The Realistic State of Religious Freedom in Our Society

A photo of four Westerners holding a sign saying “Queers for Palestine” circulated on social media after the attack in Israel. The banner photo insists, “Allah Loves Equality.”  

Statements like these are so out of touch with reality that we can only hope they are satire. Given what we know of Hamas, ISIS, and the Iranian regime, it’s safe to assume there won’t be any “pride” parades in Gaza or Ramallah soon. Progressives hoping for sympathy from Palestinian rulers or people are deluding themselves. 

A week ago, all of this would have been sadly amusing. Now, it’s terrifying. Since the October 7 attacks, protestors across Europe, America, and Australia have denied, excused, justified, and even supported the murders, rapes, and beheadings of babies perpetrated by Hamas in Israel. It makes vicious sense for radical Muslim groups to take such stands. It’s harder to fathom why Western progressives offer such affinity for radical Islamism. 

After all, this is a religious ideology that is openly theocratic, misogynistic, violently anti-LGBTQ, opposed to free expression, free press, and nearly everything on the progressive agenda. The radical Islam the far-left wants to embrace is far worse than their morbid fantasies about Christianity.  

On the same American college campuses where you can be silenced for refusing to say that a man is a woman, Jewish co-eds tearfully begged school officials to stop speeches of those wishing their people dead. In Philadelphia, a speaker applauded “Hamas for a job well done.” At George Mason University, students chanted, “They’ve got tanks, we’ve got hang gliders, glory to the resistance fighters!” Before they issued an incredibly paltry half-apology, the BLM organization chapter of Chicago tweeted an image of a Hamas killer parachuting into battle.  

As strange of bedfellows as they make, radical Islam and the far-Left share hatred for the Western tradition. They strongly oppose free markets, objective morality, and knowledge and prioritize human liberty, particularly religious freedom. 

Critical Theory explains the Left’s hatred in academic settings due to their influence on our ivory towers. This thinking simplifies human existence into predetermined oppressed and oppressor categories. Based on these categories, moral virtue and moral guilt are pre-assigned.  

The matrix of this dynamic determines who is right and wrong. Anything done for the sake of the oppressed is just, even mass murder and rape. Anything done on behalf of the oppressor is vile, even warning civilians to get out of a war zone. In this case, all that matters is that Jews have been cast into the role of oppressor and their opponents as victims; all actions are justified or condemned according to this simplistic schematic. 

In his book on the Russian Revolution, Richard Pipes described a foreshadowing of this trend:

For intellectuals, the criterion of truth was not life; they created their reality, or rather, sur-reality, Subject to verification only regarding opinions of which they approved … only by reducing people of flesh and blood to a mere idea that one can ignore the will of the majority in the name of democracy and institute a dictatorship in the name of freedom. 

Decades of Western decadence have numbed us to the power of beliefs. Ideas have consequences. Bad ideas have victims. That’s true on college campuses and in Gaza. By rejecting objective morality as tyrannical, believers in the ideas of Critical Theory embrace tyranny as moral. 

Neil Shenvi and Pat Sawyer unpack these ideas and expose them in their new book Critical Dilemma. You can request a copy with a gift to the Colson Center this month. The authors will join us on October 26 for our next Breakpoint Forum to discuss the ideas of Critical Theory in light of some of these current headlines. The forum begins at Colson Center. Resident theologian Dr. Timothy D. Padgett will host at 8 p.m. The forum is free, but you must register at breakpoint.org/forum. 

Dr. Timothy Padgett co-authored this Breakpoint. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to breakpoint.org.