Category: religion

Pinker and Tupy tout worldwide progress, espouse an objective morality

February 14, 2026 • 11:45 am

In this Free Press article, Steve Pinker and Marian Tupy (the latter identified as “the founder and editor of HumanProgress.org, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, and co-author of Superabundance”) once again recount the undoubtable progress that humanity has made over the past six or seven centuries.  The progress described here will be familiar to you if you’ve read Pinker’s two big books, Better Angels and Enlightenment Now: the progress has been in health, longevity, reduced poverty, better nutrition, less chance of violent death, and almost all indices of “well being”.

Click to read (if you have a subscription):

I’m not sure why Pinker is constantly attacked by people for touting progress, as the data are irrefutable, but I guess there’s a subgroup of “progressive” historians (and perhaps conservative ones) who like to aver that we’ve made little progress since the Middle Ages. Indeed, perhaps we’ve even regressed, and we’d be better off living in the Middle Ages. This Whiggish view is usually espoused by the religious, who say that the waning of religion has impoverished modern life. Perhaps leftish people don’t like the notion that we’re making progress (e.g., some say we’re worse off in racial relations now than during Jim Crow days), while rightish ones don’t like the palpable loss of faith of people in the West.

A few quotes:

Last month at Yale, the influential political blogger Curtis Yarvin, in a debate against Free Press contributor Jed Rubenfeld, argued that America ought to “end the democratic experiment”—and establish a monarchy. Yarvin has noted that Donald Trump is “biologically suited” to be America’s monarch. The ideas may sound extreme, but they have been influential. J.D. Vance describes Yarvin as “a friend,” and has cited his work. And Yarvin is part of a family of movements, known as the Dark Enlightenment, Techno-authoritarianism, and Neo-Reaction (NRx)—that reject the entire family of enlightenment values.

Meanwhile, theocracy is making a comeback, in movements known as theoconservatism, Christian Nationalism, and National Conservatism. The “National Conservatism Statement of Principles,” for example, declares that “where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private.” The list of signatories is a lookbook of influential conservatives, including Charlie Kirk, Peter Thiel, and Trump administration insiders Michael Anton and Russell Vought—as well as our fellow Free Press contributors Christopher Rufo and Rod Dreher.

The latter, a friend of the vice president, has said elsewhere that the West will not “recover until and unless we become re-enchanted and seek a form of Christianity, and indeed of Judaism, that is more mystical, that valorizes this direct perception of the Holy Spirit, of holiness, and of transcendence.”

. . . Of course, humanity has already tried monarchy and theocracy—during the Middle Ages—and sure enough, some of the new reactionaries are saying that those times were not so bad after all. Dreher writes admiringly: “In the mind of medieval Christendom, the spirit world and the material world penetrated each other. . . . Men construed reality in a way that empowered them to harmonize everything conceptually and find meaning amid the chaos.”

Other influential conservatives go further in justifying medieval hierarchies. On his eponymous show, Tucker Carlson recently declared: “Feudalism is so much better than what we have now. Because at least in feudalism, the leader is vested in the prosperity of the people he rules.”

One of the themes of this article is how religion has in fact been an impediment in progress, and this seems to be the strongest attack on religion I’ve seen yet from Pinker (I haven’t read Tupy before). Perhaps Steve is preparing for his debate with Ross Douthat later this month (stay tuned), which will be about God. Doubthat’s new book is Believe: Why Everyone Should be Religious.

Here’s the money quote about progress, which I’ve put in bold:

It’s said that the best explanation for the good old days is a bad memory, and the historical amnesia of the romanticizers of medieval Christendom is near-complete. Among the blessings of modernity is an Everest of data about life in the past, painstakingly collected by economic historians from original sources over many decades. This quantitative scholarship circumvents fruitless back-and-forth about whether the Dark Ages were really all that dark: We can go to the numbers.

I won’t go through the numbers, as you probably know them, but they’re impressive. Here are just a few facts:

Some numbers can shake us out of this spoiled complacency. (For sources, see our respective books Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know and Enlightenment Now.) In 1800, the European life expectancy was 33 years; today, it is 79 years—which means that we have been granted not just extra life, but an extra life. Much of that gift came from leaps in prosperity that spared the lives of children. Before the turn of the 20th century, a third to a half of European children perished before their 5th birthday. Today that fate befalls three-tenths of one percent. Even the poorest countries today lose a fraction of the children that Europe did until recently. If being spared the agony of losing a child is not “meaningful,” what is?

Do people really want to go back to medieval times if they lose, on average, 46 years of life?

But the other theme of the piece is morality. In short, religious morality impedes human well-being by not giving people an impetus to help humanity, but rather telling them to live by this or that religious dictum that will please their God. I agree with the harm to behavior done by religion, but have taken issue with Pinker and Tupy’s idea not that morality can be humanistic, which it can be, but that humanistic morality is objective rather than subjective. And they seem certain about this:

Our moral purpose, then, is to use knowledge and sympathy to reduce suffering and enhance flourishing: health, freedom, peace, knowledge, beauty, social connection.

. . .The Enlightenment project of grounding morality in reason and well-being left us with a coherent fabric of arguments against the brutality and injustice that had been ubiquitous in human history. These arguments became the foundation of civilized society.

A partial list: Kant’s categorical imperative and his practical prescriptions for peace. The American Founders’ analyses of tyranny, democracy, and fundamental rights. Bentham’s cases against cruelty to animals and the persecution of homosexuals. Astell’s brief against the oppression of women. Voltaire’s arguments against religious persecution. Montesquieu’s case against slavery. Beccaria’s arguments against judicial torture. Rousseau’s case against harsh treatment of children.

In contrast to the Enlightenment’s exaltation of universal well-being, the morality of holy scriptures was dubious at best.

Crucially, these moral conclusions were based on reasons. As Plato pointed out 2,300 years ago, morality can’t be grounded in divine edicts. If a commandment itself has no moral justification, why should we obey it? If it does, why not just appeal to the justification itself?

Such justification is not hard to find. All of us claim a basic right to our own well-being. If we were not alive, healthy, nourished, educated, and embedded in a community, we could not deliberate about morality (or anything else) in the first place. And because we are embedded in a community, where people can affect each other’s well-being, we can’t stop at this basic claim. None of us can coherently demand these conditions for ourselves without granting them to others. I can’t say “I’m allowed to hurt you, but you’re not allowed to hurt me, because I’m me and you’re not,” and expect to be taken seriously.

Now I agree that society will run better if people conduct themselves in a manner that won’t injure other people.  But to say that morality is objective, that the moral act is the one that increases “well-being”, is to buy into the fallacies that beset Sam Harris’s identical theory broached in his book The Moral Landscape.  While increasing well-being does jibe with our usual notions of what’s moral, there are problems. I’ve described some of these in a previous post called “The absence of objective morality“, asserting that, in the end, no morality is objective; all forms of morality are based on subjective preferences. I’ll quote myself here:

It’s clear that empirical observation can inform moral statements. If you think that it’s okay to kick a dog because it doesn’t mind it, well, just try kicking a dog. But in the end, saying whether it’s right or wrong to do things depends on one’s preferences. True, most people agree on their preferences, and their concept of morality by and large agrees with Sam’s consequentialist view that what is the “right” thing to do is what maximizes “well being”.  But that is only one criterion for “rightness”, and others, like deontologists such as Kant, don’t agree with that utilitarian concept. And of course people disagree violently about things like abortion—and many other moral issues.

One problem with Sam’s theory, or any utilitarian theory of morality, is how to judge “well being”. There are different forms of well being, even in a given moral situation, and how do you weigh them off against one another? There is no common currency of well being, though we know that some things, like torturing or killing someone without reason, clearly does not increase well being of either that person or of society. Yet there is no objective way to weigh one form of well being against another. Abortion is one such situation: one weighs the well being of the fetus, which will develop into a sentient human, against that of the mother, who presumably doesn’t want to have the baby.

But to me, the real killer of objective morality is the issue of animal rights—an issue that I don’t see as resolvable, at least in a utilitarian way. Is it moral to do experiments on primates to test human vaccines and drugs? If so, how many monkeys can you put in captivity and torture before it becomes wrong?  Is it wrong to keep lab animals captive just to answer a scientific question with no conceivable bearing on human welfare, but is just a matter of curiosity? Is it moral to eat meat? Answering questions about animal rights involves, if you’re a Harris-ian utilitarian, being able to assess the well being of animals, something that seems impossible. We do not know what it is like to be a bat.  We have no idea whether any creatures value their own lives, and which creatures feel pain (some surely do).

But in the end, trying to find a truly factual answer to the statement, “Is it immoral for humans to eat meat?”  or “is abortion wrong?”, or “is capital punishment wrong?” seems a futile effort. You can say that eating meat contributes to deforestation and global warming, and that’s true, but that doesn’t answer the question, for you have to then decide whether those effects are “immoral”. Even deciding whether to be a “well being” utilitarian is a choice. You might instead be a deontologist, adhering to a rule-based and not consequence-based morality.

You can make a rule that “anybody eating meat is acting immorally,” but on what do you base that statement? If you respond that “animals feel pain and it’s wrong to kill them,” someone might respond that “yes, but I get a lot of pleasure from eating meat.” How can you objectively weigh these positions? You can say that culinary enjoyment is a lower goal than animal welfare, but again, that’s a subjective judgment.

By saying I don’t accept the idea of moral claims representing “facts”, I’m not trying to promote nihilism. We need a moral code if, for nothing else, to act as a form of social glue and as a social contract. Without it, society would degenerate into a lawless and criminal enterprise—indeed, the idea of crime and punishment would vanish. All I’m arguing is that such claims rest at bottom on preference alone. It’s generally a good thing that evolution has bequeathed most of us with a similar set of moral preferences. I hasten to add, though, that what feelings evolution has instilled in us aren’t necessarily ones we should incorporate into morality, as some of them (widespread xenophobia, for instance) are outmoded in modern society. Others, like caring for one’s children, are good things to do.

In the end, I agree with Hume that there’s no way to derive an “ought” from an “is”. “Oughts” have their own sources, while “is”s may represent in part our evolutionarily evolved behaviors derived from living in small groups of hunter-gatherers. But that doesn’t make them evolutionary “oughts.”

To abortion, meat-eating, and animal rights we can now add “assisted dying.”  I favor it because I think it reduces suffering, but others say that it will actually increase net suffering by killing off people who could eventually be happy, or create societies in which people are sacrificed at will.  And don’t forget Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  If, as the authors claim, “None of us can coherently demand these conditions [of well being] for ourselves without granting them to others” then we open up a whole can of worms, especially involving war. In the end, saying that “well being” is a guide to objective morality begs the question of ethics:  we are supposed to do X because it is more moral, and that’s because it increases “well being”. But why is increasing well being always more moral? If it’s by definition, then that really is begging the question.

I’m clearly not a philosopher, but I don’t see “increasing well being” as an objective guide to what’s moral. It is a preference, based on the subjective choice that a society with more “well being” is the one we should prefer. That is usually true, I think, but not always, and runs into substantial difficulties when you try to do the moral calculus in given situations.

Otherwise, I look forward to Steve’s debate with Douthat in two weeks, which should be great fun, even if nobody changes their minds about God.

CBS/Free Press launches a series of debates and town halls. Coming up: Steve Pinker to debate Ross Douthat on God

February 12, 2026 • 9:10 am

In conjunction with its new sponsor, The Free Press, CBS News is launching a series of debates and town hall presentations. One of them is a debate about God featuring Steve Pinker and Ross Douthat, which should be a barn-burner. I am informed that that debate will take place on February 26, and will be broadcast live.

Douthat, as you know, has been flogging his new pro-Christianity book Believe: Why Everyone Should be Religious, and I’ve discussed excerpts published by Douthat here. It appears to be the usual guff, arguing that stuff about the Universe that we don’t understand, like consciousness and the “fine-tuning” of the laws of physics, comprise evidence for a creator God. Assessing all gods, Douthat (a pious Catholic) finds that the Christian one appears to be the “right” god. Are you surprised?

Pinker is an atheist, and has written about nonbelief from time to time in his books, but has not written an entire book on it.  I look forward to this debate, which will be broadcast live on THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 26, so mark your calendars. Pinker will surely be ready to answer Douthat’s shopworn “evidence,” so it should be fun.

Click below to access the general announcement.

Below: the series’ rationale and its upcoming debates and interviews. No dates and times have been announced save my finding out that Pinker vs. Douthat is on February 26.

This is, of course, the result of Bari Weiss becoming Editor of CBS News, and I’m not sure how I feel about this endeavor. Note that it’s sponsored by the Bank of America.

We live in a divided country. A country where many cannot talk to those with whom they disagree. Where people can’t speak across the political divide – or even sometimes across the kitchen table.

THINGS THAT MATTER aims to change that.

Sponsored by Bank of America, THINGS THAT MATTER is a series of town halls and debates that will feature the people in politics and culture who are shaping American life. The events will be held across the country, in front of audiences who have a stake in the topics under discussion.

This launch comes on the heels of CBS News’ successful town hall with Erika Kirk, which drove double-digit ratings increases in its time slot and generated 192 million views across TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and X – making it CBS News’ most-watched interview ever on social media.

JAC: Note that the town hall with Erika Kirk was NOT a success; it was lame and uninformative. There’s a link to the video below. Back to the blurb:

The events take Americans into the most important issues that directly affect their lives – immigration, capitalism, public health, criminal justice, foreign policy, artificial intelligence and the state of politics. The debates echo the country’s 250th anniversary, showing how the power of America’s earliest principles – civil, substantive discussion, free of rancor – have immense value today.

“We believe that the vast majority of Americans crave honest conversation and civil, passionate debate,” said Bari Weiss, editor-in-chief of CBS News. “This series is for them. In a moment in which people believe that truth is whatever they are served on their social media feed, we can think of nothing more important than insisting that the only way to get to the truth is by speaking to one another.”

Bank of America has joined THINGS THAT MATTER as its title sponsor. Tracing its lineage to 1784, Bank of America is sponsoring the series in support of dialogue and debate during the country’s 250th anniversary year.

THINGS THAT MATTERwill kick off in the new year. An early look includes:

Town Halls:

  • Vice President JD Vance on the state of the country and the future of the Republican Party.

  • OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on artificial intelligence.

  • Maryland Governor Wes Moore on the state of the country and the future of the Democratic Party.

  • In case you missed it: Turning Point USA CEO Erika Kirk on political violence, faith and grief – watch it here.

Debates:

  • Gen Z and the American Dream: Isabel Brown and Harry Sisson. Should Gen Z Believe in the American Dream?

  • God and Meaning: Ross Douthat and Steven Pinker. Does America Need God?

  • The Sexual Revolution: Liz Plank and Allie Beth Stuckey. Has Feminism Failed Women?

Readers are welcome to weigh in below on the topics and format of this forum.

God: celestial dictator or kindly father?

February 3, 2026 • 10:00 am

The only television show I watch regularly is the NBC Evening News: I watch the whole thing from 5:30-6, completely ignoring phone calls and other disturbances. Last night the lead story was about the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, the mother of Savannah Guthrie, a well-liked NBC news journalist and co-anchor of the network’s Today show.  Mother and daughter were close, with Nancy often appearing on Savannah’s show.

Nancy Guthrie was 84, and simply disappeared from her home in Tucson, Arizona on Sunday.  She has limited mobility, and when she didn’t show up for church a friend called the police, who discovered her disappearance.  Nancy Guthrie relies on medication that she must take every 24 hours or she might die.  An interview with the local sheriff revealed that there were signs of violence, and that Nancy was probably abducted.  It’s now Tuesday, so she might already be dead.

The NBC news, both national and local, gave the disappearance not only the lead story, but also lots of air time because Savannah’s a member of the network family. The first paragraph of the NBC national news story is this:

“TODAY” co-anchor Savannah Guthrie is asking for prayers for her mother’s safe return as Arizona authorities continue to investigate her possible abduction.

Savannah also related, on the evening news, that the greatest gift she got from her mother was a deep belief in God, as you see in the plea for prayers above.  On the local NBC news, anchor Alison Rosati ended her report on the disappearance by saying that she and other NBCers were also praying for Nancy Guthrie.

This is a tragedy for the Guthrie family, especially because Savannah and her mom were so close, and I won’t be dismissive of the call for prayers by nearly all the reporters. It did, however, get me thinking about people’s views about what prayers are supposed to accomplish, how they’re received by the God people imagine, and how educated people (Savannah has a J.D. from Georgetown Law) come to think that prayers are useful.

It’s clear that all the calls for prayer by newspeople reflect the still-pervasive religiosity of America, though I’m not sure whether, for some, the call for prayer is just a pro forma expression of sympathy. But surely for many prayers are supposed to work: God is supposed to hear them and do something—in this case intercede to help bring Nancy Guthrie back alive. And that got me thinking about how people connect prayer with the listener: God. Religious Jews are, by the way, among the most fervent pray-ers, with prayer serving as a constant connection with God.  And, like prayers in other religions. Jews sometimes use prayer to ask for personal benefits or simply to propitiate God.

The train of thought continued. What kind of God is more likely to effect changes requested in prayer? If God is omniscient, omnipotent, and good, wouldn’t He know that people want things, like Nancy Guthrie’s return, and not need their prayers to find out? (He presumably can read people’s minds.) A god who requires prayers to effect change would be dictatorial and mean-spirited, demanding that obsequious people supplicate and propitiate him. But surely that’s not the kind of God most Christians imagine. (My feeling is that Jews envision a somewhat angrier God—the one in the Old Testament.)

Nevertheless, despite quasi-scientific studies showing that intercessory prayers don’t work, people ignore that data, as of course they would; it’s tantamount to admitting that there’s no personal God who has a relationship with you.  Sam Harris has suggested that these studies are weak, and Wikipedia quotes him this way:

Harris also criticized existing empirical studies for limiting themselves to prayers for relatively unmiraculous events, such as recovery from heart surgery. He suggested a simple experiment to settle the issue:[32]

Get a billion Christians to pray for a single amputee. Get them to pray that God regrow that missing limb. This happens to salamanders every day, presumably without prayer; this is within the capacity of God. I find it interesting that people of faith only tend to pray for conditions that are self-limiting.

He has a point of course, and that experiment would never work.  But it’s intercessory prayer. Perhaps God answers only prayers coming from the afflicted themselves. But that implies that the “thoughts and prayers” of other people, as in the Guthrie case, are useless. In the end, the very idea of petitionary and intercessory prayer being effective implies that God is, as Christopher Hitchens said, like a Celestial Dictator presiding over a divine North Korea, requiring constant propitiation by obsequious believers. How could it be otherwise?

One response by liberal religionists is that one prays not for help, but simply as a form of meditation or rumination.  In other words, perhaps putting things into words—even words that nobody is hearing—helps you as a form of therapy, or in sorting out your thoughts and problems. That’s fine, though it’s unclear why rumination alone wouldn’t suffice.

I won’t deny anybody their belief in God, but I don’t want people forcing their beliefs on me, which is what occurs when newspeople ask for my prayers. I have none to give, though I wish people in trouble well, and hope that Nancy Guthrie returns.

These thoughts may sound cold-hearted, but they’re similar to what Dan Dennett wrote in his wonderful essay, “Thank Goodness“, describing who should really have been thanked for saving his life after a near-fatal aortic dissection:

What, though, do I say to those of my religious friends (and yes, I have quite a few religious friends) who have had the courage and honesty to tell me that they have been praying for me? I have gladly forgiven them, for there are few circumstances more frustrating than not being able to help a loved one in any  more direct way. I confess to regretting that I could not pray (sincerely) for my friends and family in time of need, so I appreciate the urge, however clearly I recognize its futility. I translate my religious friends’ remarks readily enough into one version or another of what my fellow brights have been telling me: “I’ve been thinking about you, and wishing with all my heart [another ineffective but irresistible self-indulgence] that you come through this OK.” The fact that these dear friends have been thinking of me in this way, and have taken an effort to let me know, is in itself, without any need for a supernatural supplement, a wonderful tonic. These messages from my family and from friends around the world have been literally heart-warming in my case, and I am grateful for the boost in morale (to truly manic heights, I fear!) that it has produced in me. But I am not joking when I say that I have had to forgive my friends who said that they were praying for me. I have resisted the temptation to respond “Thanks, I appreciate it, but did you also sacrifice a goat?” I feel about this the same way I would feel if one of them said “I just paid a voodoo doctor to cast a spell for your health.” What a gullible waste of money that could have been spent on more important projects! Don’t expect me to be grateful, or even indifferent. I do appreciate the affection and generosity of spirit that motivated you, but wish you had found a more reasonable way of expressing it.

In other words, “thoughts” are fine; “prayers,” not so much.

I’m writing this simply to work out my own thoughts about prayer and its ubiquity, but I would appreciate hearing from readers about this issue.  What do you think when you hear others asking for prayers.  Is prayer a good thing, and what does it presume about God?  Any thoughts (but no prayers) are welcome, and put them below.

Paul Bloom: The “god-shaped hole” is a myth

January 21, 2026 • 10:00 am

I’ve posted many times about the “God-shaped hole” (GSH) that all of us are supposed to have. In case you’ve been in, say, Alma-Ata, you will know what it is: it’s the longing for religious faith that nearly all of us are supposed to harbor, a lacuna that, unless filled by belief in God, leaves us miserable and unsatisfied with life.

Of course the GSH is bogus: many of us are atheists and don’t feel any longing for religion. Further, if you’re a nonbeliever, it’s very hard if not impossible to force yourself to believe the pablum shoved down our throats by the faithful—or those who, nonbelievers themselves, like the NYT’s Lauren Jackson, see belief as the spackle we need to fill America’s GSH.  As I’ve written several times, the GSH is touted these days as the force behind America’s so-called “return to religion”, which is not an increase in faith but a temporary pause in a long-term drop in faith.

In his essay “What if false beliefs make you happy?“, my philosopher friend Maarten Boudry (also an atheist) criticizes the view that we should believe things even if they’re dubious, so long as they comfort us. An excerpt:

But such a project of self-deception cannot tolerate too much in the way of self-reflection. You don’t just have to bring yourself to believe in God; you must also – and simultaneously – forget that this is in fact what you’re doing. As long as you remain aware that you’re engaging in a project of self-deception, I doubt that Pascal’s advice will achieve the desired effect. At the very least, there will always be some nagging doubt at the back of your mind about why you embarked on this whole church-going and hymn-singing project in the first place. And remember that you can only reap the benefits of your beneficial misbelief if you truly and sincerely believe it.

After being astounded that some of his friends would indeed take a pill that, overnight, would make you truly believe in an afterlife (and forget you took that pill), Boudry says this:

Is such a life of voluntary delusion really what you should want? Even if you don’t have any objections against untruthfulness per se, how can you foresee all of the consequences and ramifications of your false belief in an afterlife, or in any other comforting fiction? If you were absolutely convinced that your personal death (or that of other people) doesn’t really matter, because there’s another life after this one, you might end up doing some crazy and reckless things. [JAC: like flying airplanes into the World Trade Center.] And if you genuinely believe that you are wonderfully talented, that your health is perfectly fine or that your spouse is not cheating on you (despite extensive evidence to the contrary), you may still be “mugged by reality” later on. Reality, as the writer Philip K. Dick argued, is that which, after you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

In an essay on his Substack column (click the screenshot below to read for free), psychologist Paul Bloom denies that we even have a GSH:

A couple of excerpts: He starts by explaining what the GSH is and then says why he doesn’t think it’s ubiquitous:

There was always reason to be skeptical. For one thing, the idea of inborn spiritual yearning never made much evolutionary sense. There are plausible enough accounts of how we could evolve other appetites, including basic ones like hunger and thirst, and fancier ones such as a desire for respect and a curiosity about the world around us. But why would evolution lead us to be wired up for spiritual yearning? How would that lead to increased survival and reproduction? Perhaps it’s a by-product of other evolved appetites, but I’ve never seen an account of this that’s even close to convincing.

I know the theistic response here: So much the worse for biological evolution! Some theists would argue that the universal yearning for the transcendent is evidence for divine intervention during the evolutionary process. They would endorse Francis Collins’ proposal that God stepped in at some point after we separated from other primates and wired up the hominid brain to endow us with various transcendental features, such as an enlightened morality and a spiritual yearning for the Almighty.

I think there are a lot of problems with this view (see here for my critical response to Collins’ proposal), but the main one I want to focus on here is that it’s explaining a phenomenon that doesn’t exist. There is no good evidence that spiritual yearning is part of human nature. Children are certainly receptive to the religious ideas that their parents and the rest of society throw at them (they are very good at acquiring all forms of culture), but I’ve seen no support for the view that they spontaneously express a spiritual yearning that isn’t modeled for them. Children raised by secular parents tend to be thoroughly secular.

Bloom then criticizes the “milder” view that we might not be born with a drive to seek God, but experience of the world will eventually force the “reflective person” to seek the transcendent. The factors said to promote this drive are things we don’t like, especially “death, injustice, the seeming randomness of tragedy and good fortune, and so on.”  But I don’t see that, either.  In fact, the more reflective you are, the more likely you should be to believe things based on a mental Bayesian process: believing things more firmly when there’s more evidence supporting them. And only those with a bent for spirituality in the first place would think that injustice or death would raise the prior probability that there’s a God. As I’ve said, I always dowgrade my opinion of someone’s ability to reason when I find they’re believers in God. (I don’t do this so often with people in the distant past, when many phenomena were imputed to God that we now know have a scientific explanation.)

Bloom dismissed this milder form of the GSH hypothesis when he returned from a Templeton-run conference in which theologian Tony Jones was on a panel called “Yearning and Meaning,” and all the panelists were asked what finding of their work was most surprising. (As you see below, Jones has written about this at greater length.) The bolding is Bloom’s

 I used to think this was plausible enough, but I just came back from a conference where I heard Tony Jones talk about this work with Ryan Burge. Jones and Burge are the principal investigators of a Templeton-funded project studying Americans who claim to be not affiliated with any religion. There are a lot of these “Nones”—about 30% of Americans, with the proportion rising to 45% when you look at Gen Z.

Jones was on a panel called “Yearning and Meaning,” and the conference organizer went around to each panelist and asked what their most surprising finding was. Rather than try to quote Jones from memory, I’ll draw on his Substack post where he talked about this finding. (This post is also where I got the Pascal quotation I used above.)

His finding concerned a specific subgroup of “Nones”. As Jones and Burge find, not all the self-described “Nones” really reject the transcendent. Some of them are indistinguishable from religious people—they just don’t like to call themselves “religious”—others fall into the category of “spiritual-but-not-religious”. The interesting finding concerns those Nones who are totally secular.

Another large group — 33 million Americans — we classify as the Dones, or the Disengaged. Ninety-nine percent of them report praying “seldom or never.” Same for how often they attend a religious service. They’re not going to get married or buried in a church. They’re not going to let their kids go to Young Life camp.

And here’s the finding.

And they don’t have a God-shaped hole. They don’t long for religion, and they don’t miss it. You might say they’re filling that hole with other things (travelling soccer teams, mushrooms, Crossfit), but that doesn’t show up in the data. Their mental health and well-being indicators are a couple points lower than the Nones who look more religious, but it’s not a massive chasm. They aren’t religious or spiritual, and they’re just fine, thank you very much.

The title of his post is: Pascal Was Wrong: There (Probably) Is No God-Shaped Hole.

It shouldn’t come as no surprise that the theory of a universal GSH is wrong. Religion in America is waning, and it’s been nearly gone in Europe for several centuries. You don’t see the Swedes or Danes yearning and pining for the transcendent. Like many of us, they find enough meaning in life without going beyond life; they find meaning in their work, their families, their friends, and their avocations.

Now Bloom admits that some people have a God-shaped hole:  we know from what they aver that this is the case. But the GSH is far from universal, and, as we know, you can’t force yourself to believe what you don’t believe. Further, arguments that the GSH evolved are bogus: there’s no clear connection between reproductive output and spirituality, and at any rate, the waning of religion is much faster than we would expect if it represents a reversed form of biological evolution. Two more quotes:

Bloom:

As Robert Wright points out in The Evolution of God, the claim that religion is about morality, spirituality, or the answers to “deep questions” is only true of more recent religions. These are not features of religion more generally. In a review of Wright’s book, I described early deities as “doofus gods”.

Boudry:

What if some supernatural misbeliefs have been carefully ‘designed’ by natural selection for our benefit? Even if God doesn’t exist, it was necessary for evolution to invent him. The problem is that, even if you think such evolutionary accounts are plausible, natural selection (whether in the biological or cultural realm) does not really care about our happiness. According to scholars like Ara Norenzayan and Joe Henrich, belief in moralizing Big Gods has fostered pro-sociality and enabled large-scale human cooperation. That sounds beautiful and uplifting, but if you look a little closer, it turns out that it’s mostly the nasty, vengeful, punishing gods that bring pro-social benefits. The sticks works better than the carrot. Which raises the question: is belief in a wrathful god who will torture you in hell if you disobey him really good for you, even if we assume that it has helped to scale up human cooperation?

At the end, Bloom admits two more things about evolution beyond saying that yes, some people have a GSH. These are the two:

Second, I do think that religion is in some sense a natural outgrowth of the human mind. If you dropped children on a desert island and waited a few dozen generations to see the society that they came up with, my bet is that this society would include religion.

I disagree. The existence of “nones”, as well as the waning of religion, disprove the idea that faith is a “natural outgrowth of the human mind”.  Until the suggested experiment is done, I reject that claim.

Third, I agree that we are drawn towards meaning; this was a central theme of my book The Sweet Spot. But, along the same lines as what I just said about religion, the sort of meaning that we are drawn to isn’t inherently spiritual or transcendental. Meaningfulness encompasses such secular activities such as deep, satisfying relationships and difficult pursuits that make a difference in the world. Some people do find meaning in religion, but this is just one source among many.

I disagree again, but only mildly.  What we’re drawn to are things that give us pleasure and fulfillment. If you want to call that “meaning”, fine.  Yes, people are social and seek the company of others; and that’s likely a result of how we evolved. But does that suggest that we are drawn to other people to fill a meaning-shaped hole? No more than we’re drawn to eat because we have a “food-shaped hole.”

A while back I asked readers to tell us what they thought gave their life “meaning and purpose.” There were 373 answers, more than I’ve gotten for any other post on this site. And, almost without exception, they said that whatever meaning and purpose they found in life was simply the meaning and purpose they brought to it—without God.  I would go further and say that meaning and purpose (like our feeling of “agency”) are not usually there in advance and that we strive to fulfill them, but more often are post facto rationalizations of the things we discovered that bring us happiness and joy. (Yes, there are some people who decide to be priests or nuns in advance, but I claim most people, even secular ones, don’t set out to fill a “meaning-shaped hole” in their being.)  They discover what they like to do, and then do it. That becomes “purpose and meaning.”

In short, the God-shaped hole is a crock.

h/t: Robert

More osculation of religion by the NYT and Free Press

January 19, 2026 • 11:20 am

I’ve often pointed out that the mainstream media seems curiously soft on religion, taking the stance that religion is good for America and can heal it in these troubled times. But they never ask—and don’t seem to care—whether religion is true.  Instead, they insist that filling the “God-shaped hole”—a spiritual lacuna that supposedly exists in all of us—is what we need to be complete and happy human beings.

The New York Times is particularly guilty of pushing superstition as a nostrum. For two years, until 2023, they had a regular column and newsletter called “On Faith,” by Tish Harrison Warren, an Anglican priest who relentlessly pushed religion. (You can see my many posts criticizing her here.)  There were, of course, no atheists writing to point out that the God that Warren extolled weekly didn’t seem to exist.

Now Lauren Jackson, who professes nonbelief but is a spiritual “seeker”, has replaced Warren with a weekly newsletter and column called “Believing”. You can see the list of her columns here, and my post about the column here. Here’s one example below (click to read, or find it (archived here)

Jackson mourns her inability to fully believe:

I recognize, though, that my spiritual longing persists — and it hasn’t been sated by secularism. I want a god. I live an ocean away from that small Arkansas chapel, but I still remember the bliss of finding the sublime in the mundane. I still want it all to be true: miracles, souls, some sort of cosmic alchemy that makes sense of the chaos.

For years, I haven’t been able to say that publicly. But it feels like something is changing. That maybe the culture is shifting. That maybe we’re starting to recognize that it’s possible to be both believing and discerning after all.

I don’t think so—not without evidence for God.  Can you be discerning and believe in the Loch Ness Monster? That would be easier than believing in God, for at least there used to be some (now discredited) evidence for Nessie.

Here’s another more recent one (click to read), a column that proves that God is made in the image of humans and not the other way around:

A quote:

Reverend Albert Cleage, a leader in the Detroit civil rights movement, wanted to counter what he saw as white dominance of Christianity. He was also trying to make the church into an important center for Black political power. So he and his team commissioned an artist, Glanton Dowdell, to replace the old church building’s iconography, which at the time depicted a white pilgrim. Dowdell scouted a young Black mother and her 3-year-old son at a laundromat and told her she had a memorable face — a crisp jawline and sharp cheekbones. Would she allow him to paint her as a Black Mary?

She said yes. The resulting mural was radical for the time, but it served to both illustrate and venerate an emerging doctrine of Black liberation theology. Cleage was developing a gospel of Black nationalism, one that claimed Jesus was a Black revolutionary whose identity as such had been obscured by white people.

“The basic problem facing Black people is their powerlessness,” he once said.

Look, I don’t care what color God is, because I’m fully convinced that God is a man-made fiction. He’s a coloring book in the mind, and you can make God whatever sex or ethnicity you want. But none of that makes God’s existence more probable.

It’s curious that Jackson, who professes nonbelief, only writes positively about it, and doesn’t allow an atheistic point of view in her column. Though she herself is an unbeliever, you won’t see her discuss the problems with religion, nor will you see her write about Islam, save for tiny mentions. That’s because her brief is to console NYT readers by allowing them to think that religion is compatible with a modern, scientific outlook. Jackson, I believe, replaced Warren because Warren’s take on faith was too strong and was alienating readers. So the paper got themselves a “none” who writes good things about faith.

This also applies to the Free Press, whose softness on religion I’ve often mentioned. This piece, for example, came out just last week:

Here’s an excerpt:

There’s something simple yet profound about mingling with people who are different. At its very best, religion can tamp down feelings of distrust, disenchantment, and disconnection. At their very best, religious institutions are places where people from every economic background and political affiliation can set aside their differences and worship together. Instead of churches being engines of social capital generation and catalysts for building trust and tolerance, the growing polarization of American religion has left us lonelier, angrier, sicker, and more divided than ever before.

. . . . I am under no illusion that American religion is the greatest panacea for all that ails the United States. But people gathering under one roof to sing together, pray together, and work in common cause to create a better community and a better society will certainly move us closer to the ideals that were set forth by the Founding Fathers of our country. There’s nothing simpler and more consequential than people getting up on a Sunday morning, getting dressed, and making their way to a local house of worship.

For religion to effect these changes, isn’t it true that worshipers must share common beliefs about what’s true, and foremost among them must be the existence of God?  Well, no, because I have friends who are atheists and nevertheless go to church for the social aspects: the singing, the fellowship, the comity based on a false premise that Kurt Vonnegut called a “granfaloon.” Oh, that we could have a latter-day Mencken, who made his name in journalism even though he wrote stuff like this!:

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.

The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected.

Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration – courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.

We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
Mencken regularly railed against religion, and with good reason.  But the idea of a modern Mencken publishing this kind of stuff is inconceivable. Though more people than ever have given up belief or are “nones,” the curious respect for religion remains.

A lot more osculation of faith at The Free Press

December 24, 2025 • 11:30 am

I’ve often argued that the Free Press is soft on religion, even more so than its MSM equivalent, the New York Times. The editor of the FP, Bari Weiss, is Jewish, and although it’s not clear to me exactly what she believes (is there a God?), you’ll never see her criticizing religion. Her partner, Nellie Bowles, converted to Judaism, (I believe you have to espouse belief for that–a double entendre), and I can’t remember ever reading anything antireligious or pro-atheism on the site. (I may have missed something.) And now the editors have recruited at least four more religionists as part of a long series about religion celebrating America’s 250th anniversary.

There will be monthly paeans to religion for a year, and it may already have been going for a while.  One of the paeans is below: a long, tedious piece about how American required not only the Bible to attain equality of its citizens, but the Old Testament. It’s no accident, of course, that the author, Meir Yaakov Soloveichik, is an Orthodox rabbi.  (More rabbis to come!) The American experiment, he avers, involved the replacement of an earthly king with a heavenly one: God (Yahweh in his case). Well, maybe he was right, but in the end there’s no evidence for a God who makes us all equal. And religion, despite the rabbi’s claim, is waning in America, but the idea of equality remains.

Here’s the editors’ intro to the piece (bolding is mine):

Of all the radical ideas at the heart of the American founding, freedom of religion stands apart. Rarely in human history has a nascent nation rejected religious uniformity and bet instead on liberty, trusting that faiths can live side by side, peacefully and equally. In doing so, America didn’t banish faith, but made room for it to thrive in all its depth and diversity.

For this month’s installment of our America at 250 series, a yearlong celebration of the country’s big birthday, we’re spotlighting faith and how it helped build our nation. You’ll hear from Catholic magazine editor R. R. Reno on how his marriage to a Jewish woman drew him closer to God; from David Wolpe on two towering prophets of history; from Matthew Walther on the kaleidoscope of American religious life; and more.

Today, we kick things off with the great Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, who explains why the flourishing of biblical faith in the new country provided the basis for American equality. For, he writes, “In rejecting monarchy, Americans were not insisting that they had no king, but that their king was God.”—The Editors

If you subscribe, click below to read what the sweating rabbi is trying to say. If you don’t subscribe, well, you have an extra hour to do something fun:

The piece is not particularly well written, and I don’t think it makes its case, but I don’t want to waste time doing an exegesis of this. I just want to show how the Free Press keeps highlighting the benefits of faith—in this case historical ones—over and over again. And I’ll omit all the well-known stuff about the role of religion in the Continental Congress (objections to prayers, etc.) But here’s what the piece says about the Jewish foundation of Americ (all quotes are indented).

John Adams wrote that evening [in 1771] to his wife: “I never saw a greater Effect upon an Audience. It seemed as if Heaven had ordained that Psalm to be read on that Morning. I must beg you to read that Psalm.” A passage from the Hebrew Bible, describing a divine defense from one’s enemies, so united the members of the new Congress that it seemed heaven-sent.

For the Catholic philosopher Michael Novak, this anecdote highlights the prominent role played by the stories, imagery, and ideas of Hebrew scripture in the American revolution. In contrast to Christian texts, which are devoted to describing a kingdom that is “not of this earth,” the tale of biblical Israel is all about a polity that is very earthly indeed. Thus, as Novak noted in On Two Wings, his account of the role of faith in the American founding, “practically all American Christians erected their main arguments about political life from materials in the Jewish Testament.” The story of the Jews offered early Americans a tale from which they could find inspiration in their own crisis.

It also offered another advantage. Focusing on Judaic texts allowed the revolutionaries to avoid exegetical issues pertaining to Christian theology. “Lest their speech be taken as partisan,” Novak added, “Christian leaders usually avoided the idioms of rival denominations—Puritan, Quaker, Congregationalist, Episcopal, Unitarian, Methodist, and Universalist. The idiom of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was a religious lingua franca for the founding generation.” As a means of uniting the diverse group, Novak continues, “the language of Judaism came to be the central language of the American metaphysic—the unspoken background to a special American vision of nature, history, and the destiny of the human race.” Psalm 35 would serve as a symbol of the fact that patriots across America could indeed pray together.

Here it’s not just religion that was the bedrock foundation of America, but Old Testament Judaism.  Of course, the vast majority of Americans when the country was founded were Christians, and presumably accepted the Jesus stories, but this shows how historians can emphasize some stuff as opposed to other stuff to make their case

And here’s how Thomas Paine, himself an atheist, nevertheless foisted “belief in belief” on Americans in his influential pamphlet Common Sense. “Belief in belief”—the view that it’s good for the “little people” (Americans) to believe in God even if the intellectuals don’t—seems to be the point of view pushed by the Free Press, and, to me, explains why they don’t publish articles that dismantle belief. But I digress.

Paine privately denied the reality of revelation and scorned scripture as fantasy. (He would later voice his views on religion in The Age of Reason, ruining his reputation in America.) But America was a biblically literate land, and with Benjamin Rush’s help, Paine wrote for his audience in Common Sense. The pamphlet—probably the most influential published polemic in the history of the world—changed the way in which Americans regarded their king and monarchy in general.

The essence of Paine’s argument is easy to miss today. In rejecting monarchy, Americans were not insisting that they had no king, but that their king was God. “But where, says some, is the King of America?” Paine asks in Common Sense; “I’ll tell you Friend, he reigns above, and doth not make havoc of mankind like the Royal Brute of Britain.” Not all patriots approved of the pamphlet; John Adams thought its arguments overwrought and exaggerated. But Paine spoke for the many whose own sentiments were evolving. Subjects who had once revered their king were beginning to conclude that the texts of ancient Israel pointed to a new way of seeing themselves.

The tale of America is not merely that of a break with Britain; it is equally a tale of a group of colonists who came to conclude that their equality derived from the monarchy of the Almighty.

There’s more:

But the fact remains that shorn of biblical faith, no cogent explanation can be given for the doctrine of equality that lies at the heart of the American creed. Indeed, the other sources of antiquity to which the Founders turned for inspiration—the philosophers of Greece and the statesmen of Rome—denied human equality and held a worldview that there were those destined to rule and others born to serve. As the Yale legal scholar Stephen L. Carter reflected in Civility: Manners, Morals, and the Etiquette of Democracy, to this day “faith in God provides a justification for the equality that liberal philosophy assumes and cherishes but is often unable to defend.”

This is bushwah. Of course a cogent nonreligious argument can be given for the doctrine of equality that lies at the heart of the American creed. Read any ethical philosopher (John Rawls is one example), or read the article on “Eauality” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, where the word “God” appears precisely once, and only in a discussion of how Christianity espoused an equality of humans before God.

But even if this historical interpretation be true, as Americans become more and more either atheists or “nones” (those not affiliated with a specific church or faith), the rationale for equality would seem to have disappeared. It hasn’t, because we now base it on humanism, not religion. If you stopped someone in the street and asked Americans why all people are equal before the law, I doubt they say “because that’s what the Old Testament dictates.” They may mutter something about all men being created equal from the Declaration of Independence, but philosophers who give us a rational basis for equality rely not on Divine Command but on secular arguments.

At the end, Rabbi Soloveichik raises the new canard that the waning of religion in America has slowed. They make a great deal about the plateau shown below:

Europeans may wonder at the way our politics is consumed by a culture war that is linked to differences regarding religion, but these debates endure in America because, unlike the largely secular continent across the ocean that was once the cradle of Christendom, faith continues to matter to so many millions of Americans. Even the much-discussed contemporary phenomenon known as the rise of the “nones”—Americans who do not belong to a faith at all—seems to have slowed. Few Americans today know the final lyrics of “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” but when God is invoked in our public life, it is meant to remind us of the unique way equality emerged in America, the way religion impacted how Americans came to see themselves.

As we mark America’s 250th anniversary, it is impossible to know with any certainty what the next decades will bring for our country. But looking back on the past, one prediction can be safely made. Religion in America has always defied the predictions of its demise, and on the 300th birthday of the United States, there will be citizens of this country who will rejoice in their equality—and thank the almighty monarch of America for it.

Mind you, religiosity hasn’t reversed its long-term trend of decreasing; it just has hit a plateau.  Here’s a graph from the Pew article cited by the rabbi:

BUT that goes back to only 2007, and deals only with Christianity. (I bet Islam would show growth.) Let’s take a longer view, looking at Pew data from 1972 to about 2021.  Christianity has fallen nearly 30%, and if you looked way back to the turn of the 20th century, I bet you’d see a much bigger decline. The “plateau” touted above—believers never mention the long term—is just a small segment of the graph, and while religion may increase or remain static, that’s not the long-term trend. In the meantime, “nones” have increased nearly sixfold, and other religions just a tad. Nope, the rabbi’s huzzahs ring hollow.

Look again at the last sentence:

But looking back on the past, one prediction can be safely made. Religion in America has always defied the predictions of its demise, and on the 300th birthday of the United States, there will be citizens of this country who will rejoice in their equality—and thank the almighty monarch of America for it.

That’s bogus.  There are two predictions that can be made. The first is the rabbi’s obvious one: America will always have some religious people. Yes, faith is sadly still alive, and we’ll have to wait a few centuries until we become like Sweden or Iceland. But the more important prediction is that faith is waning. It ain’t dead yet, but it’s dying. Even so, Americans still espouse equality.

It’s time for the Free Press to publish some stuff about unbelief, its increase over time, and the reasons for it.

I couldn’t help myself. I asked ChatGPT to illustrate some early Americans worshipping God as a king. Not bad, eh?

Bari Weiss makes her CBS debut: a discussion with Erika Kirk

December 15, 2025 • 9:45 am

As I reported before, Bari Weiss, former NYT columnist and then founder of The Free Press, has become Editor-in-Chief of CBS News as the Free Press has joined Paramount, which owns CBS.  I was wary of this for one reason: how this might slant CBS News, though I never watch it anyway. The Free Press is heterodox and, most disturbingly, seems to be soft on religion. Will that infect CBS?

On Saturday night Weiss made her first appearance as a CBS news person, hosting a 45-minute “town hall meeting” with Erika Kirk, the widow of recently assassinated Charlie Kirk, head of  the conservative organization Turning Point USA (TPUSA).  I’ve put the video below.

It was not a propitious interview; in fact, it was pretty boring and repetitive. But that might have been because Erika Kirk seems to be a one-note person, devoted not only to dutifully following the principles of her husband, whom she idolized, but especially devoted to proselytizing about Jesus and God. For religion is one of the main pivots of both Kirk and TPUSA. (Kirk recently issued a book urging us all to rest on the Biblical Sabbath, called Stop, in the Name of God: Why Honoring the Sabbath Will Transform Your Life.)

The format of this town hall will probably be the one Weiss uses in her future town halls, and she promises many of them. She interviews a subject, and then select members of the audience (an audience relevant to the speaker’s beliefs) ask questions. You can see the video below.

First, let me note that Kirk is entitled to her beliefs, though I don’t think Weiss did her any favors by allowing her to proselytize ad infinitum in the interview.  Second, I do have immense sympathy for Ms. Kirk, who is left with two small children after her husband’s brutal assassination.  And the joy and glee that came out when Kirk was killed was unseemly, and surely deeply hurtful to Erika. This is not a critique of Erika Kirk, but of the show itself. And I’ll add that though I think Kirk’s murder was abhorrent and reprehensible, I still disagreed with almost all of his political stands, stands instantiated in TPUSA.

What struck me most were two things: Kirk’s evasion of any questions that were “hard”, like one asking her if she condemned Trump’s violent political rhetoric or whether words could constitute violence. Her response was almost invariably to say that the Lord (aka Jesus) will take care of everything.  For example, when she was asked whether she’d condemn Trump’s political rhetoric that was sometimes violent, she simply said that the problem was “so much deeper than just one person.” When asked to respond to Charlie’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act, she simply said that she was in favor of merit. (The Civil Rights Act was not “affirmative action” it was enacted to give blacks their Constitutional rights.)

The other issue was Kirk’s incessant proselytyzing. When asked why, she thought, God/Jesus allowed Kirk to be murdered, she said that it unleashed a big revival (I doubt it), that “the Lord is moving in ways we have no idea, and that God is going to use Charlie’s death to show the world something. Big.  God, she thinks, will use the event to allow her “to bring glory to her and his kingdom.”

The father of a murdered Jewish person asks Erika about growing antisemitism on the Right, and will she condemn individuals spreading that hate? She responds simply that we all need the Lord and Saviour (she’s referring to Jesus, but the guy asking questions was a Jew). She adds, “You cannot separate the Old Testament from the New Testament,” but I doubt she believes that. Kirk himself, though a supporter of Israel, made several remarks that seem overtly antisemitic, and TPUSA is aligned heavily with the Christian right. You do not tout Jesus to Jews.

It is God and Jesus all the way down, and Weiss did not question the foundations of Kirk’s faith, which perhaps would have been an unfair question give Erika’s emotionality.

Kirk reiterates constantly the fact that Charlie only wanted to have conversations, but that’s a bit of dissimulation, for Charlie Kirk was firm in his right-wing ideology and I doubt the conversations would ever have changed his mind. I applaud the desire to have mutual, civil, and nonviolent exchanges of views, but those conversations should be conducted in a way that each person should be able to tell us what evidence would change their minds. Charlie would never change his mind, despite the fact that he sat behind tables with signs making provocative statements and adding . . . “Change my mind.”

To her credit, Weiss and others do try to ask some hard question, like how does she intend to take up Charlie’s mission while maintaining a family. (Answer: the Lord will help her do it, and, anyway TPUSA is not a job, but her family.) When asked how she was able to trust God in the “midst of unfair and immense suffering,” Erika cites the story of Job, who was made by God to suffer for no good reason, but in the end came out okay simply because Job prayed for his friends, which made the angry God change His mind. I have never understood the point of that story, but theologians have tied themselves in knots trying to interpret it in a way that puts God in a good light.

Kirk’s views are all summed up in her answer to Weiss’s question about how she met Charlie. Erika responds that the Lord helped her to find Charlie in a job interview, and Erika asked God if Charlie was the right guy. He was, for, as Erika says, “If I remain in the jetstream of God’s will, then he will provide for you.”  And that’s pretty much her answer to every question in the town hall.

This was not a good first foray of Weiss into t.v. journalism, but surely things will improve as Weiss interviews people who don’t cling to superstition. But the goddiness of this show struck me as overbearing and unevidenced, and I hope religion is not a frequent “Town Hall Topic”.

One more note before I get to the video. Variety weighed in on the Town Hall, and not in a positive way; click to read:

The content:

During a Saturday-night town hall led by Bari Weiss, the recently named editor in chief of CBS News, most of Madison Avenue sought an off-ramp.

The program featured an in-depth interview with Erika Kirk, the CEO of the conservative advocacy organization Turning Point USA and the widow of Charlie Kirk, the group’s former leader. He was assassinated during one of the organization’s events at Utah Valley University, throwing a harsh spotlight on the political and cultural divides present in the U.S.

The event marked a new offering from CBS News. The organization does not typically host town halls or debates on trending issues or with newsmakers. And the choice of Weiss as moderator also raised eyebrows, because in most modern TV-news organizations, senior editorial executives remain off camera, rather than appearing in front of it.

More may be on the way. During the program, Weiss told viewers that “CBS is going to have many more conversations like this in the weeks and months ahead, so stay tuned. More town halls. More debates. More talking about the things that matter.” That would suggest CBS is planning to devote more hours to the programs.

The news special aired at 8 p.m. on Saturday, one of the least-watched hours in broadcast TV. And that may have contributed to a relative dearth of top advertisers appearing to support the show. During the hour, commercial breaks were largely filled with spots from direct-response advertisers, including the dietary supplement SuperBeets; the home-repair service HomeServe.com; and CarFax, a supplier of auto ownership data. Viewers of the telecast on WCBS, CBS’ flagship station in New York, even saw a commercial for Chia Pet, the terra-cotta figure that sprouts plant life after a few weeks.

Now, after that long introduction, here’s the video. Feel free and encouraged to weigh in below.