Let me take you back in time — to a moment when people could formulate and actually express opinions, instincts and perceptions representing a kind of truly independent thought. A time when groupthink was a phrase from a postwar dystopian novel, not a chronic condition of our present time. A time when a fellow like Ryan Blocker, of The Clyde Fitch Report, could make the thoughtful observation that there’s something about the way most conservative evangelicals and not a few progressives and liberals enforce groupthink without being accused of heresy or betraying humanity or something worse.
When I read a draft of Blocker’s article, When Does Liberal Discourse Resemble Evangelicalism?, it took me a minute to parse the question. It was like: “One of these is not like the other” bits of cognitive dissonance. But then I dove in and saw where he was going:
What I remember most about my adolescence as an evangelical Christian was a deep skepticism of joy. There wasn’t enough space in my theology to hold complexity. Any pleasure was sinful; it was my duty to name it as such. I was to be “in the world, but not of the world.” The fundamentalist sees joy as a distraction from holiness or a righteous life. It wasn’t just that the subject matter of Harry Potter was objectionable. The issue was that if I was spending time reading Harry Potter, I wasn’t reading the Bible. Therefore, anything that is popular and widely liked should be taken down and used as a site of evangelism. The evil was in “being distracted.” Because part of my duty was to share my faith with others and to mark myself as a follower of Christ, this skepticism had to be performed in public.
Liberals performing a certain kind of radical leftist politics sometimes view joy similarly. To them, joy is a distraction from being radical. It’s like an opportunity to parse “problematics” — to call to the carpet (or to the altar) those who have been distracted.
That, for me, then started to make sense — and when it did, it suddenly forced me to confront the possibilities that my own behaviors and approaches as center-left Dem, someone who aligns with a great deal of the progressive agenda, might very well have fit the pattern Blocker wrote about. And so I reflected back on the Hilary-Bernie hatred — and I think, well, isn’t that what happened on the left last year? Not for everyone, but for many of us. Purity tests. Absolutism. Mutual suspicion. A desire to enforce the correct way to think and the correct way to express that thought — yes, even on the left. What’s the difference between the way evangelicalism demands obedience and the way some, at least, on the left have demanded obedience? Well…
The most striking and arguably most troubling similarity between some evangelical communities and some liberal communities is the use of fear as social glue…
...It’s my hypothesis that fear of being the next one “called out,” and the sense of relief when another is publicly shamed, are realities in a lot of liberal spaces as well.
Something to think about. Or at least I think so. And now, for whoever might read this, we’ll find out just how open to exploring unsanctioned ones some of us really are.