https://www.prageru.com/video/ep-205-more-secular-less-free
This is where Dennis Prager loses me.
I mean he has done such an amazing job in producing media pieces pushing back against the toxic conventional wisdom on identity politics, climate policy, and some other stuff - including a bit on deficit spending, taxation, the national debt and so on.
Though, I suppose, like a lot of the people that appear on his Prager U platform, he identifies as a "conservative" I see compatibility between his views and the core values of classical liberalism. [I really hate the label "conservative"].
But, when it comes to religion he goes soft. He wants to tie secularization to the loss of individual freedom. [A subtext is the incoherent implication that it is 'good to believe, it is good to be religious, as if somehow people could compel themselves to have faith.] The proposition that secularization is tied to loss of freedom is patently absurd. He suggests that secularization is 'correlated' with loss of freedom - apparently meaning that it is causally connected. He must know that correlation does not imply causation.
But, apart from that, the claim is false, the opposite of the truth. In fact, it is the embrace of fundamental universal individual human rights (John Locke leading to the Enlightenment, as exemplified by the work of the Scottish philosophers, in particular David Hume and Adam Smith, who were clearly irreligious) - the embrace of individual liberty that led to the unprecedentedly free and prosperous societies of today's world.
It was, in fact, the loss of the power that organized religions had to compel behavior (and belief?) that heralded the era of freedom of religion (ancillary to the freedom of expression, conscience, etc.). It is in no way the loss of religious belief that is responsible for the backsliding against individual freedom that we see today in America and Europe. He has misdiagnosed the problem - unforgivably, because it suits his narrative.
The loss of freedom, the expansion of government power to impose regulations on individual behavior is always a result of the rise of other kinds of organized "religions" (belief systems with another name) that are antithetical to individual liberty, antithetical to the belief in the inviobility of individual rights (including property rights, and rights to free expression). Such belief systems include “nationalism”, “communism” and most recently, the current American form of “progressivism” all of which sanction and promote the blatant violation of individual rights in the name of the “greater good” as required in the belief system (to wit, DEI). These are in a very real sense just the latest forms of secular “religions”.
Prager would be on firmer ground if he suggested, along with David Hume and F. A. Hayek, that organized religion, can be, and has sometimes, not infrequently, been a force for good in society, in providing a structure of behavioral norms conducive to moral behavior. But, this has always been in circumstances where religious organizations have had to compete for adherents, circumstances in which religion is, in fact, a lifestyle choice – not systems of compulsory commands. Where religious organizations and belief systems have been compatible with individual choice they have frequently, though not by any means always, been conducive to, or at least not contrary to, the core tenets of classical liberalism. Where, by contrast, religions have been coupled with political power, have possessed to greater or lesser extent the power to compel (such as the power to ban the teaching of evolution, or, indeed, to compel its being taught), then religion and liberty are enemies.
Prager is a religious Jew, and this is particularly relevant in his case because early on, as a result of the dispersion of the Jewish people. Jewish religious authorities lost the power to compel individual behavior (by contrast for example, to Christianity and Islam, which, upon acquiring political power became formidable systems of oppression). It is, therefore, doubly ironic for him to misdiagnose the loss of individual freedom as somehow causally related to the “loss of religion”. I wish he would just drop this stupid line of argumentation.