“The fool says in his heart ‘There is no God’” (Ps. 14:1).
It’s been nearly two weeks since Donald Trump was almost assassinated on national television, and the left’s reaction has ranged from tepid (and swiftly forgotten) pleas to “lower the temperature” to laments over the poor marksmanship of the shooter to veiled (and not so veiled) accusations that Trump staged the whole event.
Late-night talk show host and purported comedian Bill Maher took a different tack on the shooting that also killed one bystander and wounded two others. After years of rebranding himself as a thoughtful moderate who opposes the woke agenda of his own party, Maher once again revealed his true leftist colors by using last Friday’s opening monologue to rail against those Trump supporters who believe that the killer’s near miss was the result of divine providence. In doing so, he confirmed the dangers of the left’s rejection of religion and its societal benefits.
The Banality of Maher’s Atheism
Maher’s rant had all the rationality and compassion you might expect from a multimillionaire who hoped for a recession so Trump would not be reelected in 2020. The highlights of Maher’s (half-)wit include equating those who believe in a divine plan with people who see the face of Jesus in a pancake, joking that “God was having an off day” when Congressman Steve Scalise was shot by a Bernie Bro in 2017 and slandering Trump supporters as cult members using “magical thinking” to elevate their presidential candidate to demigod status. The monologue was basically a shorter and even tackier version of his 2008 documentary “Religulous,” the extended strawman fallacy where he actively misrepresented himself to interview and then trash religious people.
The crescendo of Maher’s anti-theistic hack job came when he said, “Trump didn’t survive the attempt on his life because of divine intervention. … Trump is alive because he’s the single luckiest motherf-cker who ever lived.” This is the despairing worldview of the anti-theistic left: Nothing is by design or intention; everything is just mere chance.
Gimme That Old-Time Religion
If Maher was half as thoughtful as he wishes to appear, he might have taken this opportunity to muse on why people take solace in faith in times of crisis instead of dismissing it as “stupid and dangerous.” Like Marx, he sees religion as a mere “opiate of the masses,” ignoring that the Divine Physician actually helps His patients deal with pain and suffering, the natural results of the belief that the universe operates randomly.
Study after study has shown that religious people are happier, healthier, and more psychologically resilient than nonreligious people. For instance, they weathered the storm of the Covid pandemic much better, despite the left’s efforts to shut down religious gatherings. Communities with high levels of religious observance also handle economic insecurity more successfully. Given these facts, it should come as no surprise that Gen Z, the generation with the poorest mental health on record, is also the least religious generation.
Even Maher himself cannot avoid religious ideas when dealing with tragedy; he said the shooter “should rot in hell,” a place in which he refuses to believe.
The Evils of Spiritual Nihilism
A famous quote often attributed G.K. Chesterton says, “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.” The human urge to make sense out of a seemingly chaotic and uncaring universe will manifest itself in some manner or other, many of which are far more “stupid and dangerous” than religious belief and practice.
More often than not, these efforts to replace religion are channeled into political action, a field rife with the “magical thinking” Maher decries. Antifa, Black Lives Matter, Just Stop Oil, and Queers for Palestine are all parts of the left’s “Church of Id.” Together, they preach a false gospel whose goal is not to provide happiness and peace but increasing degrees of rage that can be funneled against their conservative and centrist opponents, feeding the cycle of leftist nonsense Maher has lately claimed to oppose. As the chief apostle of this false gospel, Barrack Obama told his devotees in 2021, “I want you to stay angry. I want you to stay frustrated.”
As we’ve seen over the past few years, this pseudo-faith has been very successful in mobilizing young people to create havoc all over the West. It may even be responsible for the decision of a 20-year-old man to shoot at the then-presumptive Republican nominee for president. After all, killing the new Hitler as part of a crusade against the threat of “Christian nationalism” would make him a saint, right?
For those who prefer sensual pleasure to political activism, one can dull the pain of a random existence with actual opiates or other drugs. Here also Gen Zers are particularly susceptible; their poor mental health makes them more likely to use drugs and develop addictions.
This is a field where Maher is truly an expert; smoking weed is the closest thing he has to a sacrament. He’s listed at no. 12 on the Marijuana Policy Project’s “Top 50 Most Influential Marijuana Consumers,” which reprinted his claim to have “tried marijuana … about 50,000 times.” Apparently, weed is so fundamental to Maher’s “Club Random” podcast that he withdrew his invitation to former “Jackass” star and recovering addict Steve-O rather than go without it for an hour.
Maher, an acolyte of the Church of Id, is fully enslaved to the self and blind to the consequences of that slavery. American society is founded on the idea that a Creator endowed human beings with unalienable rights; one cannot effectively preserve and defend those rights without due respect for that Creator. Whether it was through divine intervention or being a “lucky motherf-cker,” Donald Trump quite literally dodged a bullet that Saturday afternoon in Butler, Pennsylvania.
His response and that of millions of Americans on both sides of the political divide was gratitude to a God that Maher and his cohorts despise. Instead of maliciously misrepresenting those millions of his fellow citizens, maybe Maher should try pondering why they seem so much happier than he is.
Robert Busek is a Catholic homeschooling father of six who has taught history and Western Civilization in both traditional and online classrooms for over twenty years. His essays have also been published in The American Conservative and The American Spectator. The views he expresses here are his own.
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