Nothing keeps me religious more than the left, not even religion itself.
I am not even particularly "spiritual." My religiosity is overwhelmingly rational (the title of my Bible commentary is "The Rational Bible"). I believe in God because creation rationally suggests a Creator.
The force that has most propelled me to religion is the great (secular) religion of the last hundred years: the left. If most people of the left (the left, not liberalism) -- people who have not only rejected but scorned God, Judaism, Christianity and the Bible -- were decent individuals, were committed to intellectual honesty and had produced some great art and works of wisdom, leftism would have constituted a serious challenge to my religious beliefs.
But the very opposite is the case. While liberals have done some good, everything the left has touched it has ruined. The most obvious example is universities. As Harvard professor Steven Pinker, a liberal and an atheist, put it, the left has rendered the universities a "laughingstock."
The most godless, religion-free and Bible-free institution in the West, the university, has become the both the stupidest and most morally corrupt institution in the West. That is what first awakened me to the indispensability of God, religion and the Bible. I first wrote about it some 25 years ago ("How I found God at Columbia").
Our universities, because of the left, are intellectually and morally sick. And if that is not a result of their antipathy to the Bible, its God and Judeo-Christian thought, what is it the result of?
Let's begin with the moral. The left and the universities teach gullible young students lies, immoral ideas and foolish doctrines. At almost any university in the English-speaking world, the United States -- arguably the most decent large society in history -- is depicted as a vile society, founded by bigots who engaged in genocidal evil, sustained by racism, misogyny, xenophobia and greed. Its wars are depicted as racist and imperialist. Students are taught that it is a racist "microaggression" to say that "There is only one race: the human race" or "America is a land of opportunity" or "I try to treat everyone the same." At universities, minority students are taught that they are hated by all white Americans -- perhaps the greatest libel since the medieval blood libel that charged Jews with killing Christian children to use their blood for Passover matzos.
The universities teach that in the conflict between Israel and Hamas, it is humane, democratic, liberal Israel that is the villain, not the totalitarian genocidal theocrats of Hamas. I debated this very issue at Oxford University, where my opponents, two left-wing academics, argued that between Israel and Hamas, Israel was the greater threat to Middle East peace.
The godless left and universities teach there is no male and female in the human species, that these terms are mere "social constructs." A few weeks ago, two trans females came in first and second place in a Connecticut high school track race. These runners won solely because they were biological males. Yet, not only they were allowed to race against females, but they also set new records in Connecticut girls track. Anyone who complained this was unfair -- which to every non-leftist it was -- was attacked by the left as "haters." A writer for The Nation defended the male bodies that won the races because, in his moronic words, "trans women are in fact women" (italics added). As I showed in my last column, truth has never been a left-wing value.
Moreover, I could not find one "feminist" organization that defended the girl runners of Connecticut. Feminism is no more interested in protecting women than communism was in protecting workers.
The left is also the Western home of contemporary anti-Semitism. There are individual anti-Semites across the political spectrum, but the incubator of modern anti-Semitism is the left. Thanks to leftists such as Jeremy Corbyn, the head of the British Labour Party, and the two new female Muslim members of the U.S. Congress, anti-Semitism is becoming respectable in the West for the first time since the Holocaust. The left has rendered Zionism, the oldest national movement in history -- the 2,000-year-old Jewish aspiration to return to Israel -- a term of opprobrium. While many individuals continue to support Zionism, the one non-Jewish group to continue to defend it is the evangelical Christian community.
As I show in my commentary on Genesis, what the first book of the Bible depicts is not only God's creation of the world but, equally important, God's shaping primordial chaos (Genesis 1:2) into order. The divine order consists of distinctions; prominent examples include man and God, man and animal, male and female, good and evil, holy and profane, parent and child. The left is a war against order; in its essence, leftism creates chaos. It has worked to destroy all those biblical distinctions. The present giveaway is the nihilist project of the left to erase the male-female distinction, the only innate human distinction God cares about: "God created mankind in his own image ...male and female he created them" (Genesis 1:27); "He created them male and female and blessed them" (Genesis 5:2). No ethnic or racial distinction matters in Genesis; only the male-female distinction.
The God-centered West produced Bach and Michelangelo. The left, which dominates music and art, has produced mostly junk; there is nothing higher to aspire to, as excellence is not a left-wing value and the left uses art to shock, not inspire. Hence the huge amount of scatological art, for example.
Belief in God and the Bible were instrumental to the creation of America, the last, best hope of mankind. The rejection of that God and that Bible are instrumental to wrecking America (and the rest of the West). That alone tells me how important that God and that Bible are. The left knows it, too.
Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. His latest book, published by Regnery in April 2018, is "The Rational Bible," a commentary on the book of Exodus. He is the founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com.