And that’s how a person can end up screaming “repent” at a stranger for the crime of holding a funny sign.įrom the September 2015 issue: The coddling of the American mind Singing, swaying, and chanting build up a kind of electricity, which ripples through the group. In The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff suggest that we look at campus protests as outbreaks of “collective effervescence,” a term coined by the sociologist Emile Durkheim to describe emotions that can be accessed only in a crowd. They’ve substituted one religion for another. Perhaps, then, it isn’t a coincidence that they are also the group most likely to be involved in high-profile social-justice blowups, particularly the type found on college campuses.
In the U.S., the nonreligious are younger and more liberal than the population as a whole. For some activists, politics has usurped the role that religion used to play as a source of meaning and purpose in our lives, and a way to find a community. We might expect that religious concepts-repentance, hellfire, heresy, apostasy-would have become less salient as a result. In Britain, where I live, the decline of organized religion is “one of the most important trends in postwar history,” according to the British Social Attitudes survey. This fire-and-brimstone language might initially seem odd, because society is becoming less religious-in the U.S., church membership dropped below 50 percent for the first time in 2020, down from 70 percent in 1999. They held a sign that read REJOIN STONEWALL OR GO TO HELL. That decision might sound dry and technical, but to the students, it showed the institution’s lack of commitment to LGBTQ rights.
The man who liked Dave was urged to “repent.”Ī similar sentiment surfaced last month, when students protested the decision of University College London to stop paying Stonewall, an LGBTQ charity, to audit the institution’s compliance with laws on diversity. Someone else shouted in his face, and their word choice was notable. Someone took the sign from him and ripped it up. Inevitably, there was a counterprotest: a lonely Chappelle fan holding a sign that read We like Dave. Last October, a crowd gathered outside Netflix’s offices in Los Angeles to protest the release of Dave Chappelle’s comedy special The Closer, which contained a long riff criticizing transgender activists.
If someone is yelling “repent” at you in the street, are they more likely to be (a) a religious preacher or (b) a left-wing activist?
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