When the intellectual elites of our culture allow sentiment to supplant reason, then the discourse of public life is in grave trouble. We should know this from seeing what happens when sentiment comes to dominate other branches of our culture. Art becomes kitsch. And ethics becomes a matter of responding to the latest sob story and the immediate appetites of the moment without reflection on broader social needs, goods, or consequences.

Today, as in the days of Plato, rhetoric is what moves the crowd. But as Plato knew, truth, not rhetoric, is the task of philosophy and philosophers. That is why the latter are so important. Sadly, many in today’s philosopher class—the intellectuals—seem to have forgotten Plato. They now find rhetoric more attractive than truth. Last week provided yet another example of this when a number of British religious leaders signed a letter to the prime minister, Boris Johnson, calling for transgender people to receive the same protection from “conversion therapy” as other LGBTQ+ individuals.

The letter is a good example of how sentimental mush has come to replace careful moral reasoning in the minds of so many. The usual therapeutic patois is on full display. The language of becoming whole, of safe place, of affirmation, is strewn throughout the piece, and the postmodern ethicist’s empty-but-persuasive word of choice, “journey,” appears twice, once even qualified with the adjective “sacred.”

The letter is light on actual theology but does make peculiar comment on conversion therapy and prayer: “To allow those discerning this journey to be subject to coercive or undermining practices is to make prayer a means of one person manipulating another.”

The logic of this sentence seems to imply that to pray for a transgender person to become comfortable with his biological sex is a form of “conversion therapy.” As such, prayer is to be equated with coercion and bullying. Do these religious leaders think that prayer changes nothing and that any claim otherwise makes it simply a tool for exercising psychological power over another? Or do they think that the only petitions that should be made on behalf of trans people are those that confirm their self-diagnosis? If the former, then why bother praying for anything at all? If the latter, what about the growing number of de-transitioners, many of whom would no doubt have been grateful if somebody had prayed for them and also intervened in some other way before they permanently mutilated their bodies?

Yet as confused as that sentence is, it is not the most disturbing aspect of the letter. That honor must be given to the presence of Rowan Williams’s signature.

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