What will the 21st century be? If you asked me 20 years ago, say September 10, 2001, I would have a clear answer: promote liberalism. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of apartheid, and Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in China, a set of values seems to be moving-democracy, capitalism, egalitarianism, personal freedom.
Then in the following decades, the spread of democracy was blocked and then reversed. Dictators in China, Central and Eastern Europe and other regions hold power. We have entered the now familiar race between democratic liberalism and authoritarianism.
But in the past few years something interesting has happened: authoritarians have found God. They use religious symbols as nationalist identity signs and rally slogans. They united the masses behind them by launching endless cultural wars. They redefine the global debate: it is no longer a dispute between democracy and dictatorship; it lies between the moral degradation of the Western elite and the traditional values and superior spirituality of the good ordinary people in their hometown.
At a time when the attractiveness of actual religions seems to be diminishing, the 21st century is turning into an era of jihad that spans the globe.
Xi Jinping is one of the creators of this kind of authoritarianism. Mao Zedong despised China before the revolution. But the Xi Jinping regime has spared no effort to accept old customs and traditional values. The Chinese scholar Max Oidtmann stated that while establishing “core socialist values”, it limits independent religious entities, which is a creed that combines Confucianism, Taoism, Marxism, and Mao Zedong thought.
Last week, the Chinese government ordered a boycott of “sissy” celebrities. These are fine-looking male stars with mild personalities and are accused of feminizing Chinese masculinity. This is just one of the attempts to illustrate how the regime protects China from the cultural wars of Western moral corruption.
The regime’s top-down moral populism is having an impact. “Today, traditionalism is becoming more and more popular among ordinary Chinese as well as intellectuals and politicians,” Xuetong Yan of Tsinghua University wrote in 2018. China’s Internet is now clearly flooded with decadent “white left” attacks-educated American and European progressives who champion feminism, LGBTQ rights, etc.
Vladimir Putin and other regional dictators played similar games. Putin has long associated himself with religious philosophers such as Ivan Ilin and Nikolai Berdyaev. In an article by the Berkeley Center at Georgetown University, Dmitry Uzlaner reported that the regime is shaping itself as the “last bastion of Christian values” to prevent the world from falling into liberalism. Moral confusion.
Cultural wars also broke out there. The regime restricted the Internet, tried to restrict abortion, eased the fight against domestic violence, implemented blasphemy laws, and prohibited the provision of information supporting “non-traditional sexual relations” to minors.
Even authoritarians in the United States and Western Europe began to participate. International affairs scholar Tobias Cremer has shown that many so-called Christian nationalists in the extreme right movements on both sides of the Atlantic are actually not so religious.
They are driven by nativism and anti-immigration attitudes, and then seize the symbol of Christianity to distinguish “them” from “us”. For example, in Germany, far-right groups that aggressively boast of their Christian identity do not perform well among voters with genuine religious beliefs.
In another article at the Berkeley Center, Kramer wrote that American right-wing extremists “paraded Christian crosses at rallies, used crusader images in their memes, and might even seek alliances with conservative Christian groups. But these The mention is not about the living, energetic, universal, and increasingly diverse belief in Jesus Christ practiced by most American churches today. On the contrary, political Christianity has largely become a kind of white identity. Secularized’Christianity’: a cultural identity symbol and a white symbol that can be interchanged with Viking veneers, Confederate flags, or neo-pagan symbols.”
These authoritarians in the cloak of religion will naturally arouse anti-religious backlash among those who now associate religion with authoritarianism, nativism, and general hooliganism. In the past few decades, the unprecedented level of secularism in Europe and the United States has not reduced vicious cultural and spiritual wars.
The pseudo-religious authoritarians increase moral hazard. They act as if individualism, human rights, diversity, gender equality, LGBTQ rights and religious freedom are just the latest form of Western moral imperialism and a harbinger of social and moral chaos.
Those of us who are on the side of Western liberalism have no choice but to fight it spiritually and culturally, showing that pluralism is the opposite of decadence, a spiritually rich, practical and effective way to enhance human dignity and running. . A harmonious society.
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Post time: Sep-16-2021
