Chesterton's Fence and Religion
The downfall of religion in the West and it's possible dire consequences
In the pages of Bret Weinstein’s & Heather Heying’s book “A Hunter Gatherers Guide to the 21st Century” I was introduced to the philosophy of Chesterton's Fence. Chesterton’s Fence is a philosophical idea presented by the author G.K Chesterton. In short the idea the author attempts to convey is that there is a reason for existing laws and traditions and that unless those reasons are understood, what is existing should not be removed. The “fence” portion of the philosophies title comes from Chesterton’s use of a fence to metaphorically illustrate his point.
“…fences don’t grow out of the ground, nor do people build them in their sleep or during a fit of madness. He explained that fences are built by people who carefully planned them out and “had some reason for thinking [the fence] would be a good thing for somebody.” Until we establish that reason, we have no business taking an ax to it.”1
Weinstein and Heying’s book go on to apply this philosophy to a few topics but the one that caught my interest was religion. It’s no secret that in the modern western world we collectively have been slowly migrating ourselves as a society away from God and religious practice as a whole. If fleshed out within Chesterton’s philosophical framework religion in this scenario has become the “fence” and the axe seems to have been swung with more ferocity within the last few decades.
According to a 2018 to 2019 PEW research poll 65% of Americans identify as Christians down 12% from the previous decade. This decline is even more prevalent in younger generations, among millennials roughly only half (49%) identify themselves as Christian. This is in contrast to older generations like baby-boomers in which about three-quarters (76%) of them identify as Christian.2
Now, people may read the above quoted stat and think, so what? Who cares if the Church is losing members? Which is true particularly if you yourself are not Christian or religious. I myself am not Christian nor religious in general. So than why do I or would anyone like me who is not personally involved with the Church care about it losing ground?
Personally I couldn’t have been concerned less about this issue just a few months ago. However I’ve recently started to at least partially crack open my brain to the importance of spirituality and the possible consequences of having an absence of it after being exposed to new information. This got me thinking about religion in a different context than I ever have before.
First and foremost I never understood the need for it both as an individual and as a society. It’s still hard to convey in words the “need” for spirituality because it delivers something so intangible that it is difficult to describe using standard weights and measures. Regardless since legitimately entertaining the idea of a higher power or the existence of some sort of “god” my life feels a little more whole.
At the same time I haven’t become devoutly religious and haven’t latched on to some doctrine like a sucker fish to the side of a tank but opening my mind to the ideas and concept of the religious and spiritual realm has given me a sense of calm and serenity I’ve never felt before taking that initial mental step.
Presently I consider myself somewhat of a spiritual free agent wading through the waters of mysticism ready to attach myself to the underbelly of the most personally appropriate ship like some sort of righteous barnacle, however I’m not rushing to fuse myself to anything quite yet. Nonetheless this unrealized need made me think that likely everyone has this capacity within them, a “hole” eagerly waiting to be occupied with some sort of ideological filling. This need can be traced back to the very beginnings of civilization.
In Brian Muraresku’s book “The Immortality Key” he mentions an archeological site by the name of Gobekli Tepe. This site is dated back to the beginnings of the Neolithic Revolution nearly 12,000 years ago. It contains what is considered “the first temple” where huge T-Shaped pillars described by archeologists as “positively human like” are found, some of these pillars weigh more than 50 tons and stand 20ft high.
“….if gods existed in the minds of early Neolithic people, there is an overwhelming probability that the T-Shape is the first known monumental depiction of gods”3
So even before we completely settled as people of agriculture and “civilized” we were already paying tribute to some version of “god’. Spirituality in hunter-gatherer types of cultures is evidenced further in the religious traditions of nomadic American indigenous tribes. Apparently honoring some form of a higher power is more important to human existence than a steady supply of food.
“…it is written, Man shall not live on bread alone...” Matthew 4:4
Therefore the foundations of our religious fence was already being built before the rise of any measurable form of modern human civilization. But why does that matter? Stories of 600 year old men making boats and saving the worlds animals are for those ancient idiots of the past, what could these traditions do for a society with the ability to construct a plane that goes faster than the speed of sound?
This in part of is why religion has taken such a monumental beating in the recent past, the rapid advancement of technology. Technology has given us an un-paralleled amount of power and influence over our environment and with that an un-intended sense of collective hubris; and what is the main driver for all this tangible innovation? Science, Science and engineering has the ability to and is incredible at producing and advancing technology and making other tangible discoveries. The sense of collective arrogance the formidable tool of science has given us has diminished our need for god or at least has made us perceive there being less of a need for spirituality . On top of that our modern minds are conditioned to think scientifically and if something doesn’t have objectionable fact to back it up than it is perceived as false.
However as powerful, useful and necessary as science is, it operates in the realm of “objective truth”. Which, because of the conditioning of the modern mind is often the only form of truth we attribute to the definition of the word. In listening to Neil DeGrasse Tyson I became aware of the idea of there being different types of truth.
As mentioned in the clip above, Neil lays out the notion of there being three types of truth: Objective, Personal and Political. For the context of this article I just want to quickly run down the first two. As stated previously there is objective truth which like Neil indicates is the realm of science. An objective truth is one that exists outside of human perception or psychology, for example water boils at 100°C. This is a simple physical reality, sure you can debate well we made up numbers or we as humans made up the Celsius temperature scale. Which okay fair enough but whether you call it Celsius or fliggin-floggins and whether you measure it in numbers or banana peelings it holds true that water WILL boil at a specific temperature threshold.
The second type of truth is a personal truth, Neil uses religious beliefs as an example but I prefer to use a different one to illustrate this concept. The example I prefer is the love for your children. If you’re a parent you know this is true, you love your child, however there’s no tangible evidence for this truth. Yes you can show your love for your child in perceivable ways like giving them gifts, driving them, feeding them, holding them, etc. Nonetheless these are all expressions of your love and not the actual love itself.
The love itself exists only in the realm of human perception and within the affected individual(s) minds however it’s a “truth” that goes down to your very bones and influences a large portion of your life. You make decisions and like in the realm of religion you voluntarily make sacrifices as a result of this personal truth. It’s a completely different type of “true” than the water boiling example but nonetheless both statements “Water boils at 100°C” and “I love my children” are equally factual.
Although these are being referred to as “personal truths” they can extend beyond the individual. In the aforementioned example of loving your children that obviously holds true for you however more than likely your spouse and family share in this “personal truth”. Religion is that communal sharing of a “personal truth” stratified to a larger community.
In summary the two points I’m attempting to make clear is one: The practice of religion and spirituality can be traced back to the very beginnings of civilization and has been an integral part of human existence since than. Effectively this has set the footings and constructed the “fence” of religion within our society.
Second: Even though modern scientific based thinking typically creates a knee-jerk reaction to dismiss religion as false the plane of “truth” religious thought attempts to convey is one outside of the realm of objectionable fact.
Dr. Jordan Peterson sums up religious thought quite well in his biblical series where he takes the stories of Genesis and throws them against the backsplash of modern theories of the mind. The overall conclusion I personally drew from the series is that religion is mans best attempt to understand himself as both an individual and as a society and that spirituality acts as a buffer between articulated knowledge and the fuzzy or completely unknown.
There’s a buffer between them, and those are things we sort of know something about. But we don’t know them in an articulated way.
Part of the dream that surrounds our articulated knowledge is extracted as a consequence of us watching each other behave, and telling stories about it, for thousands and thousands and thousands of years—extracting out patterns of behaviour that characterize humanity, and trying to represent—partly through imitation, but also drama, mythology, literature, art, and all of that—what we’re like, so that we can understand what we’re like. That process of understanding is what I see unfolding, at least in part, in the Biblical stories.” – Dr. Jordan Peterson, Biblical Series: Introduction to the Idea of God 4
In a much more direct way Heying & Weinstein sum up this idea of religion existing on a different plane of truth in a single line:
“These beliefs are often literally false, metaphorically true…” – A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century, Pg. 230
So, what happens in the absence of religion and spirituality? What if we successfully swing the axe enough to destroy the West’s fence of religion? I fear that completely removing the fence of religion will no doubt leave a void, and the backfill to be poured in place where the fence posts of spirituality once stood is likely to be much less sturdy. A shaky shift-able foundation to rebuild a civilization from to say the least.
There are historical examples of societies who successfully almost wholly removed religion. One is the case of Soviet Russia. Russia never outright outlawed religion but fathers and leaders of the Russian Church patriarchy who put their beliefs ahead of the government were quickly removed and replaced with state puppets after the communist revolution of 1918.
As documented in volume one of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago the religious education of children was classified as a political crime under Article 58-10. 58-10 was defined as “Propaganda or agitation, containing an appeal for the overthrow, subverting, or weakening of the Soviet Power….and, equally the dissemination or preparation or possession of literary materials of similar content.”5
Outside of criminalizing the religious education of children several trials were held against leadership and members of the church. One trial was against the “Moscow Council of United Parishes” which had set-up an unarmed guard for the patriarch so that Church alarm bells could be rung in the event of a threat to the patriarchy subsequently mobilizing believers to follow and advocate for the release of the members of the patriarch.
This scheme was set-up in response to the Cheka (Russia’s secret police) executing the members of the Kiev Metropolitan and the Soviet Governments recent census and requisition of Church property which effectively gave the Soviet Government the power to seize church assets as their own. The setting up of this guard was seen as “counter-revolutionary” and two of the four defendant religious leaders were sentenced to be shot while the remaining two were incarcerated.
In the Volga region of Russia while people were eating the soles of shoes and gnawing at door jambs due to starvation the Soviet government seen this a perfect opportunity to undermine the regions church. “Let the priests feed the Volga region!” if they refused the government could blame them for the famine and if they agreed they’d be able to clean out the churches and replenish their stocks of foreign exchange and precious metals.
The church had already created diocesan and all-Russian committees to collect funds and obtain aid. They’d also reached out to the pope in Rome and the Archbishop of Canterbury for assistance. However any aid that came directly from the church and into the mouths of the starving citizens would undermine the dictatorship so instead the funds raised were seized, the church committees were banned and they were reprimanded for reaching out to “foreign contacts” for aid. Instead the State Commission for Famine Relief (Pomgol) coerced the church into “voluntarily” giving up their valuables in order to aid the starving.
These two instances are a few examples among many of how the Soviet Government attempted to stomp out and undermine the Church. In the Soviets succession of removing the “fence” of religion or at least significantly damaging it they created debatably one of the most corrupt, malicious, hellish places on earth where as documented in the three volumes of Solzhenitsyn’s 2100 page manifesto millions of people were arrested, tortured, imprisoned and executed over the course of it’s existence as a nation. As exclaimed by one of its own citizens Tanya Khodkevich in Soviet Russia:
“You can pray freely, but just so God alone can hear”
A more modern example of a godless country is North Korea. North Korean refugee and author of In Order to Live, Yeonmi Park states that North Korean’s have no concept of religion and that instead of God the Kim dictators were worshipped with the citizens faith being put into the state sanctioned doctrine of “Nationalistic Self-Determination” authored by Kim Il Sung, practicing anything else could get you killed. North Korea draws a lot of parallels to Soviet Russia in the sense that starvation is common and people are unjustly persecuted, tortured, imprisoned and executed.
North Korea and Soviet Russia are two examples of what could happen as the final strikes of the axe ricochet off the foundation of the Wests religious fence. Completely leveling the fence may allow all the horrors associated with these types of totalitarian governments to enter the systems of power in our world. For the time being our fences foundation seems to still be intact however the swings of the metaphorical axe have successfully knocked out some of the fence boards permitting us to peer through for what it is to come.
The spiritual supplement that’s been able to wriggle its way through the now missing fence boards can be seen in the recent uprising of gender ideology. It’s become the choice supplement for spirituality particularly in the spiritually homeless youth.
But, what’s the harm? Who cares if someone wants to identify as a different gender? Hell, let them identify as a toaster if they want to! In this perspective I’m actually in agreeance, if this type of identity remained confined to the individual and voluntary participants of that individuals “personal truth” than these types of beliefs would cause next to no friction within the population. The issue arises when these ideological based beliefs influence policy or law.
Previously in order to handle the problem of ideological beliefs effecting law Western civilization got the bright idea of separating church and state. That’s why for example in the United States people are free to practice whichever religion they choose even though the authors of the countries founding documents were Christians.
At some point and not exclusively in the United States it was decided that religious ideology should not play a role in the creation of law and policy thus separating politics from the church. Acted out this type of thinking has given us the freest least oppressed societies in human history.
On the flip side allowing gender ideology to influence law is basically the re-amalgamation of church and state. This “progressive & tolerant” doctrine is actually causing our modern civilization to regress back into that part of history before we separated religious belief from the policy & law creation process. This is where the harm lies, not in the actual beliefs of gender ideology but in the fact that this subjective set of ideas is allowed to influence and change law and policy.
Author and feminist Kara Dansky in her book The Abolition of Sex documents some of the already real world effects gender ideology has had on law. Laws with the intention of preventing discrimination against woman are are usually encompassed within the realm of civil rights law. The Equality Act which is currently being worked through the gears of the U.S Governments legislative branch seeks to re-define the word “sex” throughout civil rights law to include “gender identity”.
According to Dansky this implies:
“…that any person could claim to have been discriminated against on the basis of sex if the person believed that he or she had been discriminated against on the basis of so-called “gender identity” for virtually all purposes.” – Kara Dansky, “The Abolition of Sex”, Pg. 39
What this means is that any law currently enacted to protect women specifically would be rendered null since biological men would have access to the same protections by simply “identifying” as a woman. Some “progressive” States like California and Washington have already superseded federal law and passed legislation redefining sex to include “gender identity” and or “gender expression”.
In 2020 California state legislature enacted a Senate Bill that changed the definition of sex in the policy of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) to include “gender identity”. More specifically:
“The bill would require the department, for a person who is transgender, nonbinary, or intersex to only conduct a search of that person according to the search policy for their gender identity….The bill would additionally require the department to house the person in a correctional facility designated for men or women based on the individual’s preference,”6
The consequence of this is that biological men can and are now housed in women’s correctional facilities. It was reported in July of 2021 that the CDCR (California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation) handed out condoms to inmates and posted signs related to anticipated pregnancies. Since all sex is considered non-consensual in prison the CDCR’s actions according to the feminist organization WoLF or Women’s Liberation Front was a “…tacit admission by officials that women should expect to be raped when housed in prison with men.”7
In Washington state similar changes to law have been passed with similar consequences. It’s been reported that about a half dozen men have been transferred to a women’s prison in Washington state out of the six offenders two have been convicted for violent sexual crimes.8 One was convicted of serially murdering prostitutes and the other was convicted of raping a twelve-year-old girl.
Outside of correctional facilities the change of the definition of sex to include “gender identity” in legal doctrine has granted men access to other spaces previously designated for women including restrooms, domestic abuse shelters, locker rooms, specific portions of spa’s, etc. The U.S and these states are not the only ones to participate in this type of legal change.
As mentioned in one of my previous articles Canadian law has also included “gender identity” and “gender expression” within its pages. Under bill C4 which bans conversion therapy in Canada the criminal code defines conversion therapy in a series of bullet points one of those points being to:
“Repress or reduce a person’s gender expression that does not conform to the sex assigned to the person at birth.”9
Broadly interpreted this “repression” could mean anything, like trying to maintain sex specific spaces such as the ones mentioned in the examples above. In Toronto in 2018 a female sex abuse survivor who was residing in a women’s shelter was the one who was accused of discrimination when she launched a complaint to the Ontario Human Rights Legal Support Center after being forced to be housed with biological man.10
The beginning of the regression back into a more oppressive period of history and the resulting exampled situations as a result of that regression are only the tip of the iceberg of what we as civilization are sure to face with the continued destruction of our religious fence. As we swing the axe I fear we bring ourselves ever closer to our own version of a state sanctioned ideology. Our own rendition of North Korea’s “Nationalistic Self-Determination” authored by the PhD’s of “Gender Studies” with the state using their words to justify the oppression of it’s citizens under the guise of “tolerance”.
Footnotes:
“Chesterton’s Fence: A Lesson in Second Order Thinking”, FS, https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/
“In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace”, PEW Research, October 17 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2019/10/17/in-u-s-decline-of-christianity-continues-at-rapid-pace/
Klaus Schmidt, “Göbekli Tepe—the Stone Age Sanctuaries. New results of ongoing excavations with a special focus on sculptures and high reliefs,” Documenta Praehistorica, vol. 37 (2010): 239–56, at 254, doi.org/10.4312/dp.37.21
Dr. Jordan Peterson, “Biblical Series 1: Introduction to the Idea of God Transcript”, Jordan B. Peterson, https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/transcripts/biblical-series-i/
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “The Gulag Archipelago Volume 1, Pg 65” , HarperPerennial, 1973
California SB 132, Legislative Counsel’s Digest, https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201920200SB132
Women’s Liberation Front, “CA Women’s Prisons Anticipate Pregnancy After Forcing Women to be Housed with Men,” Women’s Liberation Front, July 15 2021, https://www.womensliberationfront.org/news/ca-womens-prisons-anticipate-pregnancy-sb123
Dori Monson, “DOC employee reports men are claiming to be women to transfer prisons”, KIRO Radio, March 10 2021, https://mynorthwest.com/2666243/doc-washington-correctional-center-women-men-transfer/
Tariq Ahmed, “Canada: Bill C-4 Banning Conversion Therapy Comes Into Force”, 2022, https://www.loc.gov/item/global-legal-monitor/2022-01-19/canada-bill-c-4-banning-conversion-therapy-comes-into-force/
Joseph Brean, “Forced to share a room with transgender woman in Toronto shelter, sex abuse victim files human rights complaint”, Toronto National Post, August 2 2018, https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/kristi-hanna-human-rights-complaint-transgender-woman-toronto-shelter