You may recall that Richard Dawkins, Steve Pinker, and I resigned from the Honorary Board of the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) because they canceled a post I wrote for the FFRF—a statement they first vetted, approved, and published but then removed—without telling me or answering my email inquiries. (My canceled piece is archived here, and was written in response to a FFRF intern’s piece that’s still there, asserting that “A woman is whoever she says she is.”).
What happened to that Honorary Board? Well, there were a fair number of people on it, but the Religion News Service (RNS) reported that the entire board was dissolved. I verified that by talking to the reporter, who assured me that the Presidents of the FFRF had indeed told her the board was gone, an ex-Board singing to the Choir Invisible. From the RNS:
The nation’s largest freethought organization has dissolved its honorary board after three of its prominent members resigned in an ideological battle over transgender issues.
The resignations from the Freedom From Religion Foundation, a group that fights for church and state separation, included well-known evolutionary biologists Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne and psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker.
The three resigned after the foundation published, and then removed, an article by Coyne in which he argued that sex is mostly binary (either male or female) and that transgender women are more likely to be sexual predators than other women.
The post, which drew intense backlash, was taken down on Dec. 28, one day after it was published, prompting Coyne, Dawkins and Pinker to resign from the foundation. That led the foundation to dissolve the 14- member honorary board.
. . . In an interview with RNS, Annie Laurie Gaylor, the co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, took responsibility for publishing and then removing Coyne’s article.
The reporter told me that Annie Laurie herself noted the Board’s dissolution. I suspect the FFRF did this so that Honorary Board members wouldn’t be able to do what I did (criticdize the FFRF’s position on its website), or perhaps because the FFRF didn’t want any more resignations.
But the board is still listed as existing! You can see the 15 members listed on this FFRF site with quite a few people you’ll have heard of.
I am curious about this, but I’m not going to write the FFRF because they don’t answer my emails, and clearly think I’m lower than a snake’s belly. But they really should tell the public the truth, not to mention all those 15 members who seem to be in Honorary Purgatory. My view is this: although the FFRF has done good work, and is still doing so, they are going down a dangerous road: conflating opposition to their “progressive” political stands with “white Christian nationalism.”
They are conflating these issues because the FFRF, along with many other secular and humanist organizations (see below) are politically progressive (i.e., extreme Left), but the FFRF, at least, wants to maintain the fiction that its mission is unchanged: to keep church and state separate and educate the public abut the First Amendment. If they want to engage in ideological mission creep yet still pretend they’re only upholding the First Amendment, the FFRF and other allies must tar their opponents with the label of “White Christian Nationalist” or just “Christian Nationalist” so that they can still appear to be keeping religion out of politics.
The problem with this is that neither Steve, Richard, nor I are Christian Nationalists, though we’re white. Our opposition to extreme gender politics and its assertion that you are whatever sex you claim to be is not based on Christianity or nationalism. Richard is of course a Brit, Steve and I are both secular Jews, and none of us are “nationalists”. And many agree with us who are nonbelievers as well.
I guess it’s okay if the FFRF pushes this kind of gender activism. After all, they can take whatever stand they want, even if it’s badly misguided. (“You’re a woman if you say you’re one.”) But it becomes doubly misguided when they engage in the rhetorical duplicity of saying that this is merely fighting Christian nationalism. There are plenty of people who oppose the excesses of gender activism who are neither white nor Christian nor atheists.
Finally, it looks as if almost every other humanist/atheist/skeptical organization in the West has signed on to the pretense that opposing extreme gender activism equates to espousing Christian nationalism. Have a look at the statement below (click on headline), signed in January by sixteen different freethought groups:
An excerpt (bolding is mine):
As the 119th Congress and state legislative sessions begin across the nation — and the incoming Trump-Vance administration prepares to take office — the extreme White Christian nationalist movement and their politician enablers have made it clear that LGBTQ-plus Americans, particularly trans people, will be singled out for discrimination, exclusion and attacks in 2025. Indeed, this dangerous movement has made anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and policies a cornerstone of their agenda.
As organizations committed to protecting the separation of government and religion, as well as universal human and civil rights threatened by the White Christian nationalist ideology, the undersigned organizations reaffirm our commitment to forcefully advocate for the rights of LGBTQ-plus Americans, create inclusive and welcoming communities, represent the interests of our diverse constituents, and act in accordance with our values.
. . . We will not permit religious extremists to foment a moral panic, encourage harassment or violence, and enact dangerous policies that seek to force LGBTQ-plus Americans generally — and trans Americans in particular — out of public life and out of existence. Nor will we sit silently or ignore when the talking points, misinformation and outright fabrications of anti-LGBTQ-plus extremists are laundered and given a veneer of legitimacy or acceptability by those who hold themselves out as voices of reason or science.
. . . we stand with our trans members, supporters, and constituents. We will continue to advocate for policies that protect the civil and human rights of every community that comes under threat from the White Christian nationalist ideology. And we will ensure that the inherent dignity and worth of all people is respected within our community and beyond.
Well, those opposing extreme gender ideology may be fomenting things, but it’s not because we’re white, religious, or nationalistic. And have these organizations ever considered that there may be many black people or Hispanics who also oppose gender activism? One might even say that blaming all this stuff on white people is a form of racism.
At any rate, this pinning the blame on White Christian Nationalism is very fishy (note that one signer, the head of the American Atheists, is named Nick Fish, while another, our friend who heads the American Humanist Association, is named Fish Stark). It’s not only knowingly misleading, but evades the substance of our concerns by simply blaming them on “White Christian ideology”. These organizations are supposed to deal in honest argumentation and truth, not in smearing all their opponents with misleading labels.
As I mentioned a few days ago, only one humanist/skeptical/atheist organization of note has refused to endorse this conflation: the Center for Inquiry (CFI). Three days after the sixteen organizations published their screed, CFI put up this post, signed by President Robyn Blumner, who is also Executive Director of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science (click to read):
An excerpt (bolding is again mine):
For instance, if there is a medical clinical trial for women to determine if a medication has a different impact on women than men, should transgender women participate? If transgender women are to be considered the same as natal women, the answer is “yes” they should participate. However, science suggests otherwise, because they are not biologically the same.
Saying as much doesn’t make you a tool of Christian nationalism.
There are other places where the biology of sex has a significant role to play. In sports, for instance. Once male puberty has occurred, it is no longer fair physiologically for whoever has benefited from it to compete in almost any category of women’s sports. At least that is what the science and evidence demonstrate.
One of the most contested areas involves transitioning minors before they reach the age of majority. In light of the latest research and actions by several European countries that have stepped back from such medical interventions, the way “gender-affirming care” is practiced in the United States is no longer universally accepted as the most beneficial approach. There are increasing numbers of detransitioners, whether transgender activists want to believe it or not, and those stories can be just as heartbreaking as the stories of transgender-identifying children seeking medical intervention.
To elide past these complex issues and claim that only one side involves civil and human rights is simply wrong. Natal women athletes have civil rights as well. Children have human rights that include not having permanent disabling surgeries before they truly understand the consequences.
Those who think these and other areas are open to rational, scientific, evidence-based debate are not laundering the fabrications of Christian nationalists as has been charged. They are recognizing that these are not simple matters of right and wrong and that the full panoply of interests at stake should be considered.
But if the conversation is over before it even begins, if any crack of daylight between one’s point of view and that of the most extreme transgender activist is considered hateful bigotry and shall not be uttered without fear of cancellation, then that is a place where reason and science have disappeared and all that remains is vitriol, anger, and self-righteousness.
That won’t happen at CFI.
CFI will continue to promote the separation of church and state, the rights of nonbelievers here and around the world, and the end of pseudoscience wherever it arises. And we strongly disagree with people or groups who think discussion is dangerous, biology is bigotry, and science is Christian nationalism in disguise.
So we have sixteen secular groups tarring opponents of extreme gender activism as “White Christian nationalists,” and one group saying that not all of us are of that persuasion, and that we need to discuss the issues that those thirteen groups consider verboten.
But CFI is right, and that’s why I throw my hat into their ring.
Charles “Shampoo Guru” Haywood invented the psyop of “Christian Nationalism”. It’s a Woke Right dialectical counterpart to Leftist activism intended to sound like all Christians are all-in with it.
James Lindsay has a podcast “WTF is Christian Nationalism”. CN is so … I want to say dumb … but it is sophisticatedly manipulative … and not Christian (AFAIK!) when its origin literature is read. They are transforming Christianity into another cult. IMHO it’s impressed me like a strip-mall church.
There’s an organization as well, American Society for Civic Renewal.
IMHO it all plays on the No True Scotsman fallacy – but it is true that not all Christians want to breach the wall of separation between church and state.
Too many people (including, sadly, many secular/atheist/skeptical organisations that should know better) seem to think that there are only two positions: agree with me on everything (aka “good person”) and disagree with me on everything (aka “bad person”).
Hence their logic: Christian nationalists disagree with gender ideology, therefore everyone who disagrees with gender ideology is a Christian nationalist.
🎯
That ghost web page with the Honorary Board members has a sick twist: an “In Memoriam” section at the page bottom that includes a photo of Christopher Hitchens with a cherry-picked quote from God Is Not Great,
“Since it is obviously inconceivable that all religions can be right, the most reasonable conclusion is that they are all wrong.”
FFRF pointedly avoided the Hitchens quotation that would have been more apt for the “trans” nonsense and the Board’s dissolution,
“One must have the nerve to assert that, while people are entitled to their illusions, they are not entitled to a limitless enjoyment of them and they are not entitled to impose them upon others.”
Love me some kickin’ Hitchens quotes!
A good point well stated.
Perhaps we need to be a little cautious about dismissing involvement of the extreme right and the role of religion in such issues. Yes reasonable people can see legitimate problems with the extreme trans perspective, but that doesn’t preclude anti-same-sex religionists from piggy-backing on our concerns and promoting more far reaching consequences. Not sure of the source or credibility, but I read somewhere (vague enough?) that Christian base who went (successfully) after Roe vs Wade are now targeting same-sex relationships. Personally I think the LGBQ community put itself at risk by adopting the trans agenda indiscriminantly, although some Lesbian organizations have criticized the women are women perspective. Not easy, especially these days, to “surgically” address issues when total commitment is the only sign of purity.
I don’t think I dismissed the involvement of the Far Right in this, as they clearly play a substantial role. My point was that you do not have to be on the Far Right (or white or Christian) to raise credible arguments against the gender extremist ideology. Further, when you do, you do not deserve to be tarred with “white Christian Nationalist” if you make such arguments.
And surely you’re not saying that we should hold our fire lest the Far Right point out that people like us agree with them on some issues!
The fear of “conservative cooties” is a powerful weapon. It’s what cowed the evidence-based medicine researcher Gordon Guyatt into abandoning both his principles as a scientist and his research contributions toward understanding medical treatments for gender dysphoria in young people. The SPLC convinced him that his research funding was contaminated by cooties, and if he didn’t want to be contaminated himself he must disavow the results of his own work.
https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/the-disaster-at-mcmaster-part-2-my
As a kicker, Guyatt also gave his own money to Égale Canada where among other things they support the inclusion of males in women’s sport.
https://egale.ca/awareness/brief-on-fina-competition-categories/
Yes, they want to outlaw same sex marriage. But I’ve NEVER read a comment on this site supporting that.
Support among straights for same-sex marriage is like the River Platte: a mile wide and six inches deep. In most jurisdictions it wasn’t legislated by popular will after a broad-based push from voters analogous to American Civil Rights Legislation, realizing The Time Had Come. Rather, Courts (as in Ontario’s Appeal Court and the U.S. Supreme Court) discovered lo and behold there was a right of same-sex couples to marry and that was that. Most straight people don’t care much one way or the other anymore but if Courts were to discover the right didn’t really exist after all (as Dobbs undid Roe as you note), many states and maybe even some Canadian provinces would enforce their old marriage laws again. As with abortion, jurisdictions that had kept unenforceable MF marriage laws on their books would have to muster the political will to rescind them if the Courts said they were now enforceable. Straight people would largely leave this for homosexuals to fight it out themselves. We have other precious now and you’re not it, we would tell them. Even if the push to undo s-s-m came from the Christian Right, which it probably would. Yawn.
Am I petty enough to regard this yawn as payback for Big Gay’s whole-hearted support of the trans agenda which, unlike homosexuality itself, directly threatens straight people and their children? Or for their waging lawfare against Christian bakers who didn’t want to make cakes for gay weddings with operating dildos that spurted fake semen over the wedding cake? (At least I think it was fake…) Damn right I am.
Mike Hart has mentioned Égale Canada, the Big Gay Octopus which functions as an arm of the Canadian State and is deep to the eyeballs in trans advocacy. I’ll just add that Égale is the plaintiff of record in the lawsuit seeking to overturn our equivalent of Skrmetti, an Alberta law to restrict gender-affirming care to minors. Dr. Guyatt’s systematic reviews on the subject are part of the evidence before the Court. Yet his donation of money to one adversarial side of an active lawsuit will make it untenable for the Alberta Government, as defendant, to call him as an expert witness to testify about his own work! When he and McMaster say it is “unconscionable” for his work to be used to restrict care to trans children, this is explicitly what they are talking about.
Ah of course I hadn’t made that connection between Guyatt, Égale, and Bill 26. You’re right they’re trying to poison the well in Alberta.
[edit to add: After thinking about it, I sort of hope they do call Guyatt to testify. I really wonder what he would say when examined under oath by a well-prepared litigator.]
Outlet of Rio de la Plata is indeed wide and shallow, but it’s not the source of its name. The English language folk etymology of Plate River is “Flat River.” However, Spanish Plata and English (outdated) Plate both mean “silver.” The word itself indeed comes from “flat” because of silver coming in sheets, but if something is “de la plata” it can only mean it is “of silver”. Cabot named it due to silver trinkets he got from the Guarani locals.
(per Wikipedia and Wiktionary)
There is a Platte River in Nebraska, a major but shallow tributary to the Missouri/Mississippi system. It was once said of a corpulent state politician that he was like the Platte: a mile wide and six inches deep, which is why I remember the jibe. The reference to the river is cited in Wikipedia, but alas not to the politician.
Used to live there… the North Platte anyway is a mile wide an an inch deep, not 6.
Considering that you and Pinker are Jewish, and Dawkins is an anti-organized religion anti-theist, it’s an obvious logical fallacy argument to label you folks as “Christian” anything or carrying the water for anything “Christian.”
My recent blog post, titled “The Psychology Behind False Smears in Political, Social, and Religious Movements: Why Partisan Idealogues Smear Those Who Differ Just a Little”
https://substack.com/home/post/p-171436166
As a Brit, I don’t know all the names in the piece, but I still found it very interesting. Thank you. I was especially interested in the point about echo chambers. The pressure to indulge in groupthink seems to have become much stronger in the last few years on social media. I think many people are too scared to step out of their echo chamber and express not only radically different opinions, but opinions that differ even slightly from the crowd.
People seem to be separating from each other rather than coming together to debate things for the common good.
“false name-calling” indeed. I agree with your premise that the driving factor is primarily insecurity. I suppose this is why I’ve been a loner all my life. I’m too curious to join groups. Intolerance all around.
I keep joining groups but I often have to ignore stuff (especially trans stuff).
I occasionally bring it up but it often causes fights, that I also find very unpleasant.
I’m not constitutionally a loner. I wish I was.
I have been a member of FFRF for 35 years. They serve a necessary function. There is an important lesson for FFRF here: just stick to your mission statement. Just deal with issues of church/state separation. It’s not like you don’t have a target-rich environment right now. I understand that the landscape has a lot of gray areas. Since most anti-abortion activists are religious and often use religious arguments, is adopting a pro-choice stance in keeping with your fundamental mission? I would have said “yes” until I discussed the matter with a decidedly unreligious person who is also decidedly anti-abortion. (He entertains the “slippery slope” argument that abortion leads to devaluing the lives of the aged, mentally and physically impaired, etc.) Anyway, just stick to shoring up that crumbling wall that stands between government and religion.
So weird that groups which cohered around enlightenment principles like evidence-based beliefs, freedom of thought and inquiry, and atheism, have become so dogmatic, illiberal, and hostile to evidence, inquiry, AND PEOPLE that might contradict their newfound woke ideology. I found Sarah Haider’s thoughts on the trans derangement of “organized atheism” and why religious people have seemingly been immunized to be fascinating.
https://newsletter.sarahhaider.com/p/response-to-critics-richard-dawkins
“White Christian nationalist” is doing even more smear work than “Commie” did for an earlier generation. The McCarthyites and others could at least point to tens of millions of “cancelled” lives in justification of their fears. Moreover, even among practicing Christians, one would need to stretch the definition to near meaninglessness to place a plurality or even a substantial minority of them into the “white Christian nationalist” frame.
I’ve never been one of those who thought the disappearance of religion would usher in some golden age (and not necessarily even a better age). The irrational, tribal, conformist, virtue-signaling, and cultish elements that can accompany it are human tendencies that likely preexist formalized religions and will long survive them. Religion can give those tendencies form. Now we have the irreligious groups illustrating they too are human, all too human.
“…one would need to stretch the definition to near meaninglessness to place a plurality or even a substantial minority of them into the “white christian nationalist” frame.”
No kidding. My eyes glaze over when I see the term. It’s just the latest dirty label used to cast ‘others’ out. I’ve never met one, have you?
Sounds like they’re flailing around to explain themselves. Flailing and failing.
My, how far skepticism has fallen. Perhaps we should set up a group called Skeptics+ and go for broke in splitting the movement that is already disintegrating, as some did before with atheism 😉
“I suspect the FFRF did this so that Honorary Board members wouldn’t be able to do what I did.”
Spot on. They can’t handle being told the truth.
The rhetoric of … seek to force LGBTQ-plus Americans generally — and trans Americans in particular — out of public life and out of existence….. is a powerful but such a bald faced lie.
How can denying men access to female bathrooms or rapists to bunk bed with women in prisons or stopping mediocre men from winning in female sports cause their death?
It is so ludicrous to claim that if you do not allow such unfairness to women and children trans people will be erased. It is such a big lie that people have believed it.
Part of the lunacy of extreme transactivism is the idea that we are obligated not just to respect the rights of trans people, but to affirm their metaphysical understanding of themselves. Thus if you don’t believe in disembodied gendered spirits or essences that got born in the wrong bodies, you are “trying to erase the existence of trans people”, or even “committing transgenocide”. Hence slogans such as “misgendering is violence”.
Someone said that they believe it, but they will never be happy unless you believe it too.
It seems all the secular, humanist, atheist and skeptic organisations are doing everything they can to get the Republicans elected at the next elections and beyond. It’s strange because I thought they were on the other side, but obviously not.
I looked at the list of organizations which signed on, and immediately noticed 2 or 3 major absences.
The Skeptic Society, headed by Michael Shermer is a big one. He’s on X routinely pushing back against gender pseudoscience.
I also don’t see Atheist Alliance of America (or Atheist Alliance International,) to which I belonged for many years. I’m not sure where they currently stand, but they didn’t sign.
There’s an interesting tendency of far-right spaces being more welcoming to the people they hate than left-wing spaces are to people they should ostensibly be sympathetic towards.
Those far-right spaces still hate, of course, but you can find open Jews and Gays in them.
Contrast the recent tendency of left-wing spaces uninviting Jews as being ‘Zionist’.
This isn’t just visible in online spaces, either. The 2024 election results showed exactly this picture, with the Republicans having the best results with minorities since Eisenhower.
The left is driving away people that agree with it on basically everything except x or y, some of whom are then absorbed by the right despite disagreeing with them on everything except x or y.
It is, in fact, what happened with me, and caused me to vote for the Christian Democrats (German elections) for the first time ever after 27 years of variously voting for Liberals, Social Democrats and Greens.
Granted, the Christian Democrats are still center right. I may be repulsed by the parties I used to favour, but not to the point of wanting to burn the country down, which is what everything further to the right than them implies.
At first glance this tendency of the left is contradicted by its second tendency, which is claiming spaces that aren’t its own, and pressuring people into conformity through this process. ‘LGBTQ’ is a prime example for this. You happen to be homosexual? Well, now you MUST be behind the transexual cause because you’re ‘LGBTQ’. Homosexuals who reject this (e.g. Fred Sargeant) are then excommunicated and no longer part of ‘LGBT’. Then add a bit of rewriting history (Fred Sargeant’s recollections of Stonewall certainly differ noticeably from the story established in the 2010s). Women who reject the transsexual narrative are no longer feminists, they’re antisemitic nationalists (e.g. Rowling; worth noting that Rowling is one of very few celebrities who both, objected to Corbyn’s antisemitic tendencies, and demonstrated genuine compassion over October 7th). And the transformation of Jewish scientists into white nationalists is of course what prompted this article.
It’s a tragedy since, ostensibly more welcoming though some right-wing spaces may seem right now, there is absolutely no question at all that they will turn on their reluctant co-belligerents the moment they get a hold on power.
This seems more than “politically progressive”.
I would use the term “politically woke progressive” where the adjective “woke” clarifies this strange evolution into an ideology denying reality and science.
Heresy against the transgender party line will be denounced not only as “Christian nationalism”, but also as Trumpism, fascism, and bourgeois Weismannism-Mendelism Morganism; and the concept of the sex binary in Biology will be dismissed as “Menshevising idealism”, just like “genes” in the good old days in the galaxy far away. Furthermore, I offer 3:1 odds that heresy toward the transgender party line will soon also be denounced as associated with dread Zionism.
I sure enjoy this site and the intelligent dialogue that follows. It makes me know there are thoughtful people with common sense and some dignity out there.
FFRF were my favorite activist atheist organization for some years. I used to give $5000 or more per year. Jerry’s experience and the sickening braindeath of Gaylor and the FFRF leadership was sickening. I don’t even like to read articles like this, because obviously once the idiotic trans brainworm attacks, these people will never recover.