Slavoj Žižek, Jordan Peterson, and Atheists Who Believe in God

“Peterson’s importance is his powerful and influential insistence that religion is not arbitrary or malevolent—that in every developed form we encounter it, religious stories are archetypal of the human condition in a way nothing else can or ever will be.”

In the final scene of Stanley Kramer’s film adaptation of the 1955 play Inherit the Wind, the play based on the infamous “Scopes Monkey Trial,” Spencer Tracy’s character Henry Drummond laments Frederic March’s character Matthew Harrison Brady’s, who is modeled after William Jennings Bryan, long descent into religious intolerance as a tragic betrayal of his once true religion: “A giant once lived in that body, but Matt Brady got lost because he looked for God too high up and too far away.”

Gene Kelly’s E.K. Hornbeck, based on H. L. Mencken, immediately chides him: “Why, you—you hypocrite! You fraud! The atheist who believes in God! You’re just as religious as he was.”

Drummond, a lawyer, has just defended Bertram Cates on the charge of teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution in a Tennessee high school. Drummond does not contest that this occurred but defends Cates by protesting the chilling conformity and intellectual intolerance enforced by a law that is transparently an imposition of religious bigotry.

Reactionary pessimist that I am, I seriously doubt we have public intellectuals of the caliber of either of these monumental figures these days. This is even more of a shame in an anachronistic sense, as H.L. Mencken would be dynamite on Twitter, provided he reined in the racism.