I have a lot of friends who sort-of shake their heads when I tell them I occasionally watch Tucker Carlson’s videos on YouTube. I remember very clearly when he and Jon Stewart famously clashed in 2004. Stewart is my age and Carlson is about 6 years younger, and in 2004 I was 100% on Stewart’s “side” and thought the takedown that has been credited with hastening the end of the Crossfire show was appropriate and hilarious.

In the two decades since then, a lot has happened. I still like Stewart, but I’m no longer 100% in support of every position he takes. And I think Carlson has changed. He regularly acknowledges he has been wrong about important issues and has been on the wrong side of momentous public debates like his support for the Iraq War. He seems to take himself less seriously and frequently acknowledges that his judgment is biased by his emotional responses. Even the giggling laugh he breaks into during his monologues or interviews (which many people find a bit obnoxious) often appears to me to be a way of laughing at himself and the absurdity of the seeming seriousness of the pundit/talking head role he inhabits.

And by a lot of measures, Tucker is the most influential conservative commentator in American media today. I don’t agree with many of his positions, although I’ve found I do agree with some of them, such as his claim that collective punishment is never legitimate. And I’m curious about what messages his viewers are getting and how Tucker is affecting their understanding of the world and what’s happening in it.

Today, I noticed Tucker has posted a 97-minute long “War Update” that spends a half hour explaining the importance to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam of Mt. Moriah, also known as the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. This discussion is relevant because, as Tucker reports, not only have US military officers been telling their soldiers that the current war is “for Jesus” and is about hastening the Apocalypse, but many Israeli IDF soldiers are apparently running around with official Third Temple patches on their uniforms. I don’t think you just get to slap any random patch on a military uniform; so this seems significant.

As a person who does not belong to any of these three “Abrahamic” religions, this is all very weird for me. Carlson acknowledges that these blatantly religious developments have gone largely unreported and unnoticed in the very secular Western society that modern America has become. He claims to be a religious christian, but not of the same flavor that seems to (or at least claims to) believe in these prophecies of the Apocalypse. It’s interesting to me that as a believer, Tucker seems to want to respect the supernatural religious beliefs by which others claim to be motivated. I suppose that’s an internally consistent position to take. If your own motivations rest on supernatural claims and you are aware that you might be wrong, it seems reasonable to avoid directly attacking others. Tucker even suggests that his (Episcopal) upbringing taught him that it’s usually best to keep those beliefs to yourself!

That’s all well and good, of course, unless the others are taking their supernatural claims out of the privacy of their own religious beliefs and killing people over them. There have been a bunch of commentators on YouTube in the past day or so, comparing claims made by US leaders that the government of Iran is a crazed theocracy with statements of our own leaders that sound every bit as crazed and theocratic. It’s entirely possible, I suppose, that at the highest levels, the people making these statements are just cynical liars intent on deceiving gullible “base” constituencies who don’t have the interest or ability to think critically. But this has been a feature rather than a bug of organized religion in the West, as long as there has been organized religion in the West.

Another YouTube video I listened to yesterday was a talk by Matthew Stewart on his recent book, Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic. (

) It was a talk sponsored by the Hall Center for the Humanities in the UK, and Stewart connected the deistic ideas of the Founders with the European Enlightenment and particularly with Spinoza. None of it was surprising to me or broke new ground, but I felt it was a very timely description of how and why secular social institutions became important and remain so. I had a conversation with my Dad, later in the day, about the story of Jefferson and the bible and scissors, and the different ways christianity can be imagined. Some people seem to see it as a set of moral teachings about kindness, peace, and charity, while others seem to focus on weird prophecies of end times wars and genocide. How are these even contained in the same religion?

This has all reinforced my feeling that although I appreciate Carlson’s religious modesty: the idea that because he might be wrong he won’t “judge” others’ beliefs, I’m not sure that’s going to protect us from Armageddon. I can easily imagine sensible, rational, kind people being rolled over by insane zealots. In fact, I might even say this is the norm. So how do we prevent that?

It’s no secret that for the past couple of decades I’ve been very interested in the Freethinkers of especially American History. I went to Ashfield and accidentally discovered the peppermint oil industry, while looking for Dr. Charles Knowlton, and I wrote a biography of Knowlton five years before I completed my dissertation on the Peppermint Kings. I remain very interested in the ways liberalism and radicalism (in the Enlightenment senses of the words) and freethought seem to support, reinforce, and maybe even create each other. I’m thinking it’s time to devote more time to exploring and communicating these ideas.

Although I get regular messages from the FRFF (Freedom From Religion Foundation) including frequent “Action Alerts” telling me that a school district (typically in a former confederate state) has begun requiring prayer in school or a courthouse has erected a statue of the Ten Commandments, I’ve been ignoring them. Maybe this has been because, as Tucker Carlson suggested, I was content that I was living in a secular society where these were just silly, local annoyances that it was safe to ignore. But maybe that’s no longer the case, when the Secretary of War is hosting prayer meetings of top Pentagon officers and the chain of command is supporting the idea that we are attacking Persia to bring about the end of the world. To do my part, I’m going to begin posting a bit more on the history of freethought and secular society.