The leading Catholic bishop in the United States admonished the growing interest in intersectionality and identity politics, saying they are “pseudo-religions.”
Archbishop Jose H. Gomez, the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, said “America’s new political religions” of “wokeness,” “intersectionality,” and “identity politics,” among others, “claim to offer what religion provides.” He delivered the remarks via video on Thursday to the Congress of Catholics and Public Life as it met in Madrid that day.
“I believe the best way for the Church to understand the new social justice movements is to understand them as pseudo-religions, and even replacements and rivals to traditional Christian beliefs,” Gomez said. “With the breakdown of the Judeo-Christian worldview and the rise of secularism, political belief systems based on social justice or personal identity have come to fill the space that Christian belief and practice once occupied.”
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While Gomez called the death of George Floyd, which attracted nationwide protests during the summer of 2020 from racial justice activists, “a stark reminder that racial and economic inequality are still deeply embedded in our society,” the archbishop maintained that “we can only build a just society on the foundation of the truth about God and human nature.”
“Today’s critical theories and ideologies are profoundly atheistic. They deny the soul, the spiritual, transcendent dimension of human nature; or they think that it is irrelevant to human happiness. They reduce what it means to be human to essentially physical qualities — the color of our skin, our sex, our notions of gender, our ethnic background, or our position in society. … In denying God, these new movements have lost the truth about the human person. This explains their extremism and their harsh, uncompromising, and unforgiving approach to politics,” he continued, urging the church “to understand and engage these new movements — not on social or political terms, but as dangerous substitutes for true religion.”
Gomez’s ideas echo warnings from authors such as John Mcwhorter and James M. Patterson, who have argued the growing notions within “wokeness” are inherently religious.
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Concerns about the church tacitly sanctioning far-left political stances led a group of 168 bishops in the United States to vote in favor of drafting a “formal statement” on the Eucharist that could prompt the church to withhold communion from high-profile officials such as President Joe Biden over stances favoring widespread access to abortions. Biden has challenged claims that he should be denied the sacrament, saying last month Pope Francis was “happy” that the president was a “good Catholic.”
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is scheduled to meet in Baltimore between Nov. 15 and Nov. 18 for its 2021 Fall General Assembly, where the issue of granting communion to officials whose views are often at odds with the church’s teachings is expected to be discussed.
