A recent picture coming out of Columbia University showed a sign outside an “encampment” there. The homemade sign read, in part, “Activism is Worship.”
The connection made in its mere three words is telling. Those who created it declare that their cultural and political identities act as a kind of religion. Making this claim implicitly rejects traditional manifestations of faith.
This rejection includes, for many, a dark streak of antisemitism and, thus, the outright hatred of one religion. But it also rejects other traditional religious expressions, especially Christianity, as inadequate at best and the supporters of bigoted oppression at worst. The sign, therefore, must be seen in light of the increase of the “nones,” those who do not identify with an organized religious faith.
But we must not take the extent of this rejection too far. This shift in society does not mean that our age is rejecting religion. It really means that many have shifted the conscious source and purpose of their faith.
By saying “Activism is Worship,” student protesters mimic many elements of traditional organized religions. First, they hold to a set of doctrines that define who belongs and who stands outside their faith. Their doctrines mostly involve the political and social views of the contemporary progressive Left. Thus, they focus their dogmas on matters of sex, sexuality, and race. They even have a liturgy of sorts found in chants such as, “From the river to the sea….”
Moreover, by saying that their worship includes or even is activism, they communicate a certain eschatology — a view of history’s last things. They believe in a heaven and a hell. But both are here in this world. Hell is the past and, to a great degree, the present. It is found in the lingering existence of perceived oppressions that run contrary to their doctrines, including the intransigence of traditional Christianity. Heaven is the utopia they seek to establish here on Earth. It is one that they can, to some degree, articulate in great abstraction, but the concrete particulars seem ever-evolving to become more demanding, wherein one wonders if their full accomplishment would be a theoretical victory and a real-life act of self-destruction.
This assessment does not mean that organized religion has no place for social and political reform in this world. Christians have engaged in social movements throughout American history. The abolitionist movement owed a large part of its adherents to believers formed in the Second Great Awakening. The Temperance Movement that resulted in the 18th Amendment was largely Christian in its arguments. Ministers formed a core leadership component of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s. And the church makes up much of contemporary advocates for the rights of the unborn.
Yet the Left’s current social activism is a religion lacking in essential elements. It lacks a God who stands above and beyond societal trends, giving His followers a permanent standard of justice with which to approach the culture. It lacks an understanding of eternity, one that recognizes our human limitations and thus places ultimate hope for the good beyond ourselves.
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Finally, this new religion lacks the concept of grace and mercy. It is a harsh, unrelenting demand for perfection personally, socially, and politically. What Christianity, in particular, holds to is much different. It declares the good news that our inborn fallibility is met with the unmerited favor of God. That does not relieve us of the duty to make this world the best we can make it. But it does make it so we do not believe we must be our own gods in perfect power and might. Instead, it calls on us to lean first on the power and love of another, therefore also permitting, even demanding, that we be merciful toward others in a similar fashion.
This new form of leftist worship exposes not just problems in our country’s religious faith but also in our political practice. A politics taken from this new religion is one doomed to following trends, not truth, forcing utopia, not the reachable common good, and doing the above in a graceless, tyrannical fashion. Let us hope the country as a whole does not go down this path.
Adam Carrington is an associate professor of politics at Hillsdale College.
