Against Lazy Left Anti-Religion: An Open Letter to Hamilton Nolan on Religion and Labor

Dear Hamilton (if I may),

I write as someone who happily supports your Substack project, usually agrees with your arguments, and sometimes forwards them to friends. But I write today to urge you to reconsider your recent argument attacking a general concept of religion—maybe this was mainly about fractions of US Christianity but you framed it sweepingly—and dripping with disdain for the new Pope Leo XIV. 

These arguments were not thoughtful and they were counterproductive in ways that are symptomatic for wider parts of the left. I’m writing to urge you to rethink them.   

You should subscribe to Hamilton Nolans' How Things Work! Usually it is very good, just not so much this time.

Let’s begin by summarizing your argument. You say religions are based on claims that no smart person can take seriously, which lead back toward forms of “self-deception” and/or “yearning” that are basically false consciousness unrelated to a search for warranted facts. Any honest person will inevitably be agnostic about most such claims—and with a negative bias since “all religions are riddled with clearly absurd assertions”—although some people resist admitting this. Vestiges of “religion-as-culture” do remain significant, and sometimes can function as “rebellion against modernity.”  But on balance we should be non-committal at best—agnostic—and most likely bored or even contemptuous of religion. We should welcome religion’s “measurable decline” as “progress.” By extension, although Pope Leo seems to be a nice enough guy and J.D. Vance doesn’t like him, we should deflate most claims about the truth value or cultural importance of his voice. If religious yearning is your thing, that might be OK, but if saying “a pox on all religion” is more your thing, far be it from Hamilton Nolan to discourage you. 

A Parallel Argument to Consider

To begin understanding why this argument is wrongheaded, let’s imagine I wrote something condescending about “workers,” snarking about their ignorance, false consciousness, and “yearning” evidenced by many of them voting Republican or wallowing in apolitical consumerism. And unions, dear God their schtick is pathetic, trotting out failed forms of “faith” and expecting to appeal to such workers! Who cares if labor has a new leader who recently defeated exceedingly less attractive competitors in a major contested election? A pox on them all!   

Would you have the slightest difficulty critiquing me? Although some workers are consumerist Trump voters, some unions do fail, and there exist some marxian catechisms that you and I would not take literally—still it would be an obvious category mistake, as well as a strategic “own goal,” to conflate these with the best fractions of workers/unions/marxians/allies we might champion, some already on board with you and some that you hope to recruit.        

Now imagine I extend my snark to people who embarrass themselves by singing “Solidarity Forever”—or since there do exist lame renditions of it, let’s focus on an exemplary case: Billy Bragg singing “There is Power in a Union.” How could anyone be so blinded by yearning to align themselves with a proposition that solidarity exists among working class people, historically and today? Isn’t it the worst utopian faith (the false consciousness type, not a form any smart person would defend) to posit that unions are strong? How blind must one be to discount the historical racism of labor, its current weakness, and how easily we can cherry-pick examples of corruption? The obvious answer to “is there power in a union?” is to be agnostic with a hostile bias! 

So we circle back (my hypothetical snark continues) to the core issue: how could an intelligent person conflate “workers” (imagined as a commendable fraction of an organized working class, working with allies) with everyone who ever worked, in any way, in any mode of production, with any political entanglements? It’s an obvious category mistake…yet typical of people who aren’t very bright. Etc. 

Have you heard enough? I hope it’s clear that I hardly believe a word of it, and indeed I would suspect anyone who did of being willfully obtuse. You can kick down my straw argument with ease. Organized labor is a practice and tradition—deeply diverse and internally contested despite problems we know. Solidarity is real, although imperfect, and it does make us stronger, notwithstanding frequent weakness. In most contexts it is good to sing “the Union forever defending our rights” as part of the tradition—even when some unions are not factually being “a comfort to the widow, a light to the child” nor “defend[ing] the workers who cannot organize/when the bosses send their lackeys out to cheat us.” 

It is precisely because we understand how “workers”—as shorthand for “conscious workers organized in commendable ways”—is distinct from everyone who ever worked with any political entanglements, that it is important to fight for the better parts of the tradition. 

OK, But What’s Your Point?  

Just as some religious folks might not immediately grasp the comparison between “religious traditions” and “workers” that I’ve been presupposing, you might not have picked up on every nuance as you approached from another direction. Let me spell it out. 

But first, let’s get something out of the way. Yes, we could try to generalize about majority trends in US religion. Sometimes that provides helpful insight at a first approximation, despite people overplaying what they think they know about it. I do not deny that many religious people are enemies of labor simply because I know that the debate about “who speaks for US Christians” is less one-sided than pundits think. Nor am I trying to figure out if behaviors of “the religious,” on balance as one lump, are better or worse than “US workers” as an overlapping lump. Since this is a badly framed question, I hope we can agree—let’s be agnostic! If you wish to posit that a religious lump would average a bit worse, I don’t care as long as you take my framing seriously. I want you to grant me that the categories are contested and even minority fractions—perhaps overshadowed by larger trends—are often significant. 

It’s almost always a category mistake to generalize about “religion.” This is such an amorphous category that it is like attempting to generalize about all people who have ever labored. Our stance should indeed be agnostic before we dig into cases. Surely you presuppose that there are diverse working-class traditions (with an “s”) nested within larger working-class traditions like Marxism. Likewise, you should presuppose that there are diverse religious traditions (with an “s”) within huge traditions like Christianity. Many of them are worth respecting (at times even championing!) in relation to the priorities of How Things Work, although many are not.  

Who speaks for “the Christians”? That’s internally debated—in battles at least as intense and complex, but longer running, as controversies about labor strategies, left party formation, and the like. Religious traditions are structured as running debates about what values and hopes the traditions should prioritize for their presents and futures, moving ahead from the better and worse parts of their current articulations. If you wish to understand this—not simply attempt drive-by-shootings in the style of New Atheists like Sam Harris—you must grasp how this precisely does not reduce to blind faith. It includes discussions among people—many of them as smart as you—about how to build persuasive and mobilizing visions: what is the best mix of core orienting values, analyses of our contexts (here dealing with facts is indeed essential), and what you call “yearning.” Something roughly similar is true in labor traditions. New Atheists are allergic to seeing how this works in lived religion, but at this point they are the blind ones.       

One of the few things that does hold as a rough generalization amid this complexity is this: most of what matters in these debates is not intellectual propositions about doctrines. At best these make up one layer of religious wholes—typically not the most important, but if so often aspirational, metaphorical, and/or symbolic, That's as opposed to reducing to mere propositions about “facts.” This implies that what you call “religion-as-culture” is not a smallish watered-down subset of “religion,” as you seem to think; it is more like religion as you define it is a subset of religion-as-culture, which in turn is too narrow for conceptualizing the whole. If you think you can swat this objection away like an annoying fly, I invite you to engage with my more developed argument called “Why New Atheist Definitions of Religion Fail.” 

Meanwhile, just think with me about two propositions: “Resolved: there is empirical evidence that X union really is a comfort to Y widow” and “Resolved: the song is factually accurate—“The Internationale unites the human race” for example, during World War I). If we can show that these statements are empirically incorrect, does it follow that labor organizing reduces to ignorant yearning?

Ways You Could Consider Rethinking 

A non-category-mistake approach, if you wish to repair damage from your post, could center on three things.

First, focus on fractions of religious folks who are themselves workers in concrete contexts, or are current or potential strategic allies, or are opponents to win over. Don't talk about all “religion” (the category mistake) or try to generalize about beliefs (a frame too narrow for either wide or focused analysis.) Do proceed case by case, attentive to contestation over practice. I should not have to belabor this! It is neo-Gramscian theory and labor strategy 101. All you need to do is connect the dots.  

Second, do not approach such people as if they are unaware of the aspirational or metaphorical aspects of things they sometimes say as they practice their traditions. (Even the most hardcore fundamentalists who huff and puff about “literal truths” of doctrine often show such awareness. When they say “God is my rock” [“literally”] or quote Jesus about being “salt for the earth” they aren’t speaking literally. The word they need, the gist of which they presuppose, is “metaphorically!”)

Nor should we assume that religious folks are oblivious to unfortunate parts of their traditions—which they may be trying to defeat or improve. They may well know these parts better than you do, just as you know more about the infighting in your union than they do. You and I agree, this is a place to be agnostic in a sense of reserving judgment. But most religious people deserve a benefit of doubt about their good will until proven otherwise, although there do exist proven exceptions to this rule. 

Third, concerning Leo XIV, upon whom you turn a mix of snark and faint praise, think less about conceptual abstractions and more about concrete effects of his practice. To become pope, Leo had to triumph in an election to lead a 2000-year-old multi-continent movement. Compromises were involved. Is he going to be perfect? Surely not. (Do you have in mind a labor tradition that is perfect on race and gender to compare?) Let’s emphasize something you touch on: there was a full-court press (especially in the US, but also worldwide) to elect someone far more conservative to roll back policies of Pope Francis. Leo seems likely to extend his policies. Although it’s not always true that the enemy of your enemy is your friend, in this case MAGA outrage about Leo is worth noting—and not, as in your case, mainly doing so to make fun of J.D. Vance without this translating into respect for pro-Leo Christians.  

If you didn't love Kamala Harris, but would have breathed a sigh of relief if she had squeaked out a victory over Trump, I encourage you to compare Leo’s election to someone well to Harris’s left—maybe even Bernie although that's a stretch—comfortably defeating Trump. Now imagine the FOX trash-talking that would have come at Bernie thick and heavy afterward. Do you care to echo it? 

Catholic Complexities 

Admittedly this leads into complexity, since even the conservative Pope John Paul II was left of Bernie on global economics, and even the liberal Pope Francis was right of Harris on sex/gender issues. So let’s get the sex part out of the way, too, since you are probably thinking about it. Everyone knows that Catholics have world-historical problems in covering up sexual abuses and failing to give women and LGBTQ folks equal rights. These are huge problems with a lot of historical inertia. Some people inside the tradition are trying to address this in ways that help and some are not. It may be instructive to compare US labor’s historic entanglements with white supremacy, colonial modes of production, and masculinist bias, with some people trying to move beyond this and others not so much. 

In both cases, it is easy for trash-talkers to cherry-pick problems and weaponize them indiscriminately against leaders who may be trying to work through them. There likely was not a single candidate for the papacy without at least one parishioner who had a lawyer suing them over real or alleged cover-ups of sex abuses. Yes, I said it, there has been a mix of the real and the merely alleged and/or blown out of proportion. I’m playing my agnostic card about the proportions of this mix—that’s not to deny many real parts, but to notice that there also have been ambulance-chasing lawyers mixed up in it. If you’re not inclined to believe me, please read this important book which has left credibility, compelling details, and an argument that places these scandals and lawsuits into a wider context of sex panics that the left more often critiques than extends.  

If I'm making your head hurt—can you imagine, some accusers may be exaggerating or lying outright while some bishops are trying harder than others to do the right thing!—think for a minute about big bureaucracies. Is there a single university president without at least one disgruntled employee suing his/her HR department—to which nay-sayers can hand a megaphone? If the answer is no, should we conclude that we don’t care who is leading a university—no candidate is any better or worse than any other? No doubt sex abuse and stances toward women and/or LGBTQ people are big problems for Catholicism. Still, until proven otherwise I’m giving Leo XIV a benefit of doubt that he will navigate this far better than his right-wing compatriots with whom J.D. Vance hoped to collaborate. Although the primary allies that you and I likely want—whether in churches or universities—are less the top-down managerial types and more the bottom-up activists, still my argument stands.

Let’s turn back toward modes of production and labor strategies where How Things Works prefers to live. Assuming that Leo XIV carries forward social teachings of Leo XIII’s (Bernie-adjacent) encyclical Rerum Novarum, this can be a big deal for labor. If you aren’t inclined to trust me, think again about Gramsci. Of course, practice around Rerum Novarum was imperfect and complex as it moved across concrete interfaces of various bishops (not to mention rank-and-file Catholics) with socialism, gender, church/state issues, and the Protestant social gospel. We should approach Catholic social teaching from case to case, one struggle at a time. Here again it's a category mistake to overgeneralize. I wrote about the key trends here and don’t want to get into it now. 

But let’s be clear: assuming that Leo carries this tradition forward, it will be non-trivial for all these matters that deserve careful analysis, not dismissive snark. 

• It will be very far left from Trump, most pro-Trump Catholic bishops, and evangelical Trumpists (whether in Christian Nationalist or prosperity gospel camps.) 

• It will be significantly left from centrist Democrats on immigration and guns vs. butter issues.  

• It will be a non-trivial cultural consideration for many rank-and-file Christians, especially but not only Catholic, whom unions hope to organize—even if (especially if!) their local church leaders are conservative.

• It will be non-trivial for strategic alliances and cultural discourses around many issues that unions care about.  

To repeat: all these things are entangled with complexities related to sex, legacies of bishops v/v socialists, the Christian right, and more. But to treat this as a conversation stopper is on par with saying, “well, never mind the labor movement, it’s historically racist, has Trumpers in its rank-and-file, hasn’t fixed all its baggage—and anyway we are only making fun of its magical thinking, not trying to understand what makes it tick.”  

Let’s not be like that! Let’s be agnostic about how labor and/or religious traditions will be articulated in practice, and let’s try not to blow up bridges before we start. That’s if we haven't lost track of the bridges existing in the first place. 

Last Thoughts With Joan C. Williams 

I began this letter after reading an interview with Joan C. Williams in Jacobin magazine. I found this good to think with and suspect you might too—albeit not as a one-size-fits-all analysis, since if pushed too hard, the “average Americans” of her title “The Left Has to Speak to Average Americans’ Values” could lead us into further category mistakes. Let’s proceed with the motto “if the shoe fits, wear it.” 

Williams talks about the “class culture” of middle-strata workers facing “economic precarity”—that is, they do not live in acute poverty yet are “hanging on to middle-class status for dear life.” Given this class position, they are concerned with creating stability in their households and communities, inculcating self-discipline to succeed in none-too-glamorous jobs, and gaining respect for the dignity of their labor. Williams speaks of a “scrum for social honor” and how honor may come through religion or inherited moral ideals. To synthesize her suggested approach, Jacobin's editors offer this: “stop dismissing cultural principles that grant average Americans’ lives dignity.”  

Reading this interview, I pondered how “average American” workers relate to “ordinary Catholic” parishes—and by extension how other “average workers” relate to other religious practices. If we bring this down to cases as we should, the people in view may or may not be active in their churches (or synagogues/mosques/Zen centers/etc). If they are, they may not care much about doctrinal propositions. But many are networked there non-trivially, and related networking would hold true for a strong majority of US citizens if we move to higher levels of abstraction and historical contextualization. This especially leads toward embedded common sense about what counts as good and bad, inflected by Christian moral sensibilities. 

Williams notes how cultural/legal victories around LGBTQ recognition built on appeals to “normie” considerations such as LGBTQ life partners needing access to hospital visitation. Such examples resonate for a scholar of US religion like me, since as this battle unfolded I paid close attention to how a centrist mainstream of US Christianity, including many evangelicals, embraced this sort of argument. Often they started from a none-too-inspiring formula of passively supporting “civil unions” without recommending them—many were simply straight Republican parents grudgingly supporting their own kids. Nevertheless this opened spaces left of such formulas and pushed hard-core homophobes into a minority. Without such transformations in the Christian mainstream, we might still be in a culture war stalemate over gay marriage. When Pope Francis said of LGBTQ folks, “who am I to judge?” it was a milestone in the same transformation, opening a way for full-throated leftward parts of Catholicism to press their case while moving centrist parts toward neutrality. Obviously this didn’t eliminate the religious right, but pushing that cohort into a minority was a necessary condition for victory.     

Extrapolating toward class issues, there can be major cultural weight behind religious/political talking points that Williams helps us imagine. “Normie” values of a living wage and stable families/communities can proceed—working together in a passably happy family—with “average Americans,” the priorities of labor, and the many religious people who are middle-of-the-road or further left. (Here again, we can connect the dots to left theory 101, following Raymond Williams on contested articulations of what he calls “residual” culture. Religion is not always a reactionary residue that “progress” leaves behind; it includes traditional resources to cultivate and rearticulate.) Leo may well help us leverage such things as part of wider coalitions. If so, he can appeal to strong precedents since the dignity of labor has been a major theme in Catholic social teaching, and of course huge parts of the Bible are intensely hostile to wealthy oppressors. 

Note I did not say Leo can “spearhead” this—although regarding some aspects of immigration politics it is not out of the question. Nor have I forgotten a known bug: religious leaders sometimes try to control movements that they should only participate in. Here again we should move case by case—sometimes pressing a religious left for greater humility, but frequently asking for less wishy-washiness and more boldness too. My argument is not that religion is normally good—here again I'm on the agnostic train!—nor that religion is a decisive factor for most people on most issues, as opposed to one layer of intersectional conjunctures. I'm simply underlining that its weight—for better and worse—is non-trivial, not least for people whom Joan Williams flags as a key voting bloc and recruiting ground for union members/allies. 

In conclusion, I urge you to read through her Jacobin interview, paying attention to whether your post’s snarky tone and background understanding of religions—trying to be intellectual while falling into serious category mistakes as well as condescension—would help or hurt for carrying forward whatever parts of Williams’s analysis you agree with. As we move from case to case with open-minded agnosticism and warranted yearning to orient us, I suspect you may come to see that your piece is too much part of the problem and not enough part of the solution. 

Thank you for considering these reflections,

Mark Hulsether