We have here two prominent, globally-known spokesmen for what we might call the anti-woke, sociologically right-wing side of things. That they invoke personal and social utility to justify belief in God, rather than classical theistic formulations, at once more robust and more straightforward, strongly suggests that we are dealing with what the historian Oswald Spengler called “second religiosity” (or “second religiousness”) in his Decline of the West. What this term means is that earlier, earnestly-held religious beliefs are rehashed largely as a cultural stance against declining social conditions and the establishment.

God is the highest value in the hierarchy of values … God is how we imaginatively and collectively represent the existence and action of consciousness across time …

God is that which eternally dies and is reborn in the pursuit of higher being and truth. 

—Jordan Peterson, during his June 2018 debate with Sam Harris.

When you understand the level of evil in the world, you understand that (following the second law of thermodynamics) the only equal but opposite force to that must be God …

Even God as a concept becomes a real thing. If you have a thousand people and they believe in God … and that makes them act righteously, even as a concept God becomes a real force.

—Andrew Tate

Whatever disagreements they might have, what Peterson and Tate are both expressing in the above quotes is a false faith, a bluff. They may believe in God but find that their faith is inchoate so far as their ability to articulate it. That’s a question we cannot judge—what they do articulate, however, is technically speaking an idol.

The West’s Second Religiosity

To worship an “imaginative and collective representation” of consciousness “across time,” that is, within our heads and within time, rather than beyond these, is technically idolatry.

To worship a force that is opposite but equal to evil, and a concept whose reality consists in affecting behaviour, is no different.

Given the prominence of Tate, I should add—although it isn’t the focus of this essay—that whether or not he is guilty of the crimes for which he stands accused—he obviously promoted moral rot through gambling and a webcam business. This track record remains significant insofar as his legions of fans have yet to hear him explicitly repent, so far as I know (a lack of repentance which may be related to his tendency to argue for God’s existence as a socially useful “operating system” rather than as a genuine transcendent source of moral truth). 

It is a technical matter of religiosity, to my mind, that sin should be repented from publicly if sin was promoted publicly. During his interview with Candace Owens, the two agreed that one should not regret past mistakes. Fair enough. But a mother who had a child with a man who was not her husband need not regret the life of that child to repent of the adultery. 

Tate’s un-repentance for pushing moral corruption may well go hand in hand with his tendency to think about God as a social operating system.

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