I recently debated the subject of religion and imperialism with atheists on a progressive discussion board. While my debating partners were very knowledgeable, it seemed to me that they suffered from a curious myopia. They clearly saw the complicity of Christian fundamentalism in America’s “War on Terror,” but they had difficulty seeing that this religious propaganda was mirrored by appeals to atheism and the values of the European Enlightenment.

When I pointed out that people like Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris use atheist rhetoric to demonize Muslims and justify American imperialism, I was told that unlike religious fundamentalists, Hitchens and Harris speak only for themselves. Whereas religious warmongers serve the interests of their authoritarian organizations, atheists obey only their own conscience, however misguided that conscience may be. Like true children of the Enlightenment, Hitchens and Harris were intellectually autonomous.

This individualization of atheism struck me as untenable. Surely atheism is as much a social phenomenon as religion is, and atheists have also been known to form authoritarian organizations. Marxists have often coupled atheism with authoritarianism, and Neoconservatism is a rabidly authoritarian mutant hybrid of the atheist philosophies of Leon Trotsky and Leo Strauss.

The more I thought about it, the more it bothered me. I felt that my debating partners were missing something important, but I suspected that I was too. Luckily, last week I happened upon a book that helped clarify matters for me. Dan Hind’s The Threat to Reason: How the Enlightenment Was Hijacked and How We Can Reclaim It (Verso, 2007) suggests that the conflict between religion and atheism is a smokescreen for a deeper and far more serious struggle between two opposing legacies of the Enlightenment. He calls these legacies the Open Enlightenment and the Occult Enlightenment.

The Open Enlightenment is the legacy that promotes open and free inquiry for everyone along with liberation from tyranny. For the Open Enlightenment, the search for truth goes hand-in-hand with the struggle for political freedom. The intellectual grandfathers of this legacy were 18th Century giants like Voltaire and Immanuel Kant, while people like Noam Chomsky are its modern heirs.

In its inception, the Open Enlightenment clashed with religious dogma and authorities, but only because of the tyrannical power of the era’s religious institutions. Voltaire, who was among the harshest critics of religious tyranny and the most enthusiastic proponents of rationality, wasn’t himself an atheist. Kant, for his part, focused on “religious incompetence” because he thought that it was especially degrading and because “our rulers have no interest in playing the guardian with respect to the arts and sciences.” If Kant were alive today, his priorities would likely be different, as our rulers are now obsessed with “playing the guardian” over the arts and sciences.

The Occult Enlightenment, which has nothing to do with the supernatural, is just as much a product of the Enlightenment as the Open Enlightenment, and it’s just as rational. In contrast to the Open Enlightenment, however, the Occult Enlightenment promotes the secret pursuit of knowledge in the service of unaccountable power.

The first philosopher of the Occult Enlightenment was Francis Bacon, a man whose work predates the official start of the Enlightenment by over a century. Bacon advocated an alliance between state institutions and natural philosophers, an alliance that would conduct large-scale experiments designed to establish humankind’s dominion over the forces of nature. Because of this, and because of Bacon’s enthusiasm for state power and secrecy, Hind calls Bacon “the prophet of the military-industrial complex.”

Hind argues that the central ethical conflict of our time is the struggle between the Open and Occult Enlightenments, between Enlightenment for the many and Enlightenment for the powerful few. The Occult Enlightenment supports state and corporate power, and it systematically undermines intellectual and political liberation. Thanks to the Occult Enlightenment, “We do not for the most part understand the world in which we live. Both the state and the corporation remain mysterious in themselves, and they generate misunderstanding and delusion on a vast scale. Trillions of dollars disappear from reckonings of government departments and the general population is routinely treated as an object to be manipulated. The private sector spends hundreds of billions of dollars making deception both palatable and ubiquitous. To the limited extent that we can grasp the facts in a given context, we find ourselves contradicted by the major media groups. In such circumstances we cannot reasonably claim to live in enlightened times.”

The conflict between the Open and Occult Enlightenments is obscured by what Hind calls the Folk Enlightenment. The Folk Enlightenment can best be described as a kind of theatre in which people pretend to fight battles that were won long ago. These battles are typically portrayed as occurring between Enlightenment rationality and an irrational and dangerous “other.” For example, proponents of the Folk Enlightenment continue to focus on the threat of religion, despite the fact that religious institutions possess barely a fraction of their former influence, and that science and technology, not theology, are what empower the oligarchies of the modern world.

Hind believes that even the threat of Christian fundamentalism is overrated. He argues that this fundamentalism isn’t so much a religious phenomenon as it is a “protection racket.” Fundamentalist leaders have the power to whip their congregations into moral panics, and they use this power to turn those whipped up congregations into political commodities.

Hind uses the involvement of Ralph Reed, the former executive director of the Christian Coalition, in the Jack Abramoff scandal as a case study: “The antics of Jack Abramoff and his associates provide a well-documented example of the way in which the religious right interacts with other sources of power in the US. Clients pay vast sums to lobbyists and political consultants, who then excite the moral indignation of ‘wackos.’ Some of the money finds its way to legislators in the form of expensive trips and other benefits. Deniability is maintained through cut-out organizations where necessary; front companies, pressure groups and so on. In all of this, the Evangelical rank and file are a long way down the food chain.” If Hind is correct, then Christian fundamentalism isn’t a growing theocratic menace, but rather a tool of unaccountable state and corporate power. Far from threatening Enlightenment values, Christian fundamentalism has been conscripted by the Occult Enlightenment in its war against the Open Enlightenment. Instead of launching attacks on fundamentalist theology, Hind thinks that our time would be better spent demonstrating to fundamentalists how their leaders are using them to support what they may well perceive as demonic power structures.

The threat of radical Islam to Enlightenment values is also widely misrepresented. Hind shows how many Western intellectuals and politicians have justified the “War on Terror” as a defense of these values against “Islamo-fascist” and “totalitarian” barbarism, but the facts contradict these imperial apologists at every turn. “Islamo-fascist” Saudi Arabia and “totalitarian” Uzbekistan are staunch American allies, while American actions during this war have been far more catastrophically barbaric than anything terrorists like al Qaeda have managed to pull off. The pro-war propaganda saturating our media, the curtailment of civil liberties, and the humanitarian crises in Afghanistan and Iraq certainly haven’t done anything to encourage “open and free inquiry” or “liberation from tyranny.” Besides all this, the fact that many American soldiers are motivated by apocalyptic Christian beliefs strongly suggests that these invaders aren’t fighting for anything resembling the values of the Open Enlightenment. It seems that just like Christian fundamentalism, the Folk Enlightenment is being used by the Occult Enlightenment for its own purposes.

Along with religion, the Folk Enlightenment also portrays such peripheral phenomena as postmodernism and alternative medicine as dire threats to Enlightenment values. Regardless of which bogeyman is chosen, the end result is the same. By exaggerating these trivial issues and ignoring the monstrous evils of the Occult Enlightenment, the Folk Enlightenment betrays the most basic ethical commitments of the Open Enlightenment. Instead of going after nuisances, the founding fathers of the Open Enlightenment targeted the foremost evils of their day, the forces that were, more than any other, responsible for keeping humanity in a state of bewilderment and oppression. In their time, these forces were those of religious and political despotism, whose collusion Voltaire called “l’infame,” or “the infamy.” Today, the infamy is found in the collusion of state and corporate power.

While atheist warmongers like Hitchens and Harris don’t go to church or listen to priests, they’re hardly intellectually autonomous, and the Enlightenment legacy they defend isn’t benign. They’re spokespeople for the Folk Enlightenment and servants of the Occult Enlightenment. Most of all, they’re enemies of the Open Enlightenment, which is, for anyone with a heart, the only legacy of the Enlightenment that’s worth anything at all.