NPR and the Shrinking of the Western Mind

I have noticed something of a pattern with National Public Radio (NPR) lately: when they interview or feature religious persons, said persons tend also to be homosexual. In February 2023, Ashlee Green wrote a gushing review of Lamya H’s, Hijab Butch Blues, a memoir written by a Muslim woman (who identifies as “they”) struggling to reconcile her Islamic faith with her inclination to be with other women. She has come to peace with this, we are told, by re-reading the Koran in such a way as to find evidence for the approval of lesbianism. “By the end of [the memoir],” Green assures us, “readers will see queerness—theirs, others’, and the concept—for what it is: a miracle.”

In October 2020, Rachel Martin interviewed Fr. Bryan Massingale (on Morning Edition) in the light of Pope Francis’s alleged endorsement of same-sex unions. Massingale is identified on the show as an “openly gay Catholic priest,” and it becomes obvious during the interview that, although he admits that Pope Francis did not change the Church’s teaching on the sinfulness of same-sex acts, he sees this move as a change in the “right” direction.

In a November 2022 interview with Terry Gross, singer/songwriter Brandi Carlile told an agonizing story about her experience as a lesbian in an evangelical Protestant church. She had been making preparations to be baptized, had invited her family and friends, only to be refused when the pastor found out that she had no intention of desisting from her lesbian lifestyle. The hushed, empathetic tones throughout the interview could barely disguise the soft undercurrent of moral superiority.

Finally, to take just one more example, in April 2024, Gross interviewed the Irish actor Andrew Scott; a fair portion of the interview was dedicated to his struggles as a “gay Catholic” growing up in “Catholic Ireland.”

In each of the above cases, and these are just the ones that I can remember in recent years, the unstated purpose of the interview or review was to elicit audience sympathy for the person at hand, while calling into question the traditional teachings on human sexuality of the various religious communities in question. In two of the cases (Lamya and Massingale), there was a strong suggestion that the time was ripe for Muslims on the one hand and Catholics on the other to catch up with NPR, either by deconstructing sacred texts or calling for an about-face in Church teaching.

The shrinking of the horizon of discourse

My main point here, however, is not to tackle the complex question of same-sex attraction and traditional religion, but to point out an irony in the approach of the ostensibly omni-tolerant, omni-open world of left Liberalism. Namely, what we see here is not greater openness, but a shrinking of the horizon of discourse in order to make complex and mysterious questions extremely simple.

Allow me to unpack this, as I think it’s essential to understanding the situation of traditional religion, and particularly Catholicism, in the modern world.

First, the problem is not with Gross and her colleagues’ sympathy regarding these individuals and their stories. It would be hard not to sympathize, for instance, with the account which Carlile gave of her anticipated baptism. The problem is with the false simplification of what is, in fact, an extremely fraught problem. The sacred texts and traditions that give rise to the prohibitions under question give expression, according to the people who inhabit these traditions, to more-than-human wisdom on the matters at hand. The notion that a 2000-year-old tradition, in the case of Catholicism, can or should change its teachings because the modern West has recently decided so is at the very least open to question. And yet it doesn’t seem so in the neat, little world of NPR.

Next, it should be noted that in none of the above cases is there any attempt whatsoever to understand people who joyfully and thoughtfully embrace such long-standing teachings. I have numerous and devout Catholic friends, for instance, who have children who identify as “gay” or “trans.” For them, life just isn’t as simple as it is for the contemporary left. On the one hand, every one of them loves their children unconditionally and continues to support them in whatever way they can. On the other hand, each one of them agrees with the teachings of their Church on human sexuality. But because their world is not as insulated as the NPR world, their situations are difficult and often painful. They both believe Catholicism to be true and love their children with an unconditional love. I suspect the same is true of many Muslims and Protestants in the same situation, not to mention Orthodox Jews, Hindus, or adherents of other religious traditions.

Such situations simply do not fit into NPR’s clean divide between those on the side of love and those on the side of hate.

Locke and the Liberal project

And this brings me to the heart of the matter. The shrinking of the horizon of modern discourse has roots that go back to early modernity. At the beginning of the Liberal project,¹ John Locke (and the mainstream Enlightenment)² makes a few moves which help to account for the actual narrowing of the modern mind.

First, Locke radically reduces the scope of reason, so that it no longer puts us in touch with things in themselves, with reality that is, but only with our mental representations of reality.

Second, he and the mainstream Enlightenment, in general, will reduce reason to the realm of the temporal, empirical order, to Kant’s “phenomenal,” or Mircea Eliade’s “Profane,” or Charles Taylor’s “immanent frame.” The notion that one can begin with the things of this world and work one’s way up, so to speak, to the realm of God is unthinkable in this approach. If there is a God, he is most definitely outside of the order of nature and can be known only through faith.

Third, he reduces the scope of “religion” to private and voluntaristic beliefs about other-worldly matters, matters beyond the realm of reason, politics, or “public” discourse.

Fourth, he reduces the role of politics to the adjudication of rights disputes between self-interested individuals. Politics should no longer, in this view, concern itself with ascertaining the transcendent Good and trying to form society in accordance with that Good.

Finally, in addition to these “spatial” constrictions, we should also note modernity’s tendency to be dismissive of the past, and, by implication, those parts of the world that are still “stuck in the past.” To borrow from Augusto del Noce, to be modern is to “have entered a period of philosophical research marked by a sharp break with respect to the Greek and medieval periods, which are thought to have ended.” He goes onto say that mainstream modernity just is the rejection of the medieval Christian-Greek synthesis.³

But here is where the irony comes in. Locke thinks that it is true that we cannot know transcendent truth; Locke thinks that it is good that politics not concern itself with transcendent goodness. He thinks that the Liberal solution is, in fact, the only legitimate one,⁴ something he seems to have in common with the people at NPR.

Reason v Freedom

Let us return to the problem illustrated in the NPR interviews. First, there is a false humility that haunts mainstream, modern thought. While it claims to limit what we can know, it does so only in order to have total domination over the newly constricted space. Reason is limited to the empirical realm, so that science can gain absolute mastery over nature; politics is limited to the “immanent frame,” so that a putatively “secular” reason can hold absolute sway.

Second, in the insistence that the knower never genuinely finds an object outside of his own mind, we get an ironic exaggeration of the importance of the individual and his opinions about reality. We could paraphrase Chesterton by saying that the individual, when cut off from reality, gets really big in direct proportion to the world’s growing very small. Let’s listen to Justice Kennedy in the famous Casey decision of June 1992: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

Notice what happens when we pair this sentence with Barack Obama’s 2008 response to Rick Warren’s question regarding when human life begins: “That’s above my pay grade.” Obama’s epistemic humility (his shrunken sense of what reason can know) ironically gives the individual the right to decide for himself when human life begins. The shrinking of the scope of reason radically increases the realm of individual freedom.

This makes it easier to understand how the ever-so-open-minded and ever-so-non-dogmatic reporters at NPR can make the counter-intuitive move to make what is a complicated problem, one that ought to be open to serious discussion, into an obvious battle between haters and lovers. If the individual is cut off from reality, we must take his or her private opinions about the matter—whether it’s Lamya’s idiosyncratic reading of the Koran, or Massingale’s private theological opinion on where Church teaching needs to go—as the last word. The very idea that Truth has authority over individual opinion cannot help but seem fascist in such an approach.

This is only exacerbated by the reduction of reason to the immanent frame. If reason has no natural knowledge of the transcendent, then reason has no natural obligation towards it. NPR’s purely secular reason, then, is simply taken for granted. If some people wish to opt for something in addition to the merely empirical, they should be free to do so, provided that they do not think that such opting offers any bearing on the nature of reality.

What tends to happen in such a world is that “secular reason” is given jurisdiction over non-secular reason. It is after Kant has limited reason to the realm of the “phenomenal” that he goes on to write a book called Religion Within the Bounds of Reason Alone. Similarly, the generally irreligious types over at NPR see no problem with their attempts to treat religion on NPR’s terms. This, it seems, is why they prefer to talk only with the most secularized and westernized religious believers, “believers” who also seem to have placed their religion within the boundaries of their own private opinions.

The need for a genuine religious identity

Finally, there is the relegation of reason to modern reason. The reason of the past—which included Plato’s convictions concerning a transcendent and unchanging Good which stands as the Source and Measure of all that is, Aristotle’s insistence on the need for an Unmoved Mover to account for all that is in motion, and Aquinas’s arguments in favor of a Being which simply is by nature—must be set aside as so much childish preparation for the mature reason of modernity. We must set aside, to borrow from Kant, this “self-imposed tutelage” to the past.

It is this last move that spares the NPR crowd from having to take seriously any thinkers outside of Western modernity. An Islam that still thinks in traditional ways about human sexuality is simply an Islam that is still under a “self-imposed tutelage,” and is in desperate need for a “butch” Muslim to set it free.

Each of the foregoing, modern moves help to explain why NPR can sound so humble and open on the one hand, while proclaiming the gospel of individual liberty with an almost fundamentalistic fervor on the other, and why a bunch of at-onetime-pacifistic-left Liberals have all of a sudden become globalist war hawks intent on rooting out “enemies of democracy” wherever they might be found.

If all of this seems very gloom-and-doom in nature, it gives me reason for hope. For years now, we Catholics have been working hard to show that we can fit into the secular, Liberal order. Our Supreme Court justices have all promised that their faith would be, like Locke’s, a private matter. But all of this stems from the fact that we’ve largely accepted the mainstream, modern framework outlined above. We would do well to re-read the great religious scholar Mircea Eliade, who has shown in his numerous studies that religion is not a matter of private beliefs about otherworldly matters; it is a public, social and culture-founding quest for the meaning of reality, and it is rooted in our natural desire to know the truth about the whole. As such, religion cannot be privatized and separated from public affairs, politics, economics, or education without ceasing to be what it is. Liberal Protestantism’s capitulation to being little more than the civil religion of Liberalism ought to serve as a warning sign in this regard. It’s not uninteresting that the symbol of this religion is no longer the cross, but the rainbow flag.

The time is ripe, then, for us Catholics to advertise our de facto larger view of things. First, we have believed in and defended a notion of reason that puts us in touch with reality.

Second, that reason is not limited to the immanent frame, but opens up to the realm of the Transcendent. This is why the First Vatican Council pronounced with full, ecclesial authority that Catholics must believe that they can know, via natural reason, that God exists!

Third, our openness to the wisdom of various cultures of the past (the Greeks, Romans, and, in the Middle Ages, the Arabic) makes it easier for us, than it does for NPR, to take seriously those traditional cultures currently outside of the West and its hegemonic Liberalism.

I write all of this in the light of the fact that so many of our Catholic educational institutions, including my own, have marginalized and attenuated Catholic identity to become more “inclusive” and “diverse.” Because they have uncritically embraced Liberal (and increasingly left, Liberal) assumptions, they have become narrower, more doctrinaire, and less open to the genuine dialogue. At the same time, they have become more pragmatic, technocratic, and corporate, in a strange attempt to combine the worst elements of our two-party system. Since they, like NPR, have lost sight of the primacy of the Transcendent, their world, too, has become small. This, of course, means the death of the university, and we should be thankful, at least in part, that so many nominally Catholic universities are currently going out of business.

I conclude, then, with this counterintuitive suggestion: it is not until genuine religious identity has been restored to our institutions of higher learning that we will begin to see an opening of the American mind, and, perhaps, even a market niche in the world of higher education.

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