Evangelicals will have much to appreciate about Murray’s work. Most of us will find the book self-recommending and friendly to our priors. But this means that it’s all the more important to be distinctly Christian in these conversations. Christians are not content merely to pop politically correct bubbles (though we often must). We are obligated to speak the truth in love — an obligation that secular critics of progressivism like Murray won’t necessarily share. 

The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race, and Identity begins with a quote from G.K Chesterton: “The special mark of the modern world is not that it is sceptical [sic], but that it is dogmatic without knowing it.” As epigraphs go, it’s a fine choice. Yet perhaps a better one would be this one: “A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed.” The Madness of Crowds faithfully and forcefully documents the chaos that reigns when an entire generation of elites embraces this inversion.

Douglas Murray dives headlong into the contemporary “social justice” orthodoxy that already seemingly owns the whole of Western higher education and much of our politics. Though not a conservative — he’s an irreligious English journalist who also happens to be gay — Murray looks into progressive ideology in the areas of feminism, homosexuality, race, and transgenderism, and reports back a dogmatic orthodoxy punishing enough to make Nathaniel Hawthorne tremble. Murray’s curation of social justice culture’s alarming character is an extraordinarily valuable work of journalism, even if, unlike Mr. Chesterton, his secularist commitments keep him from connecting the most crucial dots.

Murray warns early on that the spectacles of outrage, cancellation, and ideological persecution that are now epidemic in Western life threaten not just manners but civilization itself.  “We face not just a future of ever-greater atomization, rage, and violence,” Murray writes in the introduction, “but a future in which the possibility of a backlash against all rights advances — including the good ones — grows more likely” (9). The “madness” Murray has in mind is that of a mob. According to Murray, the fuel powering the steamrolling machine of madness is identity. Once it is politically weaponized, identity becomes a powerful means to shut down truth-seeking and impose dogmatism.

One example is the conflation of what Murray terms “hardware” — innate, objective, biologically-determined facts about people — with “software,” i.e., social conditioning, preferences, and psychology. Calling hardware what is actually software empowers a multitude of intellectual dishonesties and political strong-arming.

As a gay man, Murray has no qualms with LGBT equality. But he does sharply criticize the social and political weaponization of homosexuality (“Gay”), as evidenced by the cynical way the gay left rejects any suggestion that experiences or upbringing may cultivate homoerotic feeling — even when such suggestions come from gays. Murray bemoans the way the contemporary gay rights movement reduces sexuality to sexual politics, and thus only values gay people who leverage their identity toward progressive ideology.

This is an important theme running throughout The Madness of Crowds. Identity politics, Murray observes, bottoms out in irony: tThe gradual erasure of personality and reduction of individuals to their politics. Murray recounts how technology entrepreneur Peter Thiel, who is gay, was relentlessly attacked by LGBT activists for endorsing Donald Trump. Murray cites one journalist who asked, “When you abandon numerous aspects of queer identity, are you still LGBT?” (44). Had The Madness of Crowds gone to press a little bit later, Murray would almost certainly have cited similar attacks from progressives toward mayor Pete Buttigieg.

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