The Daily Signal - How ‘Faith and Reason Can Win the Culture War’

Episode Date: May 30, 2024

Unlikely alliances are forming across America as Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox Jews, classic liberals, and traditional conservatives are all troubled by a spreading political ideology that has abandoned reason, the author of a new book on the subject says. Americans are seeing a contingent on the Left that “has gone completely mad,” says Jay Richards, co-author of “Fight the Good Fight: How an Alliance of Faith and Reason Can Win the Culture War.”  “We're not dealing with a kind of Walter Mondale-John F. Kennedy liberalism of the 1960s,” he explains. “We're dealing with a radical postmodernism, and we call this 'woke ideology' because we don't have a word for it, but it really is radical, and it's all about basically destabilizing the current order.” Issues such as diversity, equity, and inclusion curriculums in schools and gender-identity ideology have “awakened” Americans across political and faith divides, says Richards, who also serves as director of the DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family at The Heritage Foundation. (Heritage founded The Daily Signal in 2014.) Richards joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss the unique alliances the radical Left’s agenda has unintentionally created and to explain how faith and reason can work together to win the culture war.  Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Thursday, May 30th. I'm Virginia Allen. Unlikely alliances are forming across America as Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox Jews, classic liberals, and conservatives are all troubled by a political ideology that has abandoned reason. That's according to Jay Richards, author of The New Book, Fight the Good Fight, how an alliance of faith and reason can win the culture war. Jay is sitting down with us on today's show to talk about how the so-called woke ideology has actually created some very unlikely alliances across America as Americans are striving to get back to a place of reason. He explains how both faith and reason can create normalcy within our

culture once again. And just how faith and reason together are the answer for this crisis that we're facing within culture today. Stay tuned for my conversation with Jay Richards after this. So what is going on with Ukraine? What is this deal with the border? How do you feel about school choice? These are the questions that come up to conservatives sitting at parties, at dinner, at family reunions. What do you say when these questions come up? I'm Mark Geinney, the host of the podcast for you. Heritage Explains brought to you by all of your friends here at the Heritage Foundation. Through the creative use of stories, the knowledge of our

super passionate experts, we bring you the most important policy issues of the day and break them down in a way that is understandable. So check out Heritage Explains wherever you get your podcasts. Well, I am so honored that we have with us on the show today, Jay Richards, he's the co-author of the new book, Fight the Good Fight, How an Alliance of Faith and Reason can win the Culture War. Jay, thanks for being here. Oh, great to be with you, Virginia. This new book is really practical, and I like how practical it is. Who is it written for?

Well, so the initial audience, the sort of core of the target audience, would be really Catholics, evangelicals, and Orthodox Jews, or practicing Jews. That's the sort of the center of the target. But it's also about, okay, for readers like that, if you're interested in actually building friends and allies in the country. How do you make arguments for your policy positions if you're conservative for someone that's either not religious or maybe they think of themselves as, you know, very much on the left, but they're concerned about gender ideology or the border? How do you make those arguments? Or are the kind of public arguments? And so I wanted the book, if say, you know,

a totally secular person that wasn't religious, it was on the left, picked it up, and say, okay, you know, it's a little intense in the introduction, but when you get into the arguments, It's, okay, I disagree with this, but it seems rational. So that's really it. In some ways, it's honestly, it's a kind of translation of the heritage view on policy issues, but distilled down into bite-sized chunks written at honestly like a ninth grade level. So it's very accessible. But also providing both the kind of theological interpretation and explanation of political issues,

but also providing the basic public arguments that I think that we ought to be making to people that don't share our background worldview. And you have a lot of experience working in that realm of interacting with people, especially in recent years, that don't necessarily share your background or worldview. You work pretty extensively on the gender ideology issue here at the Heritage Foundation. And within that space, you talk about the fact that you have formed what you call non-traditional allies. What has that looked like? Well, and so even let me back up, I have spent a lot of time working just with actually bringing believers together. You know, I mean, it's something we need. We do.

And James Robinson and I are an example of this. He and I had done a book together in 2012. For people that don't know, James is a well-known evangelical Christians, sort of charismatic in that orientation. Was a crusade evangelist in the 1970s and 80s has a TV show with his beautiful wife Betty on Christian TV. I'm a sort of Catholic academic, and we're really interested in Catholics and evangelicals in particular working together, but broadening that tent. And then I've discovered something really interesting on the gender ideology front is that people that conservatives would not ever think of as allies and suddenly are right in the fight with us. In fact, sometimes leading it. J.K. Rowling is a perfect example of this.

I don't think, you know, she's sort of politically on the left, I assume, thinks of herself as a strong feminist. But it's been just unbelievable and shown moral courage in fighting the gender madness. That, I think, is a sign of something interesting that's happening culturally. It's really global, but we focus on the U.S. And it's this. It's that the kind of alternative on the left has gone completely mad. We're not dealing with kind of Walter Mondale, John F. Kennedy liberalism of the 1960s.

We're dealing with a radical postmodernism, and we call this woke ideology because they don't have a word for it. But it really is radical. And it's all about basically destabilizing the current order. And a lot of people have awakened because of this, either because of the critical race theory stuff, which is a direct affront to Martin Luther King's vision that almost all Americans share. And then gender ideology, which if you were a woman.

thinking you're defending the rights of women and non-discrimination against women. And all of a sudden, you're told, actually, to be a nice, properly thinking progressive, you need to be just fine with men competing in women's sports and men coming into your bathrooms and sterilizing kids in the name of gender affirming care. Well, a lot of people that aren't conservatives are not okay with that. And that, to me, that is wonderful that they're not okay with it because that means they're following the light of reason and truth. as much as they have it. And honestly, I just think we conservatives

that maybe you're not used to hanging out with people like that need to get used to it because let's be honest. If you add up, okay, let's just take Catholics and evangelicals. And so I'm going to leave out our Orthodox Christian friends because they're not demographically huge in the U.S. So take the conservative

evangelicals and take the conservative Catholics. So far as I can tell, that's about 25% of the population. Like it or not, you're not winning national elections. with 25% of the population, right? And so we need to be conjugating and not dividing. What the left wants us to do, the left wants us arguing.

They want us arguing about integralism and Christian nationalism and Catholics versus evangelicals, right? They want us fighting each other. My general rule of thumb is, okay, try to figure out what the left wants us to do and then don't do that. Do the opposite. Do the opposite. It's a really good heuristic.

We need to be figuring out, okay, how do we create a new group of allies, right, that can actually make a difference culturally and politically? And I think that's the moment we're in. That's what this idea of an alliance of faith and reason is all about. Yeah. So then give us some practical tips because, and let's, since we're on the topic of gender ideology, let's maybe keep going in that vein. For someone who is not in the church, you can quote scripture to them all day long. well, that's good for you, but it's not my beliefs. How do you broach having a conversation within the context of reason to say, hey, let us come together and reason together on this?

And let's find where we agree so that we can be a force multiplier in this issue. Okay. And so that's the perfect way to frame it. And let me contrast it with abortion, all right? So now the abortion issue, if you know some embryology, right, you can learn that, okay, human life begins at this moment of fertilization when the sperm and the ova. unite, you create a unique human being, almost no one has ever directly experienced that, right? You don't see that happening. And so you're having to reason your way. And then until recently, we didn't really know what was happening inside a woman when the baby was developing,

right? And so people could kind of intellectually, okay, I can follow your argument and still reject it because it's not kind of a direct experience. But nevertheless, people still live in the world. And so people have to be more or less reasonable most of the time, right? And, and kind of follow gravity and traffic laws and stuff like that. Abortion, even though you can get there by reason, you don't need theology. All you need is this is when human life begins. It's wrong to intentionally kill a human life. Abortion is the intentional killing of human lives.

So it's wrong, right? That's really straightforward. People don't often buy it because you can keep it sort of out of sight out of mind. Everyone experiences male and female. This is a direct experience that we all have. It's one of the universal things that people, by the time their five or six, develop a really acute way of saying, okay, that's a male, that's a female. Now, can we have all sorts of bad cultural stereotypes and all that stuff. That doesn't mean there aren't males and females, right?

It's in biology. It applies to humans. And, in fact, it applies in more or less the same way to all plants and animals. Gender ideology denies that. That's a lot of people don't realize that. But gender ideology says, ah, biological sex is, if it's a real thing, it's complicated and it's not. not important, and it's subordinate to something else called a gender identity, which is this internal sense of gender we supposedly have, and something called sex assigned at birth.

So in other words, this biological reality that every human being in history recognizes isn't really true, and this other thing you've never heard about is actually the way to explain things. That's crazy to people. And so this is why you can get women who identify as lesbian, leftist. atheist, atheist, atheist evolutionary biologists like Richard Dawkins, you know, moms, suburban moms that were not especially political, all of a sudden they're saying, wait, I'm not sure what's happening. Maybe I kind of thought of myself as a liberal, but that's crazy and insane and actually evil.

And so maybe I need to rethink my political orientation and kind of work my way back to basic foundations. That's what's actually happening in the minds of people, I think, that are involved in the movement. And in fact, it's happening on X, formerly known as Twitter right now, where they're mostly women. So as far as I could see, they're videotaping themselves saying, you know, I'm a lifelong Democrat, I'm pro-choice, whatever. I will never vote for Joe Biden. I mean, that's what, because of this. Yeah. Because of this. And so that's different from disagreeing over the marginal income tax rates or broadband regulation or whatever. Very foundational issues. And I love the fact that you have just gone after

some of the most hardest and controversial issues, and even tackled some of the language that we hear from the far left that sort of paints people that aren't on their bandwagon in a very broad stroke. You mentioned the word Christian nationalism. We're hearing that thrown around a lot, really against anyone who is a patriot. Yeah, basically, if you're a Christian, you like America and think your faith applies to stuff, right? You're a Christian nationalist, and we talk about that in the book, and it's a trap. See, the left is clever.

And so what they've done is spent several, the media spent several years weaponizing this term Christian nationalism so that people associate it with, honestly, with like the Ku Klux Klan and white nationalism and a desire to establish Christianity as the national faith. And I don't know, lock up people there are Christians or something like that. Okay, maybe there's five or six people that think that's a good idea. But almost no Christians are up for that, right? And so if you get accused to being Christian nationalist enough and you get tired of it, one temptation is say, well, fine, then, I am a Christian nationalist. That's, I think, a bad strategy because you don't get to have private meanings of words. It has a public meaning.

And if it's used as a pejorative, you don't want to associate yourself with it. On the other hand, you don't want to spend all your time saying, I'm not a Christian nationalist and sort of disavowing lots of things because the reality is, and I'll just speak for myself, but in the book, we think that the founders' generation, the way they handled this, is the right way to handle it in which you don't have a nationally established church. At the time, by the way, states some of them still did have establishment. That's good. We believe in religious liberty and religious freedom. And then the First Amendment guarantees exercise of religion, not mere belief.

And if you look at how this actually worked in practice, people brought their faith to the public square and made. the case for it on all sorts of issues. And then here's the key thing, Virginia, that people miss. The founders believed in the natural law. They believed there were the natural moral law that was noble to some degree by everyone. And part of that was actually knowing that there's a creator. So the idea that God exists and gives us our rights for the founders as well as really the perennial Christian tradition, that was a truth of reason.

You could know that by reason without special revelation. And then of course we have various kind of sectarian disagreements. just being able to recover that, right, where a non-established church doesn't mean a public square purged of religious faith and recovering the idea of God and the natural law as public truths rather than sectarian truths, that's where we think we ought to go, right? The problem is there's no word for that other than let's get, you know, it sounds like we're just trying to recover 1787 or something, right? Christian nationalism is the pithy term that they want to label us with.

Explaining what we actually want takes a little bit of time. But, I mean, that's the reality. And so my view is, look, I'm not going to run around saying I'm not a Christian nationalist. I'm absolutely not going to embrace the term either. Yeah. So what are the practical steps, Jay? How do you actually go about forming that coalition? And, you know, for people that aren't necessarily working in the policy space,

and maybe don't have that opportunity to constantly be rubbing shoulders with people that are like them or not like them, working in the think tank world, whatever it may be. But for Americans living across the country, how do you go apart of being in this movement, been of saying, we're going to reclaim faith and reason and bring reason back into the national conversation. Well, that's honestly what the book is written for because most people don't get to do what we do. So buy the book. Right.

No, exactly. But it really is because it's not a think tank book. You know, it's just not that kind of thing, even though there's copious references to heritage backgrounders, I promise you. But the reality is that most of this work gets done by people at the local level. It's the people living next door to you. It's the people in the Kiwanis Club with you. it's the people in your church group that are all over the place, right?

I mean, we all know people like this. And so the first thing to do is to prove your own integrity, right? Find something that they think is very, very important that you do agree with, right? And you build that. Find the common ground. And then learn how to make these arguments. And I can tell you from being in the fight, I'll anonymize this a bit. But a woman that I'm thinking of that is not religious.

She's been very much on the left her entire life with self-ademic. identify that way. And I was with her on a gender ideology thing. He said, you know, it occurs to me, she said a couple of years ago I would have thought of you as a bigot, probably. And I'm realizing that maybe I don't fully understand why conservatives think what they do. And so I'm wondering, I'm sure that we have a different view of, you know, say same-sex marriage and abortion. I think those were the issues she brought up. So how would you make an argument, as I put it, that marriage is intrinsically about natural marriage, about the conjugal reality of male and female, and then how would you make the pro-life argument? And I sort of laid it out, you know, and I laid it out in a way that

didn't presuppose any kind of sectarian ideas. She, gosh, you know, I guess I disagree with that, but that's a lot more rational than I would never have been able to imagine that that was the thinking process for conservatives a couple of years ago. It's the occasion of agreeing with us on something that's so fundamental that becomes an opportunity for conversations that I guarantee you I was not able to have with anybody a few years ago. Yeah, wow. I want to take the last few minutes and speak specifically for parents because parents are having to navigate these cultural issues like they have never had to before.

I mean, you think about gender issue, abortion, any of these things, when there was a time not long ago where it's like, okay, maybe when my kids in high school, maybe when they're in middle school have these conversations. Well, now kids in elementary school are being exposed to this. What is your advice for parents having to have these conversations with their kids at such young ages? This is difficult. And I can tell you that we had to do this with our youngest daughter because we lived in Seattle at one point now, actually in Seattle. Yeah, exactly.

It forced it upon you. The general approach is you want inoculation rather than quarantine or overexposure. So think of ideas as, you know, pathogens floating around. But there's some good ones. There's probiotics, but there are a lot of pathogenic ideas floating around. In that kind of environment, you don't want to expose a child with a weak immune system, right, to deadly pathogens. On the other hand, you don't want to put them in a bubble where they can't build up their immunity, right? That's how ideas are.

And so you need to be the one introducing them. You need to be the one that first introduces them to things and do it in a really serious way appropriate to their age so that it's not a surprise. there's nothing enticing about it when they see it. And we just have to, we have to inoculate our kids younger than we would have even a few years ago. And here's why. Because there is a concerted, intentional campaign to expose and indoctrinate kids at a very young age. Look, that's what the gender unicorn and the gender bred person. That's what that's about.

It's giving the conceptual categories to a five-year-old so that instead of thinking that there are males and females, they think in terms of these, you know, gendered spectrums. It's literally trying to replace what would otherwise be the natural categories of thought that a child would develop. That's what the other side is doing. If you don't pay any attention to that or you think, well, you know, I have a nice, the school, elementary school, my worst, my most irritated argument that I hear from people, it's, well, the principal's a Christian. This is what Christians will tell themselves. It's like, okay, I know I live in the most toxic city in the world.

and I know there's some bad stuff happening in public schools, but there's this one official at the school that I like. So what? I mean, what atmosphere are they in, right? You need to, if anything, be paranoid. Don't be obnoxious. Find out exactly what's being taught, exactly what's being exposed.

Your kids are being exposed to. And if you don't know and anyone's cagey, don't write that off charitably. Assume that there's something bad happen. Yeah. The book is Fight the Good Fight, How an Alliance of Faith and Reason, can win the culture war. Jay, how can we follow your work? So if you want to follow my random thoughts in real time on exit at Dr. Jay Richards,

and of course here at the Heritage Foundation, heritage.com. Excellent. Jay, thank you so much. Really appreciate your time. Thank you, Virginia. And with that, that's going to do it for today's episode. Thanks so much for joining us here on the Daily Seagull podcast. If you have not had the chance, make sure to check out our evening show right here in this podcast feed where we bring you the... top news of the day. Also make sure that you hit that subscribe buttons. You never miss out on

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