I suppose this raises a serious question: Is someone who is "politically black" more a person of color than an actual black person who has the wrong politics?
This is why woke radicalism is also fundamentally about power. In Nikole Hannah-Jones' world, she would presumably be the arbiter of who is "politically black," which would be a powerful position considering that 70% of Princeton students have decided that they're people of color
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I have a new essay out today on why Christianity failed. Thought I'd share a few thoughts here about what inspired it. The piece brings together a few different strands of my thinking on religion. 1/x wisdomofcrowds.live/why-christiani…
In my recent Atlantic essay 'America without God,' I focused on what Christianity's decline meant for the American idea. But that still leaves open a different, challenging question on why Christian attachments have declined so rapidly. 2/x
The intellectual and spiritual vacuum intensified due to an unlikely confluence of events in the 2000s, and Trump was able to benefit from this. But there's a counterfactual history where instead of Trump filling the vacuum, Christianity could have made a return. It didn't. 3/x
Last week, @dmarusic wrote our first ever Friday Essay, and it's very, very good. I'm biased, but it's one of the most insightful pieces on American religion that I've read in a long while. Check it out.
The goal is that a year from now, we'll have 50 or so essays that are high quality but also a little bit odd, because they won't be meant for tens of thousands of people to read.
One of the main insights from @douthatnyt's book is that decadence is obviously "bad," but it's by no means the worst thing a society can experience. If the choice is between living with decadence or being "rescued" from it by a Napoleonic figure, I know which I'd choose
For me, the most fascinating thing about the new edition of @DouthatNYT's book is that COVID "hardly plays a role"
As @matt_hw8 points out: "If a once-in-a-century pandemic can’t jolt us out of our somnolent decline, maybe nothing can"
1. New Gallup numbers are out on US religion. Yes, church membership isn't an exact proxy for religiosity. But membership tells us about the structured presence of religion in people's lives. As a measure, it's likely to have more political implications than personal belief
2. But individual religiosity has *also *decreased, if not to the same extent. There has been a significant decrease in number of Americans who say God or religion is important in their daily lives, and the numbers are particularly low for young Americans
3. Secularization is real and rapid. "Nones"—atheists, agnostics, and those claiming no religion—today represent a quarter of the population. And this has happened over a relatively short period of time
Who knows. Maybe “whiteness” doesn’t explain everything.
It's been hard to watch otherwise smart liberals twist themselves into knots trying to figure out how to apply absurd and arbitrary constructions around race to current events
Critical race theory, or whatever you want to call this silliness, is objectionable for a number of reasons, but at a very basic level it makes people sound ridiculous
Yes, I know people like this. And I worry about them. Who would have thought, irrationality and science going hand in hand? COVID absolutism is its own kind of fanaticism. If you're going to believe in something (and everyone believes in *something*) this is one of the options
Then there are more normal examples of COVID absolutism. In weeks when daily cases were only *50* in a city of half a million, I knew young people with no health conditions who refused to do outdoor dining without a mask
The misinformation around indoor dining was interesting as well, where people would act like it was the most dangerous thing imaginable. To my knowledge, very few (if any?) DC restaurants closed down in recent months due to tracers finding indoor transmission as the source