The new gnosticism

Michael Shellenberger connects progressive ideology to anti-religious beliefs

On its face, American Experiment’s 2025 Fall Briefing featuring Michael Shellenberger was set up as a straightforward speech about California’s cautionary tale: its corrupt leadership and ridiculous public policy. However, halfway through the talk, Shellenberger began tying the progressive pitfalls of his home state to an esoteric heresy from the early Christian church called Gnosticism. Shellenberger made the illuminating case, which will be further explored in his upcoming book, that disastrous progressive policies are an outgrowth of this heresy’s stance on divine truth, metaphysical reality, and the secrets to salvation. To bring Minnesota back from the brink of California craziness, conservatives should listen to Shellenberger’s final clarion call to tell the truth and expose lies, as well as the guidance of early opponents of Gnosticism in the Christian Church, who called for their fellow Christians to hold fast to the tradition successively passed down to them.

California is operating in conditions that Shellenberger calls “dream worlds.” Concepts fully embraced by the left, such as harm reduction, misinformation, and climate change, are fundamentally lies that result in disordered actions. The linguistic creation of misinformation — information that those in power find inconvenient or challenging — tees up the construction of censorship systems to stamp out dissent. Claims of climate change, propped up by dubious statistics and graphs, result in the punishment of the developing world as it tries to catch up to the developed world in energy production.

Shellenberger has witnessed and studied these lies and their consequences firsthand extensively. His 2020 bestselling book “Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All” exposed the hysteria around climate change and the reality of declining carbon emissions, deaths from extreme weather events, and the risk of global warming. His viral Twitter Files investigation in 2022 showed America the determination on the left to silence the right and monopolize the digital information space. The first half of his speech was brimming with his unique and passionate insight into these controversial topics.

Shellenberger then shifted from the what to the why. Why is it that progressive-controlled institutions and governments are determined to adhere to these faulty narratives, consistently producing ruin? Shellenberger pointed out the steep decline in religion throughout America, which had previously “bound everyone together for thousands of years.” He cited Pew Research’s 2019 finding that religious “nones” had grown by 30 million in the preceding 10 years. “When religion is gone…people start to look for some alternative sacred.”

At this point, Shellenberger introduced the 20th-century German philosopher Eric Voegelin and his concept of “dream worlds,” the focus of Shellenberger’s next book. Dream worlds are “full-blown alternative [realities]…that [have] answers to every question, every objection you might make…which serve as substitutes to traditional religion.” Totalitarians can convince the population that their dream worlds are more real than reality, which results in “compassionate” people committing “morally insane actions” such as providing hard drugs to addicts and sterilizing children.

Shellenberger admitted that his last two books were partially incorrect in identifying climate alarmism and mistreatment through compassion as religions. He now views them as anti-religions by which the left uses traditional religious words to express the exact opposite. Harm reduction inverts the biblical principle of self-responsibility, insisting that the individual has no agency or power. In Genesis, mankind is given the mandate to have dominion over the Earth, but climate change reverses this by allowing nature to dominate humanity.

Shellenberger then noted that Voegelin compared dream worlds to Gnosticism because they, like Gnosticism, invert the biblical story, claiming that the world was created in error and that only through hidden knowledge can some find their way out. This knowledge, or Gnosis, provides salvation by revealing “one true spiritual origin and the way back to the divine.” It is easy to connect this idea to that of wokeness by progressives, which claims that only through a particular set of knowledge of how the Western world is corrupt can a person be liberated. As Shellenberger points out, no real solution to the identified problems is required, as simply having this knowledge is enough to bestow the desired virtue upon the holder.

According to Shellenberger, the best way to bring people out of their dream worlds is to tell the truth. Harm reduction is actually addiction enablement, the climate crisis is mostly alarmism, and the fight against misinformation and hate speech is a thinly veiled attempt to create a censorship industrial complex.

Conservatives should also look to Paul’s writings in the New Testament of the Bible, which deal with a precursor to Gnosticism, as well as the Church Fathers who directly combatted the purveyors of Gnosticism. In his first epistle to Timothy, Paul tells the young leader to “guard what has been entrusted to you” and “avoid the godless chatter and contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge,” which is the Greek word gnōsis. Paul also tells his readers in his epistle to the Colossians to “see to it that no one makes a prey of you by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ.” Paul is telling these early Christians to stick to the truth of what has been passed down to them rather than becoming disillusioned with a sophistic dream world. Bishop Irenaeus of Lyons makes a similar argument against the Gnostics by appealing to apostolic tradition in his 2nd-century work titled “Against Heresies,” in which he states that “bishops in the Churches… neither taught nor knew of anything like what these [heretics] rave about.”

Progressives are retreating into their dream worlds and manipulating language to justify their morally insane actions. Shellenberger understands this and is sounding the alarm on California’s insanity. He is also detailing the anti-religion that undergirds the whole belief structure and fuels every activist passion project from climate change delirium to ambitions for dystopian censorship. Conservatives should heed Shellenberger’s call to speak the truth and refuse to adopt the lie-ridden language of the left. They should also look to early Christian opponents of Gnosticism, such as Paul and Irenaeus, who advocated embracing the truths they were handed. Conservatives have a hard-won tradition of personal responsibility, tight-knit religious communities, environmental stewardship, and freedom of speech. Minnesotans must embrace these handed-down truths if they want to prevent the state from sliding into California’s underworld.