Filling Heretics' God-shaped Hole

Deep thoughts from a gender Jew-for-Jesus at Dissident Dialogues

I hadn’t been to the Brooklyn Navy Yard for many years, and last time I went, it was to visit the Sweet-and-Low factory for an article. The time before that, in the late ‘90s, was to visit a working prop shop. In other words, I hadn’t been to those parts since they became home to the hipster post-industrial class.

Two weeks ago Friday, I got off the subway in Dumbo (a neighborhood that used to be mostly abandoned, with wild dogs running about, but is now the most expensive in Brooklyn), and walked past the $4 million condos, and then by the housing projects, and finally to the Duggal Greenhouse. In that former ship-building hangar was a two-day festival, Dissident Dialogues: A Place for Dangerous Ideas. In other words, a very expensive heretic hangout. Steerage class/general admission tickets ran about $300, but it was in the thousands of dollars for “VIP,” which came with an open bar and the ability to stand on a landing above the crowd and, as the brilliant Bridget Phetasy joked, spit on the plebes if they wanted. (Luckily, they didn’t want to.)

The organizers managed to gather some really big names and tackle some really big ideas. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, newly minted Christian, and her former mentor Richard Dawkins, old school atheist, tangled over religion. Briahna Joy Gray and Eli Lake “debated” Israel and Gaza, if you can call berating each other debating. What’s the future of feminism? Can liberalism be saved? Does anyone care about Uyghurs? Steven Pinkner, Kathleen Stock, John McWhorter, Greg Lukianoff—all the heterodox heartthrobs. No wonder some tickets were pricier than a Taylor Swift concert!

The gender medicine panel was particularly good, not just because Stella O’Malley was there, mesmerizing us with her brogue, but because Michael Shellenberger, the moderator, asked Stella, Maud Maron, and Mia Hughes a really great question: how did we get here? Why are so many young people basing their gender identities on stereotypes, as opposed to the 1970s when there was a cultural goal to push beyond those stereotypes, and let boys play with dolls and girls play baseball?

I tackled some of that in my book TOMBOY, noting the generational swings, from the tomboy heyday to the Girl Power era, and the ways that manufacturers and marketers embedded our deeply felt views about gender into what they made and sold, and was happy to hear Stella discuss that. I’ll be writing a lot more about the “how” of gender identity ideology in my next book.

Two people I interviewed for that project found god, or God, through gender. I’m saving the details of their stories for the book, but I’ll say this: one is an ROGD mom who ended up going to church for her own sanity, and then found a community that supported her and helped her and her family through a very difficult time. Faith saved them. Another is a desister, a boy who identified as a girl for many years and, when he came out of it, became a devout Catholic. Whether they went from one cult to another could be debated, but one thing was clear: religion helped them tremendously. It straightened them out, gave them purpose and direction, provided a clear moral code, and offered the one thing I think is most important to a good life: community.

So I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised about the recurring theme of religion, as an answer to the illiberalism and culture warring we were there to dissent from, at Dissident Dialogues. After all, dissidents come in many forms, many of them religious apostates. Lots of Christians in particular feel demonized by the current discourse. Christians aren’t safe in some parts of the world. Now any Jew who believes the state of Israel has a right to continue existing is less safe, too. This was a festival of “dangerous ideas,” and what’s dangerous is relative to whatever is deemed safe by the cultural zeitgeist. Thus, many a straight, white, Christian feels imperiled in America these days (whether they are or not). I do not have faith myself, but I truly get the appeal.

Still, when Dawkins insisted that Christianity was built on the idea of sin, and Ali countered that it was built on love, I felt deeply uncomfortable in my seat, surrounded on all sides by whooping theists. In truth, I am afraid of religion, though I have, since I was very young, felt a desperation for the community associated with it. I once spent hours talking to Jews for Jesus, trying to understand the difference between their faith before and their newfound faith, stumped by their refusal to concede that if they were wrong before, they could be again. I’ll claim that for myself: if I’m wrong about God and religion, I’ll gladly concede. I have certainly changed my mind about some things in recent years, thinking of myself as a gender Jew for Jesus. Although maybe I didn’t change my mind so much as hone my positions based on information and the permission to defect from the hard left.

At any rate, I can completely respect people who have faith, but I’m not very interested in the idea of God. I just don’t think it’s a good story. I like the story of the stars, whose light beaming down at us might have died out thousands of years ago. The closest I get to spirituality is that sense of wonder, rumbling inside me, about nature. The closest I get to church is the movie theater, that moment when the lights go down and I’m awash in hope, that I might feel as I did when I first saw The 400 Blows, and felt as if I’d been reborn through 1960s black and white film. Who needs religion when you’ve got French New Wave cinema?

But there’s been a lot of talk lately that the reason for American Chaos is the declining role of religion and rates of church attendance. We’ve lost our way because we’ve let God go. Meghan Daum—who does not get enough credit for tackling dangerous ideas long before there was a community built around it—reminded me of the phrase “god-shaped hole.” Konstantin Kisin, who unsuccessfully attempted to moderate the Israel debate, has recently been talking about “The Atheism Delusion.” The New Atheists, Harris and Dawkins and the late Hitchens, ushered in an age of nihilism, not rationality. We lost our senses of meaning and purpose, our moral codes, our ability to conduct ourselves as adults. Religion may have been the opiate of the masses, but social justice is the fentanyl of the elite. (Did I steal that joke from someone or make it up? I don’t know!)