking for some of these ex-liberals, none of whom I knew personally.

Since then, I have found these individuals in ways I could not have planned. I found at least one through F3, the national men’s workout group named for fitness, fellowship, and (non-sectarian) faith.

The online community Other Life, where Justin Murphy’s course Indie Thinkers facilitated my starting this newsletter, sent me several more. Murphy himself is one such convert; I highly recommend reading his moving Easter reflection, “On the Unleavened.”

From there, my online interaction on Substack, writing on topics at the boundary of theology, philosophy, and the Jordan Peterson discourse has brought me into contact with even more.

While I once thought of evangelism as the duty to throw seed overhand at every passerby, I have come recently to see that evangelism is as much a matter of locating good soil that will be receptive to the seed. I credit fellow writer and subscriber Ross Byrd for contributing to my understanding of this dimension of evangelism.

The intersection of the theistic argument from the failure of liberalism and these disaffected ex-liberals is a nexus of good soil and Christian seed.

Now, the ex-liberals at that nexus have some associations: A penchant for culture war, resentment against liberal elites, and even a temptation toward harder right positions. This can tempt Christians to keep our distance. (Though Christians have many of the same associations and temptations.)

But this would be to miss an opportunity: A whole group of people whose minds are open to the possibility that Christianity might be good for the world.

Whether Christianity is true - acknowledging that will depend on the openness of their hearts.

And that, in turn, will depend, not on the rigor of our arguments, but on the openness of our hearts toward them.