
Bill Maher by Angela George / Wikimedia Commons (Left), Bishop Robert Barron (Right)
CV NEWS FEED // Bill Maher, a comic who spent decades of his career mocking religion and religious people, has unexpectedly “become an ally,” Bishop Robert Barron writes in his latest op-ed, published by CNN Opinion.
“Bill Maher first came to my attention in the 1980s as a clever, wry and politically alert stand-up comic,” the bishop of Winona-Rochester and founder of Word on Fire ministries wrote.
For the majority of his career as a standup, Barron observed, Maher “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.”
And yet, the past five years have marked a shift in Maher’s focus, Barron says, towards articulating the ills of the “woke” movement that the Bishop notes has “managed to capture the allegiance of most major institutions of our country.”
“As he has done so, I have found myself, time and again, nodding my head in agreement,” said Barron. “To my surprise, the nemesis had become an ally.”
Barron explained that both he and Maher oppose the woke movement’s “all-or-nothing antagonism” and espousal of cancel culture, “one of the ugliest aspects of our contemporary society.”
“Like me, Maher finds that what he and others have called “wokeism” represents not a development of classical liberalism, but a deviation from it,” Barron continued:
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.
By regularly fraternizing with media personalities across ideologies, Maher combats this phenomenon, Barron writes. “Demonstrating in action that intellectual opponents do not have to demonize one another,” Maher “[strikes] at the foundation of wokesim and [shows] in a true spirit, that he still believes in the democratic process.”
Barron concludes:
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!”
