Roy Cooper, Prayer, and the Folly of Anti-Religious Collectivism

Former North Carolina governor Roy Cooper announced he’s entering the state’s Senate race. This has upset a lot of people on Bluesky. Not because they object to Cooper’s politics—he’s a Democrat who is popular enough that he could well flip a critically needed Senate seat—but because, in his announcement, he mentioned that he’d prayed before coming to the decision.

Prayer, you see, is something only religious people do. In Cooper’s case, Christian religious people. And because far-right Christians are currently doing their damndest to destroy the country and inflict great cruelty on marginalized Americans, a devout Christian like Cooper, even one who quite clearly views such destruction and cruelty as running counter to the ethics of his faith, is anathema. For these Bluesky types, religion itself is evil. Or, at best, in the political sphere ought to be confined by a policy of “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

This enragement in the replies takes the form of a lot of people condemning religion not just as evil but all religious faithful as irrational. Or whatever else might track with the way the New Atheists, back when that was a culturally relevant thing, talked about religious belief and religious believers. Reading these replies brought a feeling of cringe. Not just from seeing these, as I’ll argue, nonsense positions stated openly and righteously, but because when I was in my late teens and early 20s and in college, I made similar statements. I cringe at the Aaron who once was, but who I grew out of.

I’m writing about it, though, because I set off a rather minor conflagration when, in response to a criticism of such anti-religious criticisms of Cooper, someone wrote that lots of people have been “harmed, traumatized, or oppressed” by “religion” and so it’s okay to be mad about its expression, even in as what one might’ve thought as anodyne a form as, “I prayed while wrestling with this major decision.”

I can’t find that post to link to here, because the person blocked me, but what I wrote in reply was:

No one has ever been harmed, traumatized, or oppressed by “religion,” just like no one has ever been harmed, etc., by “philosophy.” They have been harmed by particular people with particular religious beliefs. Conflating those with the concept of religion itself is just a way to sneak in bigotry.

I bring this all up here not to just surface Bluesky drama into a different medium, but because the anger directed at me criticizing the anger directed at Cooper, and the anger directed at Cooper in all its teeth-gnashing enthusiasm, I think speaks to a real problem with the way some people on the left—in particular the Very Online left, but also in my old “logic and reason” libertarian circles—think about religion. And how they think about religious people.

To get mad at someone expressing anything religious—or, if we want to narrow it, to get mad at someone expressing any sort of a religious belief hooked onto a religion as broad and diverse as Christianity—is to be collectivist in a way similar to ethnonationalism or racism. It is, as I said, to be a bigot. It is to unreasonably, and irrationally, other most of the humans you share the planet with. Which is mean-spirited, ignorant, and quite stupid.

The typical response to my claim that no one has been harmed by “religion,” just as no one has been harmed by “philosophy,” but that plenty of people have been harmed by religious people acting out of their religious belief—just as plenty of people have been harmed by people acting in application of particular philosophical beliefs—was to point out a litany of specific harms done in the name of specific religions. It was, in other words, to restate my argument while mistakenly thinking one was rebutting it.

It might be that religions, of one sort or another, have led to so much harm that it outweighs any of their particular value. That strikes me as implausible, but it’s not incoherent. But religion is such a vast category of beliefs that it makes no sense whatsoever to condemn it as evil, or to claim that any expression of any religious belief is wrong and bad and impermissible just because some religious people have done some bad things, and even if those things they’ve done have been very bad.

But it is also to display a total lack of curiosity about the lives of others, and in a way strikingly analogous to the sort of dehumanizing hate the people mad at Cooper claim to be against. The fact is, most everyone you share this planet with has some religious beliefs. Atheism is rare. (And if you think some atheistic worldviews, such as Buddhism, still count as religion, then not even all atheists are irreligious.) To believe that any religious viewpoint is the result of evil and/or irrationality is to say, in other words, that very nearly everyone you share this planet with is evil and/or irrational, and that you, due to your uncommon sophistication and moral insight, are one of the few rational and good people out there.

None of this tracks with history, or philosophy, or sociology. Some religious people are evil, or do evil things. Most aren’t and don’t. Some religious people have used their faith to justify horrors. The overwhelming counterbalance hasn’t. At the same time, some entirely secular people are evil, or do evil things, and some entirely secular people have used their philosophies and ideologies to justify horrors.

The trouble with the New Atheists, whose arguments echo through Bluesky’s anger at Cooper, is that they lied to their readers. If you explored atheism through the context of Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins, you came away thinking all religious faith is stupid, because the arguments for religious faith they presented and then knocked down were stupid. And many of those arguments were. But they also aren’t the arguments sophisticated advocates of religious faith actually make. You can, of course, still believe those more sophisticated arguments fail. (I do, which is why I’m still an atheist.) But they’re not stupid. And the people who think they do work aren’t stupid, any more than philosophers who argue for consequentialism as the correct moral theory are stupid, even though I think consequentialism is pretty clearly not the correct moral theory.

And just as consequentialists can be good and moral people grounding their goodness and morality in consequentialism, even if I’m not persuaded by the arguments for their moral theory, the same applies to religious faithful to ground their morality in that faith. The fact is that a lot of moral goodness is the result of, or built upon, religious faith. Both now and historically. A lot of the expanding sphere of moral concern has come from people advocating for it based on their religious faith. To deny that, to condemn religion itself (versus particular religious beliefs held by particular people) as so without merit that the very expressing of any of it in a public forum is anathema is, to be blunt, to be a bigot, and of a particularly ignorant variety.

This ignorant bigotry is, I think, the result of a lot of people simply having a difficult time with a theory of other minds. It is to be solipsistic. It is to be incapable of accepting intellectual or value difference, and so to treat any intellectual or value difference from your own perspective as being necessarily stupid or corrupt. People who hold this view—well represented among those most angry at Cooper’s faith— simply can’t put themselves in the head of another, and don’t much care to. To accept pluralism would be to undercut their own sense of elitism and righteousness. Empathy is only for the in-group.

It’s deeply corrosive to humanity’s shared bonds. And it’s no way to go through life.