The CBC has both an audio podcast and a transcript of an eight-minute talk by Francis Lee, who describes herself as a cultural studies scholar who is also a queer and trans person of colour (“QTPOC”). When younger, she was an evangelical Christian, but gave that up to work on liberation politics for queer and trans people.  And yet she notices that both religion and her political activism are permeated by “purity culture”, something that many of us have also seen.

Click on the screenshot below to go to the audio, and click on the arrow to listen.

Here’s a small part of her transcript:

It is a terrible thing to fear my own community members, and know they’re probably just as afraid of me.

What am I talking about?

I’m talking about the quest for purity.

There is an underlying current of fear in my activist, queer, and trans people of colour communities. It is separate from the daily fear of police brutality, discrimination, or street harassment. It is the fear of appearing impure. I’ve had countless hushed conversations with friends about this anxiety, and how it has led us to refrain from participation in activist events and conversations because we feel inadequately radical.

When I was a Christian, all I could think about was being good, and proving to my parents and my spiritual leaders that I was on the right path to God. All the while, I was getting messages that I would never be good enough. Perfection was an impossible destination.

A decade later, I feel compelled to do the same things as an activist. I self-police what I say in leftist spaces. I stopped commenting on social media with questions or pushback because I am afraid of being called out. I am always ready to apologize for anything I do that a community member deems wrong, oppressive, or inappropriate — no questions asked.

I use these protective strategies because these communities have become a home, and I can’t afford to lose them.

Activists are some of the judgiest people I’ve ever met, myself included. We work hard to expose injustice and oppression in the world. But among us, grace and forgiveness are hard to come by. It is a terrible thing to fear my own community members, and know they’re probably just as afraid of me.

And it’s exhausting. The amount of energy I spend demonstrating purity in order to stay in the good graces of fast-moving activist communities is enormous. Often times, it means that I’m not even doing the real work I am committed to do.

She’s right, of course: this kind of “purity culture,” in which only a small subset of all opinions is tolerated and approved, is what’s tearing the Left apart. It’s the inability to accept, have discourse with, and “forgive” (if that’s the right word) those who are generally on your side but don’t conform 100% to movement-approved opinions.  It’s no secret that if you diverge from Regressive Leftist views, in both the general and particular, you get demonized and smeared with increasingly hyperbolic adjectives—ranging all the way up to “alt-right”, “white supremacist” and “Nazi”. Women who see themselves as feminists, like Christina Hoff Sommers, but don’t agree 100% with the third-wave species of the movement, don’t get met with argument and discussion, but are simply dismissed as “sister punishers”. If you wear the wrong Halloween costume, you’re not only criticized, but reported to your college authorities. If you carry a “Jewish Pride” flag in a Dyke March, you’re expelled for being a Zionist racist, even if you’re just flaunting, well, Jewish pride. If a NASA spokesman wears the wrong shirt, one that shows semi-clad females and was given to him by a woman friend, the poor clueless guy is forced to apologize in tears after being demonized and brutalized on social media. Is there no empathy, at long last?

There is extensive policing of language, too, so my own use of the word “Cassini’s suicide mission” has now (as I feared) been cast as a slur on the suicidal, which it is not meant to be—nor, do I think, does it diminish the plight of people who want to kill themselves. Real contrition is dismissed in favor of completely destroying a transgressor’s livelihood and reputation, as in the case of “Gelato Guy“. Black people argue that other blacks with lighter skins might consider not going to meetings about racism because lighter-skinned blacks have “pigmentation privilege.” If you question the statistics on the frequency of college rapes, or worry about whether Title IX provisions may be too draconian against the accused, you’re called a rape apologist. If you raise the possibility that different representation of sexes in different professions could reflect in part different interests, you’re called a racist or a misogynist.

What I’m trying to say, I guess, is that argument and engagement of ideas are being replaced by defamation and demonization of those who disagree with Received Truth, and this greatly disturbs Francis Lee. It also disturbs me.  This kind of petty policing of language and behavior may satisfy the moral desires of Leftists, but will it advance progressive views in an era where they’re being squashed by American politicians?

I don’t know—nor does anyone else—whether the fractious behavior of the Left had anything to do with Trump’s victory. But looking back over what I’ve written, I think that I’ve sometimes been guilty of the same purity behavior that disturbs Ms. Lee. I’d like to think otherwise—that I try to argue with others on my side rather than call them names (that’s why there’s a policy on this site against commenters hurling epithets at other commenters)—but somehow all of us need to enforce a little less purity and be a little more forgiving of those with whom we disagree. I’m not talking about the Right, as I despair of convincing them, but about an effort to find common ground with other Leftists.

How many people feel the same way as Frances Lee, but dare not say what they think? That suppression doesn’t enforce unanimity, but drives divisions underground, and, as in the case of Lee, may drive her completely out of social activism. I’ve stifled myself about purity culture—many times. After all, who wants to be called names?

I’m not even sure what I’m trying to say here, except that Francis Lee has hit on a kind of authoritarianism which, it seems to me, is wrecking the Left. And I share the sentiments she expresses near the end of her post:

If we are interested in building the mass movements needed to destroy mass oppression, our movements must include people not like us, people with whom we will never fully agree, and people with whom we have conflict. That’s a much higher calling than yelling at people from a distance and then shutting them out.

On pp.48- 49 of his book The End of the Holocaust (2011), Alvin Rosenfield discusses the adoption of the “Holocaust” trope by groups like the Nation of Islam, whose leader Louis Farrakhan argued that “The holocaust of the black people has been a hundred times worse than the holocaust of the Jews.”

I take no position on Farrakhan’s mathematics; what I want to show is how the Oppression Hierarchy arises, and how its adherents benefit from it:

As Christopher Lasch and others have pointed out, a politics of suffering and victimization has been developing within American society over the past several decades, a politics whose proponents draw on the pervasive presence of Holocaust images in order to garner for themselves a certain moral superiority that victims have come to enjoy in our society. In the words of one commentator, “paradoxically, in our era, which proclaims happiness as a universal goal, not only preoccupies itself with—even invites despair over—certain forms of suffering, but also on an ever escalating scale it recognizes, ideologizes, and politicizes some forms of suffering and victims, making them valid, fashionable, and even official.” In such a manner “suffering  becomes a moral identity and a basis for political entitlement.” The philosopher Tzvetan Todorov takes these insights still further:

“What pleasure is to be found in being a victim? None; but if no one wants to be a victim, everyone wants to have been one. . . Having been a victim gives you the right to complain, protest, and make demands. . . Your privileges are permanent.

“What is true of individuals here is even more true of groups. If you succeed in establishing cogently that such-and-such a group has been a victim of injustice in the past, this opens to it in the present an inexhaustible line of credit. . . Instead of struggling to obtain a privilege, you receive it automatically by belonging to a once-disfavored group; hence the frantic competition, not as in international commerce, the status of ‘most favored nation’ but that of the group most in disfavor.”

I’ll add the usual (and unnecessary) caveat that of course some oppressed people must call attention their situation so that others become aware of it. The archetype for that was this abolitionist medallion designed by the Quakers in the late eighteenth century:

But I’ve also seen many people who seem to revel in their own personal “lived oppression” when it is both dubious and unnecessary. The point is that one’s ethnicity, gender, and so on, instantiated as victimization, does not give you moral rectitude, a correct point of view, or the right to shut up or dismiss people from other groups.

On Saturday the Guardian published an article called, “Would you Adam and Eve it? Why creation story is at the heart of a new spiritual divide.” The point of the article, based on a A YouGov poll commissioned by Newman University in Birmingham, is to make a point that’s the subtitle of the article: “Major survey reveals that it’s atheists who perpetuate the conflict between religious belief and science.” In other words, it’s the damn atheists who keep saying there’s a conflict between religion and science when such a conflict doesn’t really exist. To wit:

According to the research, nearly two-thirds of Britons – as well as nearly three-quarters of atheists – think Christians have to accept the assertion in Genesis that God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. But just 16% of believers accept the creation myth – according to which, in the words of the questionnaire, “humans and other living things were created by God and have always existed in their current form”. Only 9% of all Britons reject evolutionary theory.

According to Professor Fern Elsdon-Baker, who led the research, the findings suggest a need to revise stereotypes when it comes to Christian belief in Britain. “In a society that is increasingly non-religious, this mismatch in perception could be seen as a form of prejudice towards religious or spiritual groups,” she said. “It may be one of the contributing factors in religious groups or individuals saying they see a conflict between science and religion.” [JAC: There is a big difference in how the religious versus nonbelievers see evolution; I give the data below. In light of these data, the accusation of “prejudice” seems unfounded.]

According to the British Attitudes Survey, religious belief is continuing to decline in Britain, but the former archbishop of Canterbury, Lord (Rowan) Williams, says the YouGov survey confirms that a presumed incompatibility between science and religion is “a phoney war”.

“The number of mainstream Christians – certainly in this country – who have qualms about evolutionary theory is very small indeed,” said Williams. “But perceptions are different, and the presence of US-style fundamentalism in the popular imagination means that a growing number who know nothing of the actual history of intellectual discussion of these questions assume that all religious believers must be committed to combating scientific accounts of the universe’s beginnings.”

First of all, this study was conducted in Britain, not the U.S., so the conclusions (which are wrong even for Britain) can’t be extended the U.S., where the conflict is far more intense. And in the U.S. it’s not atheists who are responsible for the religious rejecting evolution; its their own conditioning and brainwashing. Further, wholesale rejection of evolution occurs in many Muslim countries, too, and you can’t pin that on atheists, who would often be killed or imprisoned for even saying that there’s a science/religion conflict. Finally, even in Britain, as Julian Baggini discovered to his chagrin (an atheist, he once said religion was not about specific beliefs but about human comity), British Christians believe in the literal truth of a whole lot of myths and superstitions (see here and here), including belief in miracles, heaven and hell, the bodily resurrection of Jesus, and so on. Here’s part of Bagginis’s survey of Anglicans—admittedly not constructed scientifically. But have a look at the last row, as well as the second and fourth. If science contradicts the Bible, say these Anglicans, just as many of them will believe the Bible as will reject the Bible in favor of science. That bespeaks some conflict.

But on to the YouGov data. As reader Mark pointed out, if you look at that data, there’s a big difference between the “religious/spiritual” people and those who are not “religious/spiritual” or atheist.

The base population was asked the question “Which of the following statements comes closest to your view about the origin and development of life on Earth”? There were five choices, listed in order below. #1 is straight biblical creationism, #2 is theistic evolution (note that it refers to all creatures, not just humans), #3 is pure naturalistic evolution that we teach in biology class, #4 is “another theory” (I suspect largely religious), and #5 is “I don’t know”:

Here are the data divided by belief, with the five rows of percentages corresponding to the five answers given above—in order.