Corporate Mockery of Religion Grows, but It's Consumers Who Still Hold Power
Target just announced that its stores are pulling merchandise promoting Satanism as part of its celebration of "LGBTQ+ Pride" this June.
The retailer cited customer backlash.
In other words, the people who run the retail giant were originally happy to promote a viciously anti-religious "secular Satanism" movement whose atheist members don't literally believe in the Devil, but use Satanic imagery to smear Christians: especially the Catholic Church.
Target changed its mind only after customers threatened to take their business elsewhere.
Meanwhile the Los Angeles Dodgers are going ahead with plans to celebrate a drag queen group that mocks Catholic nuns.
It's fine because it's "satirical," we're told.
Really?
This writer wonders whether a baseball team would dare encourage the mocking of devout Muslim women on grounds of "satire"; this writer has a feeling that law enforcement would be breathing down their necks very quickly.
The mockery of faith is big business these days.
Just last week, the Christian legal organization Alliance Defending Freedom reported that "of the 75 major corporations evaluated in this year’s Business Index, only two scored over 25% out of 100% possible in their respect for speech and religion."
For two reasons, this is deeply troubling — one of them obvious and the other less so and more controversial.
The obvious problem is that corporate America is becoming ever more sycophantic in its cultivation of the secular enemies of religion.
Indeed, many younger executives are themselves hardline secularists, firmly committed to the gender ideology embraced by its millennial and Generation Z customers. (This was where Target miscalculated, forgetting that it sells to ordinary Americans who don't want "ironic" Satanism shoved in their faces.)
The net result is that our tradition of religious toleration is under threat from greedy progressives who pride themselves on being the most tolerant people on the planet.
On the other hand, freedom of speech cuts both ways.
The First Amendment does not make it a crime to criticize religious beliefs, or even to mock them, so long as the civil liberties of believers are not infringed.
And this is where we confront the second, less obvious problem arising from increasingly overt anti-religious prejudices of big business.
A small but influential group of "New Right" Christians, including conservative Protestants and Catholics, are agitating for the passing of laws and the appointment of judges that would effectively outlaw secularist opinions.
The Protestants, mostly Calvinists, call themselves "religious nationalists."
The Catholics go by various labels: integralist, common-good constitutionalist, post-liberal. And, interestingly, both have a lot more in common with the thinking of progressive ideologues than we might imagine.
Stephanie Slade, senior editor at Reason magazine, recently explained that this movement includes "unapologetic proponents of actual-left-wing policies, such as tariffs, industrial subsidies, and aggressive antitrust action, even against companies that don't meet the traditional definition of monopolies.
"It would be no exaggeration to designate this cohort right-progressives."
What they envisage is a sort of deeply troubling and implausible regime change.
We've heard that sort of language before: as the 20th century demonstrated again and again, it's a recipe for replacing one tyranny (or imagined tyranny) with another one.
This "regime change" is a risible fantasy, of course. On the other hand, the secular malevolence of corporate America, vigorously supported by the Biden Administration, is anything but a fantasy.
Is there a way out of this mess? I'm not optimistic, but at least I can suggest a starting point: the common sense and natural decency of ordinary citizens. If corporate America is powerful then so, by definition, is the American consumer of corporate products.
We can see what is happening.
Companies that embrace progressive ideology are chipping away at the nature of what it is to be human and also our natural inclination to pursue a relationship with our Creator.
But they won't be able to do that if we decide to stand up to anti-religious bigotry, thereby reinforcing our moral authority to speak out against atrocities in China, Nicaragua, Nigeria and other persecuting states.
Target has been forced to drop its promotion of atheistic Satanism, just as Bud Light ditched its Woke partnership with trans-activist Dylan Mulvaney when its sales fell by an astonishing 26%.
The message is clear.
Secularist retailers and their allies are not in the least worried by the prospect of a "regime change." But they change their tune very quickly when people of faith stop buying their stuff.
Andrea Picciotti-Bayer is the director of the Conscience Project and a fellow at the Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America.