THE NEGATIVE AFTERBELIEF

Sep 25, 2025
14 min read

Updated: Oct 3, 2025

You know this phenomenon, this optical illusion, that occurs when you stare too long at something and fatigue your photoreceptors? When you close your eyes you get what is called "retinal inertia", where those burned out receptors don't stop responding even in the absence of light. What you see then, with your eyes shut, is a "negative afterimage" that is the inverse of the light intensity and colours you were just looking at with your eyes open. Yeah. Now imagine that but with beliefs.

Journalist Michael Shellenberger, whose work I tend to like and I find myself constantly recommending to people, just produced a video correcting the record. He was upset about some arguments a talking-head on MSNBC, Vicky Nguyen, and a US senator, Tim Kaine, were making about Christian Nationalism and the idea of natural rights.

In his post sharing the video, Shellenberger tells us “The idea that our rights are natural is Christian Nationalist misinformation, say the media and Democrats. But it's not. It's right there in the Declaration of Independence. Behind the Left's dehumanization of conservatives is an ignorant denial of America's spiritual foundation.” In a previous post on the same theme he suggested these two and others on the left were “captured by a radical ideology that is fundamentally anti-Christian.”

Shellenberger tells us that, “while the marriage of Christianity and Western civilization might appear strange or convoluted, for Nguyen, or theocratic, to Kaine, it did not appear so to America’s founding fathers, nor does it appear so for anyone familiar with America’s history and its founding on the theory of natural rights,” he goes on, explaining natural rights, “i.e. rights we are given by God or Nature or the Creator.” Shellenberger then reminds us of the second sentence of the US Declaration of Independence: “We hold the truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights…” Here he is also forced to acknowledge the ancients, that America’s founding documents reflected not merely a set of Protestant moral assumptions but “the republican model of government inherited from Greece and Rome” along with “Aristotelian reasoning about virtue and the common good…”

Shellenberger argues that the senator, Tim Kaine, “appears to believe that ‘natural rights’ and protection of non-Christians are incompatible.” And the journalist diagnoses the problem as Kaine belonging to a cohort of “Baby Boomer progressives who embraced a form of Marxism created by Catholic theologians in Latin America in the 1960s known as Liberation Theology. In that way,” Shellenberger says, “Kaine’s globalist progressivism has triumphed over his Christianity, his belief in natural rights and his loyalty to the United States, making the senator fairly representative of many progressives and others on the left.” We are told the senator, like so many others, have replaced their Christian values with a “highly simplistic ethic of compassion and utilitarianism…” Shellenberger goes a little further, insisting “few progressives are particularly thoughtful, deliberate, or even aware of their own morality.” He says the core belief among people like the senator is that “progressives are good and conservatives are bad.” This, Shellenberger tells us, is because progressives think they are more rational and compassionate, better able to manage the sophisticated moral calculus of their utilitarian ethics that seeks “the greatest good for the greatest number.”

To contrast the progressive worldview and ethics, Shellenberger insists “Christian morality is far more complex, resting upon thousands of years of philosophical and theological debates and paradoxes that resist reduction to a single principle.” He tells us “Christian ethics demands recognition of sin, repentance, and redemption, which,” he asserts, “run directly counter to the progressive desire to flatten morality.” He tells us Christianity insists upon not only divine law but also the “intrinsic dignity of the human person.” Shellenberger preaches that “what is called Liberation Theology, social justice progressivism, and wokeism, are all based on the exact same highly simplistic, good versus evil worldview — whereby people can be divided into victims and oppressors, and to the victims everything should be given while the oppressors must be stigmatized, censored, persecuted, prosecuted, and punished.”

Okay. Did you catch all that? It’s absurd on its face. Effectively all of it. Even the unstated context.

THE UNSTATED CONTEXT

Before his recent conversion (de-programing? mere eye-opening? the Left’s race to extremism, leaving him behind?), Shellenberger and almost anyone who wasn’t an Evangelical army recruit could see it was the backward Christian Conservatives in America, with George W Bush as their public face, who sent the entire world down a tragic set of us-vs-them forever wars (involving the rewriting of so many national and international laws and norms and, it might be noted, all violating our inherent and inalienable human dignity). They weren’t wrong. We watched it all happen. We have the receipts. President Bush, those in his administration, and the press were all too eager and united to use their personal faith and moral framework to craft, unveil, and enact their response to an attack on the country. They would initiate an open-ended “crusade” against “evil” couched in strict either/or terms, literally as a “monumental struggle between good and evil.” Bush himself, leader of the nation and the whole of the free world, delivered an ultimatum to the entire planet: “you’re either with us or against us.” And folks didn’t just notice one deliberately divisive speech by one president or even a whole novel playbook for the 21st century but could spell out for you why this was the norm for this religion and why (like many others across time) this faith leans into an overly simplified and tribalist thinking rooted in its most ancient texts and even modern teachings of those. And they could also point out how this marriage of dogma, group identification, and politics was and remains particularly pernicious (unless of course your aim is to conscript an army for a war against the forces of evil), as evidenced by the myriad terrible examples we could all call up from the deep past and living memory.

But that was then. Now, like so many recent Democrat divorcees, Shellenberger no longer connects with what he sees as a horribly mutated Democrat party (for whom he ran as a candidate for governor of California in 2018) or even really the left-of-center. He also now formally identifies as a Christian. Raised in a Mennonite household, he only recently returned to faith, seeing, among other things, the Christian prescription and challenge to “love thine enemy” as an antidote to so much anger and hatred. From his new vantage it is clear as day to Shellenberger (and so many others) that it is those who are not so situated who have an inherently backward worldview, even a deeply bigoted one. That wrong perspective, he tells us, is one born out of a rationalism and utilitarianism unmoored from faith (the source of all goodness) that forces its adherents to see things as black/white, oppressor/oppressed, us/them, good/evil. That’s right: there's the negative image. But then, from this new footing and especially with the help of his faith, Shellenberger actually tells us what he has come to understand.

THE GENERAL FRAMING AND ARGUMENT

Shellenberger shares how we can see America being divided into two groups (ZOINKS!): the Christian Right and the Progressive Left. The Christians, like Shellenberger, with thousands of years of sophisticated moral philosophy, are objectively good (ZOWIE!); while his confused enemy, the Progressives, like Kaine and Ngyuen, what with their devilish compassion and rationalism, are obviously evil (GONK!). Bold move, Michael. Bold move. So, Shellenberger didn’t just go from being able to see with clarity the trouble with religious tribalism, a particular brand of Christian moralizing and reductionism, and the weaponizing of faith for political or geopolitical ends to, I would argue, endorsing as much. No. He also then applies the very same over-simplified dualist logic he diagnosed as symptomatic of the problem. Didn’t he? I think so.

Most curiously, the dots he does not connect, and he appears to deem mostly irrelevant, are that these two people — Ngyuen and Kaine, who he calls out as being, effectively, immoral and ignorant of Christian doctrine and its foundational role in America’s inception all while harbouring and spreading this narrowminded anti-Christian bigotry founded in Marxism — are… wait for it… not only proud and loyal Americans but devout Catholics, with young Kaine in his formative years even taking time out away from his JD at Harvard Law to spend a year in Honduras helping run a Catholic school founded by Jesuit missionaries. (GAH-LEE!)

Worse than all that, and to my shock and horror, to explain where the ignorant denialists go so wrong Shellenberger offers all the same sorts of postulates so resoundingly debunked so very publicly, over and over again across the English-speaking world for a whole decade — and that got virtually no meaningful push-back at any point. Everyone from local cardinals, rabbis, and imams to celebrity gurus and hucksters continuously took to stages all across Australia, Europe, and North America to oppose the observations of folks like Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and many others, too. And those learned scholars of the sacred and of scripture would inevitably come with the exact same handful of low-quality arguments so easily made to look so very silly in just the previous debate on the previous stage in the previous town and already published on YouTube for millions to witness and learn from. They seemed to love coming to the table with obvious misreadings of their own and other’s faith or textual interpretations totally divorced from the actual beliefs of real people. And all too often those were paired with untenable, even goofy, reimaginings of world history or a shameful attempt at pretending to know something about biology or physics. There have to be 5,000 hours of such material to review for anyone who wishes to relive the 2000s. So why keep up this charade?

SOME SPECIFIC CLAIMS

The Declaration of Independence Shellenberger cites at the outset was signed in 1776. That document was drafted, largely in isolation, by Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson was no Christian and rejected divinity and all the core doctrines of Christianity. No one disputes any of the above. And in his draft, this foundational document his co-founders implored him to write, he did not add the words God or Creator but, for example, did include things like a condemnation of slavery. Yes, a single mention of the "Creator" was added to the final official document by the thoughtful Christian editors in Congress. But they didn't just add. With what Shellenberger tells us was their vastly superior ethics and sense of the “intrinsic dignity of the human person”, these Christians saw fit to purge from the final draft any protestation against treating humans as chattel. Of course this ethical intuition and education came directly from their faith. (Or were these good Christians also ignorant of the teachings of Jesus and the intellectual labours of their co-religionists over the eons, like Kaine and Ngyuen?) But, of course, the Bible makes no such prohibition, only recommends one not beat their human property so ferociously that they take out an eye or sever a limb… Also, it might be noted, this failure of Christians to detect pure evil arrived at a time when they were, surely, all too conscious of countless Europeans, maybe a million of them, people identical to themselves and most of America’s 18th century settlers, being captured and taken into slavery by North Africans, the “naval mujahideen” of the Ottoman Empire, and from all across the Mediterranean but also with raids as far away as Ireland and Iceland. Not only was protection money paid to keep these slavers away from American ships — that amounted to 20% of the early US federal government’s annual expenditures — but this pirate threat was actually what precipitated the formation of the US Navy... Still, “slavery = bad” was somehow beyond all these good Christian founders. So, it seems to me, clearly we have in this final official foundational document the imposition of Shellenberger’s higher Christian moral clarity [sic] over a far more civilized Enlightenment substrate arriving from a non-theist who rejected everything one would think of as Christian.

More than that, any careful reading of the Declaration of Independence reveals this mention of a “Creator” provides none of the specificity Shellenberger imposes. Why and how does Shellenberger choose to read there, of all things, a Christian God (whose most common and best subscribed version accepts prayers and intervenes in individual human lives)? That is simply not in the text, the first draft or the final copy held in the National Archives in DC. Why, too, does he insist “all men” to be the universalist product of the crucible that he says the Christian faith has always been and thus something identical to how he would translate it today? Lord knows. Certainly Shellenberger concedes that the founders and their compatriots did not think as he does (on nearly any issue or even so little as the definition of common words...) Or maybe he considers Jefferson (the Enlightenment deist, really a non-believer and fierce rationalist who, for instance, promoted a progressive utilitarianism encouraging the population to prioritize the acquisition of practical knowledge to maximize one’s usefulness to society…) to be America’s most important founder? Regardless, Shellenberger fails to note that the nation’s framework and supreme law, the US Constitution, written in 1787, makes no mention of the former Declaration’s Creator. For what Shellenberger insists is a nation whose entire foundation and framework is deeply Christian, what is very clearly and curiously absent is any mention of a Christian God or the essential Jesus Christ. Those are very significant omissions. Surely. What explains that if his version of events is reality? Even more curious is that it wasn’t for another century, long after all the founders were dead, and only after a civil war, that the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, ratified in 1868, established equal protection, at least in writing, for all citizens. That’s right, up to this point Americans (really good Christians, according to Shellenberger) still did not understand “all men” to mean “all men”. They also believed what was said to be the Creator’s “unalienable” endowments were really intended by the founding fathers to mean “like, totally and completely alienable. Like, totally!” They felt no need to ground the thing, any founding documents, in reality, at the intersection of the citizenry and their government even, or to merely spell out that these rights should be extended most meagrely indeed to all Christians, regardless of their skin colour. The genius of the founders (or most of them) was just so poorly conceived, their superior Christian ethics so immature at this very late date, after 1,800 years of Shellenberger's vigorous debate, that folks had to eventually spell out that (in an America with divine “unalienable rights” granted to “all”) you couldn’t go ahead and arbitrarily deprive of life, liberty, property, and/or the ability to seek happiness from anyone you saw fit. Right. And then, of course, it wasn’t for another century, and quite nearly another civil war, and the resulting Civil Rights Act of 1964, that folks, doubtless good Christians all, finally sat down and said: “No, really, ‘ALL’ and ‘UNALIENABLE’. Like, for real! Like, FOR REAL, REAL!!!” (We won’t even talk about women’s rights or gay rights or anything else…) How does this reality correspond with the version of history we're being pitched? Hint: it doesn't. Now recall, that Shellenberger chastises Kaine for fearing that Christian Nationalist with their natural law might fail to extend basic human rights to non-Christians. He says this knowing that it took two centuries to ensure those same God-given and inalienable rights [sic] penned at the nation’s inception extended even to all Christians (...but don’t try, in 2025, to get your mail delivered or go to a bank or talk to anyone in government on a Sunday!) Exactly. I don't know about you but I'm so glad to hear Kaine's concerns about theocracy are totally baseless. Reassuring.

Of course Michael knows very well that the broadening of human rights arrived largely over the last few hundred years and only really got serious over the last few generations, and not over the eons Anno Domini. He also knows that enlightenment took place not by way of a closer reading of the books of the Bible or through deepening one’s practice of Roman Catholicism or by anyone emulating Jesus. And he knows for certain that real-world progress was not arrived at by any number of debates within the institutions of Christianity itself. Surely. Instead, as we all know, the West has made moral and real, legal human rights progress, slow and painful, only by abrading, dislodging, and jettisoning all the truths and tenets of Christianity we've been able by way of an unrelenting collision, always unwanted and often unintended, with reality. I mean, everyone is perfectly aware that for all of their history Christians have fiercely opposed even mere descriptions of the world or the most tepid documentation of an individual’s own subjective experience (to say nothing at all of any real theological or philosophical challenges.) Who doesn’t know the example of Galileo? He was censored and locked away for a physical observation that anyone could make. "Shit bro, that looks like a moon— wait— four moons; here, look for yourself." That came AFTER most of Christian history, nearly all of Shellenberger’s “thousands of years”. If you want to go only to the next closest example, and my personal favourite, you can read the works of Descartes. Because of the terrifying example of Galileo, Descartes (doubtless shaking in his boots) was compelled to preface everything he wrote (about his own perception and experience) with a long explanation as to why nothing he was about to put to paper was in any way questioning anything Aristotle said, anything spelled out in the Bible, or any Church teachings (which was mostly Aristotle). With his subordination and intentions so clearly spelled out up front, this devout Roman Catholic (who made pilgrimages, had divine visions, and wrote about little more than the sublime genius of his Catholic God) was still shunned and all his work censored by nearly everyone, especially the churches and all the schools and universities they operated. This wasn’t the 3rd century or the 5th but midway through the 17th. Yes, even after 1,600+ years of Shellenberger’s vigorous Christian debate, there was no room for any text (one that virtually no one could read nor was reproduced in any numbers) that might contain something novel or that could potentially result in a reader having a single interesting thought. The good-est Christians, with their vastly superior logic and morals, simply couldn't risk it.

Shellenberger knows this. And he knows that for all of Christianity, including in most places today, any debate or even elementary dialogue was and remains seriously frowned upon if not punished. How could any serious person doubt that? Yes, ignorant children tend to be free to make their most obvious inquiries. They are also free to observe and obey whatever response is given to them. Right. And we all know even modern presidents (“the leader of the free world”) lack the basic freedom to even insinuate that they may not be a true believer. Or we have examples like those Sam Harris and friends enjoyed spelling out: how, even in the 21st century, polls show Americans reporting they would rather their children spend time with a predator (who could merely harm their kids in this lifetime) than a non-believer (who could corrupt their souls, condemning them for eternity). What is a purer distillation of Christian reasoning and higher moral philosophy? These two examples alone make me wonder how close you have to look, even in 2025, to spot any of the openness and goodness Shellenberger insists is so intrinsic, eagerly granted, and flowing forth from his faith?

Michael also knows that if our rights were “natural” and born of a Christian Creator they would have, at the very least, been spelled out in any of the historical or modern texts or arisen from the Church and the numerous Christian nations the world has seen rather than, as he admits, Greece and Rome and, as he omits, the Enlightenment (where some folks carved out a space free from superstition and divine oversight where, for once, substantial progress could be made, including the flourishing of democracy, secular society and the most basic human rights, modern education and science...) Does he deny that it was and is the faithful who have worked so hard to edit out and ignore all the progress being made despite their fierce protestations, penalties, purges, and pogroms? Surely not. So, lest we forget: where religion ends civilization begins.

RE-SOURCES

Shellenberger’s Substack - Public

https://www.public.news

Michael Shellenberger - Rogan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dK3HK5Yy1AI

Vicky Nguyen

https://www.vickynguyen.com

Tim Kaine

https://www.kaine.senate.gov/about

January 2002, The Washington Post - 'We Will Rally the World'

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2002/01/28/we-will-rally-the-world

March 2002, The New York Times - Bush Strikes Religious Note In an Address For Holidays