Joe Rogan and the Death of God

Human beings thirst for meaning and order, but there are better ways to get them than from old-time religion.

This is a weird time to be writing on religion and politics in America. 

In the olden days, things were pretty simple. There were the traditional Christians who loved God and apple pie and, on the other side of the aisle, the progressives who talked about civil rights and pluralism.  Yes, there were a lot of people in between, but it was still a pretty straight horizontal line.

Now, the wheels have come off the political and religious wagons.

Politically, the so-called “Intellectual Dark Web” has morphed into an RFK-Jr-adjacent third space filled with diagonalists, conspirituality believers, alienated MAGA populists, whole foods lefties, psychonauts, and – as a recent Times profile astutely put it – anyone for whom outsider/insider is a more relevant dichotomy than liberal/conservative.  The line is more vertical than horizontal. 

Religiously, too, Americans are in flux.  A report published last month from the Public Religion Research Institute showed that the only major religious category to grow between 2013 and 2023 was “unaffiliated,” which now includes 26% of Americans, up from 21% ten years ago.  The numbers of atheists and agnostics have doubled.  Catholics are down the most; white evangelicals and Black Protestants are holding steady.

But “unaffiliated” doesn’t mean “nothing.”  On the contrary, a Pew report from last December showed that large majorities of Americans have supernatural beliefs such as the belief in the soul (83%) or ‘something spiritual beyond the natural world’ (81%).

Enter, as he often does, Joe Rogan.

Rogan – who, as a reminder to my dear liberal-bubble friends, is a more influential voice than just about anyone you or I closely follow – recently garnered some publicity for mentioning on his show that “We need Jesus.”  And he’s not alone; many in the IDW/resentful-conspiratorial-centrist-outsider world have come, or come back, to religion, including Russell Brand,  Jordan Peterson, Michael Shellenberger, and Rogan’s conversation partner at the time, quarterback Aaron Rodgers.

For Rogan, who was raised Catholic but now has a blend of different spiritual beliefs – i.e., typical of the “unaffiliated” 26% of Americans – religion answers a psychological and possibly ethical-social need for a moral order.  His conversation with Rodgers included a mishmash of conspiracy theories about elites controlling the media and politics, false information on vaccines and the origins of Covid-19, and other favorite subjects, but eventually came around to a critique of liberalism and a fundamentally conservative embrace of religion.  I’ve provided a long quote here so you can read it in context:

Unfortunately, the problem with living in a secular society and living in a society that has a lot of people that are atheists, that have no belief system at all, is you find a belief system.  And a lot of these people that call themselves atheists, they've subscribed to the religion of woke. Their God is equity and inclusiveness. Their God is this ideology that they think that you have to subscribe to. And that's why it's spooky, because people, human beings, seem to have a very strong desire for some sort of order and form and some sort of pattern that they can follow that seems to be the right way to go. And they can be led by cults. They could be led by groups of people. They could be led by intolerant governments and evil armies and corrupt politicians. They could be led. But I think as time rolls on, people are going to understand the need to have some sort of divine structure to things, some sort of belief in the sanctity of love and of truth. And a lot of that comes from religion. A lot of people's moral compass and the guidelines that they've used to follow to live a just and righteous life has come from religion.

And unfortunately, a lot of very intelligent people, they dismiss all the positive aspects of religion because they think that the stories are mere superstitious fairy tales, that they have no place in this modern world, and we're inherently good, and your ethics are based on your own moral compass, and we all have one – and that's not necessarily true because you see, the way people behave in war, they don't have any moral compass. They're just fucking murderers and killers . . . [There’s a digression here on veterans and suicide] . . . It's a fucked up world we live in. We need Jesus, I think, for real. Like, if he came back now, it'd be great. Like, Jesus, if you're thinking about coming back right now, now's a good time, now's a good time. [Laughter] We're kind of fucked.

There’s a lot that I find fascinating here. 

First, and easiest to dismiss, is the common Christian Right claim that liberalism (or “wokeness”) is a substitute religion. Social justice isn’t about, say, providing equal opportunities in a civic democracy, but are about creating a new God to worship and venerate. Needless to say, this is not how any progressive understands their political commitments, which is why such assertions never come with evidence.

But then Rogan pivots.  At first, religion (and substitute religion) is mostly about filling a psychological need: “human beings seem to have a very strong desire for some sort of order and form and some sort of pattern that they can follow.”  Then, however, Rogan says that this isn’t merely a strong desire, but something we need for moral order. We need “guidelines that they've used to follow to live a just and righteous life” and “a lot of that comes from religion.”  We can’t trust our inner “moral compass” – though ironically, Rogan’s example is of soldiers, who often kill precisely because they are following external orders and rules as opposed to their inner moral compass. It’s religion, or moral anarchy.

Rogan’s quip about “we need Jesus” has been misquoted in a lot of the online chatter about the interview – he was laughing as he said it, aware that it was an ironic thing for a foul-mouthed, pot-smoking, often anarchic comedian dude to say. But it did sum up his point: that in a fucked-up world, we need a source of order and morality beyond our flawed moral compasses.

As I’ve talked about at length here in Both/And, progressives, conservatives, and whatever Rogan is all agree that we’re living in a “fucked-up world.” We just blame one another. For liberals, the world is endangered by climate catastrophe, encroaching fascism, and runaway inequality; for conservatives, by immigration, loss of ‘American’ identity, and loss of religious values. And for the conspiratorial populist center/right/left, it’s because of elites controlling everything, a corrupt establishment, and the loss of moral order. 

Now, as an empirical matter, data suggests that religion does not do a better job of instilling morality than secular moral education, and that much of its success has to do with pro-sociality rather than religious teaching itself.  And of course, depending on which moral qualities you seek to maximize, religion often does much worse; one of the main reasons people say they’re leaving Catholicism, for example, is its teachings on LGBTQ people.

But intuitively, as someone who grew up moderately religious, became more religious, then became less religious and more interested in meditation, and eventually became a rabbi and Buddhist meditation teacher, I can understand the yearning for a world in which the truth is agreed-upon and uncontested. Though as someone who spent ten years in a nest of self-hatred because of that supposed truth, I see it as a terrifying political-religious program.

In a strange way, Rogan is symptomatic of the contemporary American encounter with the death of God.  Here’s Rogan and Nietzsche having a beer together:

Did Nietzsche just say “wait, hold my beer”? Maybe hold my toupee.

What Nietzsche meant by his memorable formulation wasn’t deicide, but the fact that in an age of science and evolution, God no longer was a living source of meaning, myth, and morality for human beings. He was, of course, wrong about that, as far as half the people on the planet are concerned, though he was probably right about editors of The New Yorker.  But now, the post-theism Nietzsche described does seem to be filtering down to larger and larger percentages of ordinary Americans.  And we should admit that the results are mixed.

In Nietzsche and subsequent philosophers, the gap left by religion’s absence is filled by philosophy – perhaps a proto-Randist/Schopenhauerian will to power, or a gentle Sartrean existentialism, or maybe even a neo-Stoicism, or Rortean pragmatism, or simple European humanism. But of course that hasn’t happened. For many, many people, religion’s gap is often left unfilled, and is one of the many reasons why so many Americans live lives haunted by loneliness – or, in extreme cases, die “deaths of despair” - or search for religious meaning in the political realm, though I think that happens far more in Trumpworld than the land of AOC.

In other words, Rogan is partly right. Much of society has thrown out the good of religion along with the bad — though not because of some idolatry of wokeness or war on religion, of course. As always with conspiracy theories, the real causes are multiple and complex: the breakdown of traditional community and family structures; scandals among religious leaders (especially, but not only, in the Catholic Church); technologization and the inability of mainstream religious organizations to keep up with it; growing discontent with conservative religious doctrines and teachings amid shifting social mores; nihilism and despair among rural Americans; greater secular education (i.e., more college degrees); the secular space of consumer capitalism and celebrity culture; and numerous other factors.

But what takes its place? 

Rogan proposes, basically, a kind of old-time religion, though I think the laugh in his delivery knows that there’d have to be at least some reconstruction of it as well. But there are many better alternatives: progressive religious denominations which offer the good without the bad; a public education system that teaches basic moral values like the Golden Rule, which can be grounded as much in personal experience as in sacred text; forms of non-religious spirituality such as secular meditation or yoga; non-religious communities where people connect and support one another; or even, for some, the psychedelic spirituality that Rogan himself occasionally talks about.

Of course, I have no idea which of these might fill the gap left by traditional religion. But I do know that until progressives speak to the problem Rogan has pinpointed, they’re going to be fighting an uphill battle against those who say they have the answers.

I wish there could be a different Joe Rogan Experience, in which his questions could be the beginning of a conversation rather than the end of one, and in which Rogan invited people he disagrees with to appear on his show. How about a progressive pastor, explaining how a religious moral order can exist without retrograde conceptions of a divinity and Natural Law?  Or how about delving deeper into Rogan’s (and Rodgers’s) psychedelic experiences, and seeing what moral guidelines might emerge from there and what pitfalls may occasion this radical trust in one’s own intuition? For that matter, how about inviting Joe Biden on the podcast to articulate his own liberal Catholicism which affirms religious truth but doesn’t seek to impose it with the power of the state? Or maybe, you know, an actual trans person or progressive or social justice activist, instead of someone who claims to know all about them?

I know, I know — Rogan’s team follows the tried and true Fox News formula of telling angry men what they want to hear, and that the last thing they want to do is offer a way out of the echo chamber. I just wish it weren’t so.

Like Nietzsche, Joe Rogan gets two things right: human beings thirst for meaning, and God isn’t providing it anymore. That’s why the construction of order is the fundamental act of God in the Hebrew Bible – an act to be imitated by human beings. But the answer to that crisis isn’t Jesus coming from the sky to save us.  We can only save ourselves.

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I’ve been reading some great articles this week. Here’s a sample.

I absolutely loved/hated

Chris Geidner

’s brilliant dive into the insane “theory” that Joe Biden canceled Easter and replaced it with Transgender Day of Visibility. What a perfect example of how lunatic fringe ideas rise to the very top of the MAGA universe.

As a parent, I also loved

Sasha Chapin

‘s moving essay about talking honestly with parents about whether they regret having kids. I don’t, but I also think it’s weird how some people act as if parenthood is right for everyone, or is the sole meaning of life. It isn’t.

And on Israel/Palestine, I was moved by the Times op-ed by Jose Andres, founder of World Central Kitchen, which offered the kind of moral clarity and multiple-narrative consciousness that’s so rare and important right now. Here’s a fundraiser for World Central Kitchen, which is feeding hungry people in Gaza right now, organized by some rabbis (you don’t have to be a rabbi to donate). Also, 972 Magazine in Israel did a terrifying investigation into the use of AI in Gaza.

I know I’ve been promising this for a bit, but my response to the moral panic over antisemitism will be running in the Forward this week. You can find it at this link (if not right now, then very soon).