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Opinion: I’m a Catholic bishop who has found an ally in Bill Maher
Opinion by Bishop Robert Barron
Tue, May 28, 2024 at 9:40 AM PDT·6 min read

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Editor’s Note: Bishop Robert Barron is bishop of the Diocese of
Winona-Rochester (Minnesota). He founded the Word on Fire Catholic media
ministry and is one of the most followed Catholics in the world on
social media. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. Read
more opinion on CNN.

Bill Maher first came to my attention in the 1980s as a clever, wry and
politically alert stand-up comic. But I began to follow him more closely
about 20 years ago when, in the wake of the new atheist movement, he
dedicated a good deal of his comedy to mocking religion and religious
people.

Again and again, on Maher’s HBO program, “Real Time with Bill Maher,” he
would often present the most extreme and simple-minded version of
Christianity, and his audience would derisively laugh with him at the
poor rubes who still believed such nonsense. All of this came to full
expression in his 2008 documentary film, “Religulous,” which featured
interview after interview with religious people utterly incapable of
fending off Maher’s rather standard and tired atheist objections. (HBO
and CNN share a parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery.)

Although he annoyed me, I suppose I continued to watch Maher to see what
the “other side” was saying and thinking. In fact, the first YouTube
video of mine that got a sizable audience was my rejoinder to
“Religulous.” Actually, I can say with some confidence precisely why
Maher’s understanding of religion was so weak. He and I are around the
same age, and both of us were educated in a Catholic context (his mother
was Jewish, but his father was Irish Catholic).

To put it gently, the time when we were going through school was not a
golden age of the Catholic intellectual tradition. I remember that
religion class was largely a matter of banners, balloons and a vague
commitment to social justice. An awful lot of Catholics from our Baby
Boomer generation fell away from the church because, when they grew up,
the childish version of the faith that they had received proved grossly
inadequate.

Over the past five years, Maher appears to have largely dropped his
obsession with religion and has spent considerable time articulating his
opposition to the “woke” ways of thinking that have managed to capture
the allegiance of most of the major institutions of our country:
universities, corporations, the military, government and so on.

As he has done so, I have found myself, time and again, nodding my head
in agreement. To my surprise, the nemesis had become an ally.

Like me, Maher finds that what he and others have called “wokeism”
represents not a development of classical liberalism, but a deviation
from it. Whereas classical liberalism holds to freedom of speech, a
colorblind society, equality of opportunity and the peaceful
adjudication of dispute through argumentation, I see proponents of
wokeism argue for strict limitation on speech, a racialized
consciousness, forced equity of outcome and the stirring up of
antagonism between those considered oppressors and those considered the
oppressed.

Moreover, the classical liberalism espoused by everyone from former
presidents Thomas Jefferson and John F. Kennedy to Martin Luther King
Jr. called for the fixing of our social problems through reason and
political action, whereas many on today’s left embrace the rhetoric of
victimization and complaint. Finally, the classical liberal tradition
holds to the objectivity of science and the reliability of mathematics,
whereas what I see as the philosophy of wokeism treats the fields of
both science and math as expressive of patriarchy and western cultural
imperialism.

Classical liberalism has its shortcomings, to be sure. (If you want a
detailed discussion of this, consult my book “The Priority of Christ:
Toward a Postliberal Catholicism.”) Nevertheless, I would insist that
liberalism is a heck of a lot better than wokeism. In opposing the
latter and preferring the former, therefore, Maher and I very much make
common cause.

Maher and I both feel that one of the ugliest aspects of our
contemporary society is the all-or-nothing antagonism that is
characteristic of wokeism and the brutal cancel culture that follows
from it. The woke consensus is that those we disagree with are not just
to be corrected or ignored; they are to be shouted down and silenced.

Perhaps the most sickening feature of the recent fiasco surrounding
Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker’s commencement address at
Benedictine College was the X (formerly Twitter) post by a social media
manager for the city of Kansas City, specifying the suburb where Butker
lives. (The post was quickly deleted and the mayor said the employee,
who has not been publicly identified, no longer works there.) One is
certainly permitted to quarrel with Butker’s views on sexuality, gender
relations and marriage, but to expose him and his family to potential
harassment or threats is beyond ridiculous. In calling out all of this
dangerous nonsense, Maher, who pointedly described the overreaction to
Butker’s comments as branding him as “history’s greatest monster,” is
performing a real public service by standing up for those who may face
backlash from expressing similar views.

In a Sunday interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, Maher observed that
political opponents today don’t just disagree with each other but have
begun to perceive one another as an “existential threat.” What a sad
decline, he lamented, from the 1980s when Republican President Ronald
Reagan and former House Speaker Tip O’Neill, a Massachusetts Democrat,
could sit down for a friendly drink at the end of a workday. He said he
couldn’t imagine President Joe Biden and House Speaker Mike Johnson, a
Louisiana Republican, doing that today.

And Maher practices that fraternity across ideologies. Last week, he
appeared as a guest on the Greg Gutfeld show on Fox. Gutfeld hosts the
most popular program on late-night TV, and he represents a strongly
conservative perspective. Maher listened to Gutfeld’s monologue, even
laughing heartily a number of times, and then he engaged the host and
the other guests — all conservatives — in lively conversation. Maher and
Gutfeld especially locked horns in regard to former President Donald
Trump and his fitness for high office, with neither man backing down
from his position. But they didn’t insult one another; they didn’t
resort to smear tactics. They presented arguments and, at the close of
the program, they were both laughing.

What Maher was doing — and I give him great credit for it — was
demonstrating in action that intellectual opponents do not have to
demonize one another and that they can talk through issues without
resorting to violence or personal attack.

And in so doing, he was both striking at the foundation of wokeism and
showing, in a truly patriotic spirit, that he still believes in the
democratic process. So, leaving aside for the moment his past and its
far less than adequate understanding of religion, let me say, “Three
cheers for Bill Maher!”

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