Conversion, schism, and apologetics
Watching the secular West hit the wall of nihilism in real time
Ayan Hirsi Ali’s announcement of embracing Christianity is one of the biggest pivotal moments culturally since 9/11 and I don’t know how many people actually realize that… Ayan is basically letting us know that she thinks what a lot of us, rational immigrants from Muslim countries who believed in the promised of the Western elites of secular humanism, already have been feeling for a long time: Western elites are completely abandoning all their ideological promises and commitments of rationalism, scientific objectivity, freedom of inquiry, freedom of expression, and all the basic dignity the modern educated human could not survive without and which are badly needed in Muslim communities and societies.
But Ayan is not just saying she believes Western elites are abandoning just us Muslims who wanted liberty, but they are abandoning their commitments to their very own Western societies. One way to look at this is that as Western elites ditched Ayan for the Islamists, Ayan turned to the ancient fort of Christianity for a last escape. And you can not isolate this from what has been happening all over the US, Canada and Europe and the open support for Hamas and terrorism against Israelis.
Conversion
In reprinting Ali’s essay in The Free Press, Bari Weiss asks the question I think is going to be the Next Big Thing for American Christianity to confront: “Can religion be justified on pragmatic grounds, or does it require sincere faith?”
I know that Christian faith is not merely the equivalent of an appreciation of Judeo-Christian heritage and values. However, the term seems unavoidable now in my struggle to describe why I feel alienated from the secular liberal social/political consensus to which I assumed I would always belong.
Not only does the term “crisis of faith” seem appropriate to describe the emotional turmoil of this experience; but also — and more importantly, I suspect — it is becoming increasingly awkward to realize that the reason why I cannot utter the newly-required woke shibboleths is because I actually believe in something different than “you-do-you-it’s-all-good-live-and-let-live”. I actually believe that there is a higher Good that does not come arbitrarily from the head of human beings, and that a grounding in this Good is responsible in large part for the security and prosperity of the society I have been lucky enough to live in.
Western civilisation is under threat from three different but related forces: the resurgence of great-power authoritarianism and expansionism…; the rise of global Islamism…; and the viral spread of woke ideology….
We endeavour to fend off these threats with modern, secular tools…. But we can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: what is it that unites us? The response that “God is dead!” seems insufficient.
Ali goes on to say that her conversion was not just a pragmatic matter of recognizing the cultural limits of atheism, but that she “found life without any spiritual solace unendurable — indeed very nearly self-destructive.” I have never been an atheist myself, viewing the firm conviction that there is no God as the mirror image of a confessed faith in God — albeit without the consolations that belongingness in a faith community often bequeaths. I don’t know whether my complete lack of interest in New Atheism was some sort of early signal about my own religious inclinations or whether it was more an intellectual disdain for punching down. I knew I didn’t believe that Christ died for my sins, but I also knew that part of that lack of belief was due to a lack of knowledge about what that actually meant. Atheists were sure — but it’s easy to be sure that there’s no God if you think that Christians believe there’s a Guy in the Sky pulling us around like puppets on strings.
Remember The Book of Mormon, the musical? It was incredibly successful, but I didn’t enjoy it at all. It felt cheap to me, more evidence of the knee-jerk secular tendency to make fun of people of faith as simple and credulous. But credulity, it turns out, is an equal opportunity lender; Ali quotes the line often attributed to G. K. Chesterton: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.” I personally think we’ve always been capable believing in anything, but the larger point still stands: sincere belief in Something is not just an action toward that Something, it is also necessarily a backstop against What Is Not That Thing. If we didn’t understand belief to function this way, the term hypocrisy — which is, I think, the dagger wokeism is trying to stab through the heart of the West — wouldn’t have meaning.
Schism
I am trying to put a healthier distance between myself and the wormhole of gender identity, but I do not want to let this important moment go unremarked.
Genspect is an organization that emerged first as a renegade band of dissidents against the obvious harms of medicalized gender identity which is now poised to overtake WPATH as the mainstream professional organ for the medical treatment of gender-inspired dis-eases. Genspect had resolved to meet whenever and wherever the various continental divisions of WPATH meet, which took them (for their second conference) to Colorado, near Denver two weeks ago.
Given the complexities of this whole gender thing (and no doubt also because of Genspect’s sudden importance in this space), opposition to Genspect’s approach was inevitable, and predates the conference. Genspect was founded by psychologists with the aim of crafting an alternative — but still recognizably, in the Western sense, medical — approach to gender-related distress.
It is not a feminist (radical or otherwise) group; indeed, like any group of professionals that seeks change within its profession, it has to precede deliberately. Whatever your feelings are about credentialism/professional licensure, anyone who puts in the money and the time to join one of these modern-day guilds is naturally incentivized to not lean too far over her skis in an attempt to bring change. From that standpoint, the firm stance that Genspect takes against body modification as a treatment for psychological distress associated with the sexed body — and the speed with which it has constructed this stance — is admirable. But from the standpoint of those who feel like the entire construct — medical or otherwise — of gender identity/trans-whatever is merely another dry branch thrown on the ever-burning pyre of patriarchy, Genspect was never going to go far enough.
All it took for the simmering of discord to explode into a splatter of schism was one photo, posted by Genspect on Twitter:1
Many people (including myself) know without need of a caption who the two individuals are, and why they were at the conference. The woman on the left is Laura Becker, aka Funk God, a detransitioner who has written extensively — and creatively — about how an abusive childhood and the influence of Tumblr led her to believe that she needed to take testosterone and have her healthy breasts removed in order to overcome her personal trauma and bodily discomfort.
The man in a dress next to her is a self-acknowledged autogynephile named (at least online) Phil Illy. He’s an AGP with a twist, though: he is on a mission (complete with a recent book) to reframe a paraphilic interest in woman-thing-ness2 as a kind of sexual orientation: auto-heterosexuality.3 I’ve watched an interview with him, and he comes across to me as a based autogynephile who has used his big brain to repackage his sexual fetish into a more salable form of narcissism. Every woman has a story of a guy who talks only about himself on a date; Phil levels up by literally taking himself on a date. The fact that he’s dressed like he imagines that woman(thing) would dress is largely beside the point; so is the fact that he’s under no illusion that he really is a woman. Whether you’re taking selfie in my bathroom or not, public displays of narcissism have real consequences.
The trouble is, I fear, without some understanding/naming of a Higher Good, it is basically impossible to say why this is so.
Heather Heying, an evolutionary biologist who attended and spoke at the conference (and met Phil), comes to a conclusion I agree with. But what is striking is that she cannot name the ultimate basis on which I think her argument clearly rests.
She writes:
Not everything that has evolved is good. Nor does it follow that anything that people currently believe, no matter how much of a community they have found on-line, or how many university professors have written scholarly articles about the phenomenon, is either evolutionarily robust, or good…. And so, when assessing any bit of 21st century behavior… it is necessary to keep an eye on that truth: just because many people are doing it, does not mean that it is the right thing to be doing.
We are under no obligation to normalize such feelings. Indeed, we are obligated to do the opposite. We do not cheer for the self-mutilation of a sad girl, or for her attempts to starve herself. We do not celebrate confusion.
Normalizing fetishes and other rare mental states is bad for society, because it provides a template for the confused. (emphases mine)
Heying acknowledges that in staking out a difference between good and not good, she is bucking the “the postmodernist thinking behind many modern arguments.”
Once the thing is made real by its name, it comes to seem ever more true. And voila, the slippery naturalistic fallacy is manifest: name X, point to the reality of X on the basis of its name, conflate X’s reality with its inexorability and its goodness, and in turn, force the acceptance of X.
But if goodness in the post-modern understanding is constructed — and therefore arbitrary, purely subjective — what was it before it was arbitrary? It was given, and objective. But instead of making that claim — which feminists for valid reasons spent several centuries running from like a house on fire — Heying has to follow words like good, right, truth, and obligated with squishier words like confusion, normalizing, rare, and bad for society. Rhetorically, it seems, on the way to church of Moral Good, Heying gets waylaid in a pub called Harm Reduction.
It’s not that the harm reduction argument is entirely wrong; I agree with Heying entirely that non-creepy (in her estimation) Phil is nonetheless violating the social contract whose constraints exist for a larger benefit, and as such, he is contributing to its erosion. The problem with the harm reduction argument is that it is not sufficient; harm has proven again and again to be an entirely subjective concept, easily weaponizeable to exact whatever concessions the zealots deem necessary to secure their “right to exist” or “safety”.
The elephant in the room then, is that Heying (and so many others) cannot seem to find a way to say that a woman-being-woman is a Moral Good without trapping women inside oppressive notions of how they should look, act, or feel.
Critiquing part of Phil’s book (he gave her a copy), she notes:
So: if you are confident, strong, and self-assured, you are manifesting manhood. And if you engage in care-taking and domestic work, you are manifesting womanhood. Manly men don’t clean. Womanly women aren’t confident. Manly men don’t parent. Womanly women are weak.
This is bollocks. I rather thought that we were over such insipid and restrictive tropes. Clearly, I was wrong.
This isn’t a simple matter: there is no easy way to disentangle the inevitability of sexual difference in culture (that’s gender, by the way) from the lengthy history (including the present minute) of women being treated, in ways small and large, as lesser beings. But this much is clear: if feminists believed that the solution to patriarchal oppression was the rejection of religious dogma that undergirded it, I think it is abundantly clear now that the alternative — radical subjectivity — is equally fraught with perilous trade-offs. You cannot wish away asymmetries that exist before language with language, any more than you can aspire to the Good without calling it by its Proper Name.4
Apologetics
My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?… Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too—for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist—in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless—I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality—namely my idea of justice—was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning…
I confess I haven’t read very many examples that fall into the genre of apologetics, but C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity does strike me, rightly or wrongly, as particularly sui generis. A former atheist, he composed what would become Mere Christianity as a series of radio lectures, given between 1941 and 1944. He’s not trying to explain the particularities of any given Christian denomination, but rather explain why he came to believe that Christianity was true. He compares that basic faith as the shared hallway of a house, with many doors opening to the various expressions of that faith. In this sense, mere doesn’t mean weak or partial; it means shared.
I grew up with an outsize awareness of being a religious minority — I don’t think many four-year-olds knew the word proselytize — which developed, I guess, into a fear of my religious apartness rendering me a target. I never had a problem being a non-Christian in what I understood as a Christian country (actually I was rather proud of how well it seemed to work, overall), but I can still conjure the visceral sickness I felt the first time I was explicitly told I was going to burn for eternity in hell unless I accepted Jesus as my personal savior.
God is going to invade, all right: but what is the good of saying you are on His side then, when you see the whole natural universe melting away like a dream and something else—something it never entered your head to conceive—comes crashing in; something so beautiful to some of us and so terrible to others that none of us will have any choice left? For this time it will be God without disguise; something so overwhelming that it will strike either irresistible love or irresistible horror into every creature. It will be too late then to choose your side.
This is, in nuce, the same salvation-or-damnation message that was delivered to me years ago. Why then, does it feel so different to me from Lewis? It could be my age, it could be the language, but I think it’s mostly the way that Lewis manages to frame Christianity from the perspective of an unbeliever.
Christianity simply does not make sense until you have faced the sort of facts I have been describing. Christianity tells people to repent and promises them forgiveness. It therefore has nothing (as far as I know) to say to people who do not know they have done anything to repent of and who do not feel that they need any forgiveness. It is after you have realized that there is a real Moral Law, and a Power behind the law, and that you have broken that law and put yourself wrong with that Power—it is after all this, and not a moment sooner, that Christianity begins to talk.
The conundrum seems to be, then, that you cannot understand what faith is (or what it is even for) until you have a kind of awareness of the condition seemingly described by faith itself. To believe in God is not merely to understand something apart from yourself, but to understand yourself, too, as having “put yourself wrong with that Power”. And while this state of affairs is posited as a given for all by believers, the only way to be able to listen, so to speak, to what Christianity has to say is to genuinely believe it about yourself.
I don’t think I have to spell out the disincentives that exist—and have always existed, even if our contemporary culture is distinct in its secularity—against the personal acknowledgment of one’s own wrongness. I will freely admit that I have felt exactly like Colin Wright (the “me” in the above cartoon); my (correct/acceptable) views haven’t changed at all; I’m just now being called a bigot. Unfair! It’s disorienting and it hurts. It’s leading to underground movements of people who have all been hurt in this way, some even permanently ostracized by former close friends.
Note that such underground movements are labeled with the term “free speech,” while the woke progressives are branded as a literal new religion. On the one hand, you could say that this is just the familiar secular habit of labeling anything doctrinaire with the same label as the Original Doctrine against which secular humanism defined itself. But it’s not actually that simple. We know that secular humanism and even progressivism trace their origins to Christian faith — this is best evidenced, perhaps, by the growing schism in the Protestant world over the issues of female ordination, gay marriage, and transgenderism. So our old way of looking at things — with free speech aligned with the left and dogmatic belief lined up on the right — just doesn’t work anymore. You can see a trans flag in a church (or synagogue) but need to join a “free speech” group to state without fear of reprisal that there are two sexes and two genders.
The cognitive dissonance in my head then, comes down to this knot. I feel as if I can no longer explain what I thought to be my own liberal values without grounding them in what I would have called conservative principles — Judeo-Christian beliefs that there is a Higher Good that we don’t just get to arbitrarily move around to suit our fancy. Even if we’ve spent the last two centuries more or less doing precisely that — and even if I’m fully aware that I have personally benefitted from much of that movement.
What Satan put into the heads of our remote ancestors was the idea that they could ‘be like gods’—could set up on their own as if they had created themselves—be their own masters—invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside God, apart from God. And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history—money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.
You don’t have to believe in Satan to recognize that everyone wants the line of morality to be where she feels comfortable. I don’t want early, elective abortion to be criminalized; I don’t want divorce to be illegal. But I also don’t want a society where we encourage or celebrate a woman removing her breasts because she feels like a man. I want men to feel enough shame (or fear, either is fine) to keep their fetishes in the privacy of their own homes. But I am beginning to feel that the twin of “shouting your abortion” (as that awful phrase goes) is forcing a smile at a man with an erection in the ladies’ loo. I’m not saying that I can’t craft arguments to tolerate the former and condemn the latter; I do it all the time! But this isn’t about me, it’s about the culture as a whole, and if I’m honest, I don’t see how the mainstream claws back the once self-evident respect for women’s spaces without some sort of broader reckoning with what has been called a “small-o orthodoxy,” one firmly grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition. I may be an outlier, but the sex denialism movement has shattered my moral-political compass and is forcing me to reconsider the trade-offs I’ve made — because remember, there are no solutions — between what I know to be true and what I want to feel right.
Basically, I feel about my politics the way Augustine felt about his sex-addiction: save me, Lord, but not yet.
Genspect has since deleted this tweet and posted a response to this incident.
The search for terminology continues. What I’m reaching toward here is the idea that the moment a man can think himself a woman, woman ceases to become what she is and becomes a thing.
Auto being self + hetero being opposite = sexual attraction to oneself as the opposite sex.
The asymmetry in the photo, needless to say, is that the toll of gender woo is much higher for women like Laura than for men like Phil. He breaks the gender-critical internet because he’s a man in a dress; never mind that woman without breasts next to him, that’s just… whatever. Expressive individualism in the vein of cross-sex fantasy somehow manages to diminish women while leaving men whole — and then some. Didn’t feminists want to liberate the female body specifically from patriarchal oppression? And yet it is her body, not his, that is permanently altered, chemically and surgically. Phil, meanwhile, intact as ever, gets to indulge his sexual pleasure/narcissism in ever-widening circles. If the notion that these two people are somehow related by their “gender non-conformity” isn’t enough to reveal to you the utter meaninglessness of that term, I’m not sure what will. (Not that I won’t stop trying to explain it, lol.)
Very good essay -- covers a lot of ground; far more there than can reasonably be addressed in a brief comment or two.
But I think your "bottom lines" -- "everyone wants the line of morality to be where she feels comfortable", and "make me chaste Lord (but not yet)" -- both speak to the problem of relativism. Which various Popes have been beavering away against for some time -- probably since Augustine at least:
https://www.ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/benedict-battles-dictatorship-relativism
The problem -- as I expect Ayan Hirsi Ali will eventually come to realize, sooner than later one hopes -- is that Christianity, like virtually all religions, is still something of a manufactured absolute. There is, no doubt, a great deal of value in many religions, but still something seen "through a glass, darkly".
But nice to see your quote of Heying:
HH: "Once the thing is made real by its name, it comes to seem ever more true. And voila, the slippery naturalistic fallacy is manifest: name X, point to the reality of X on the basis of its name, conflate X’s reality with its inexorability and its goodness, and in turn, force the acceptance of X."
However, I think she and most women -- pretty much everyone in the whole transgender clusterfuck in fact, present company excepted of course ... -- are more or less guilty of the same "crime" in turning the words "woman" and "female" into empty signifiers, no more than badges of tribal allegiance if not fashion accessories. They rather desperately, if not pigheadedly refuse to consider that they're just labels for categories which have objective criteria for category membership, even if the question of which criteria will be trump is something of a political football. But basically the logical fallacy, the "sin" of reification: turning abstractions -- which is what categories ARE -- into real things:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_(fallacy)
See my kick at the kitty, at the age-old question of "what is a woman?" for elaborations on those themes; of particular note therein is a rather brilliant analogy, something of a "Road to Damascus" revelation, in a tweet from RadfemBlack:
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/what-is-a-woman
https://twitter.com/RadfemBlack/status/1161471915812360193