On Sunday, October 30th, a little-known 80-year-old priest took to the pulpit of St Mary's church in the small rural town of Listowel, Ireland. What Father Seán Sheehy said that day shocked his parishioners. He broke the unspoken agreement that the Church should stick to the milder, more palatable bits of its doctrine in exchange for notional public religiosity. Sheehy went into a diatribe condemning gays, contraception, abortion, and "transgenderism." A number of attendees left the mass in disgust. And so began the parable of Father Sheehy.

The public reaction was swift and explosive. The story dominated Ireland’s national media outlets for weeks. Fr. Sheehy, whose comments were denounced by the Bishop of Kerry as well as members of the Association of Catholic Priests in Ireland, was invited onto Ireland’s most popular radio shows as an opportunity to explain himself. The story received international coverage ranging from The Guardian, a left-wing outlet in the UK, to Fox News, a right-wing outlet in the US. Some of Ireland and Europe’s most prominent politicians and celebrities jumped into the fray. An array of protests were organised at the church where Fr. Sheehy gave his fateful sermon. What fascinates me is that nobody seemed to do even an informal cost-benefit analysis of all these efforts. While engaging in all the sanctimony and excoriation, no one stopped to question whether this storm of outrage might do more harm than good.

The Fr. Sheehy affair, in particular the longevity and intensity of the coverage it garnered online and in the media, demonstrates how much social progress has been made in recent decades. To me it also shows how vital it is that we not unduly obsess over the views of the most irrelevant and the most irreverent, the losers of the battle for hearts and minds. While it’s disappointing to see that such backward views linger, becoming overwhelmingly preoccupied with them is a danger in itself. Traditionalist attitudes and religious orthodoxy will always exist. At a certain point, fixating on their views brings diminishing or even negative returns in advancing liberal causes like human rights and individual freedom.

Panoramic view of Listowell, Kerry, Ireland - where Fr. Sheehy gave his sermon.

I was an avid debater when I was younger, and took part in competitive debate competitions at the local, national, and international levels. Over the years, I won more than I lost. I came to enjoy the feeling of winning more than the debating itself. After each event, speakers could line up and talk to the panel of adjudicators — the debating world’s term for judges — about the outcome of the debate. They would discuss why they ranked you where they did, where they thought that you had excelled, and how you might improve for the next time.

Following each victory, I always made sure to scurry to the front of the line, ready to receive the feedback, and guaranteeing that every debater standing behind me would hear the adjudicators’ praise. It was important to me that others were forced to bear witness and hear why, in the judges’ own words, I was the winner. I cringe at it now, but I have to confess I was there at the front of the queue for one reason and one reason alone — because I was consumed with my own sense of achievement and making sure everyone else knew that I had won and they had lost.

In retrospect, I see how petty and destructive this approach was. I can now admit that I had no intention of listening to any of the criticism the judges presented, or their advice as to how I might improve in the future, or even to hear their own thoughts on the debate topic. In the years since, I’ve learned the lesson that the psychology behind being a “bad winner” is fundamentally self-damaging.

There seems to be a cohort of activists and partisans vigilantly waiting to pounce on their defeated culture war opponents the next time one transgresses. These people are, in many ways, the adult version of the teenage debater I used to be — unsatisfied with winning and fixated on asserting and reasserting their dominance. In some cases, this attitude leads to outright winning-denialism. Our culture war victors enjoy being the underdog and the oppressed so much that they cannot admit the progress we have made. Conservatives, for their part, likewise seize every opportunity to play the aggrieved victim. The reason behind the instinct to deny one’s own success is simple: it is easier to inspire action — votes, donations, activism, sign-ups, etc. — with a message of urgently-needed change rather than a need for continuation.

To those paying attention, however, it is undeniable that the culture wars across Western Europe have abounded with a long line of liberal victories ranging from gay marriage, to abortion, to the secularisation of education, to the normalisation of substantial immigration. In his book Why Liberals Win (Even When They Lose Elections) (2015), religious scholar Stephen Prothero points out that the continued existence of culture wars actually demonstrates that liberals have already won. In large part, what passes for culture wars nowadays mostly represents a scanty effort by social conservatives to futilely resist the tide of social change that they inwardly know themselves to be incapable of stopping.

Liberals are still coming to terms with winning, and doing a poor job of it. A study out of Ohio State University found that winning can often engender intense aggression towards losers, but not the other way around. Other literature on success suggests that at the highest levels, winners are acutely aware of how valuable their time is, and make an effort not to waste it on such trivialities like rubbing their success in people’s faces.

Too many people seem to take such pleasure in raining down opprobrium when social conservatives make comments no longer deemed acceptable that they never stop to think about the consequences. Sheehy is a priest who, sources say, has long been shunned not only by mainstream culture, but by his own peers as well. He is an attention-seeker and provocateur, a man of such low moral fibre that, in 2009, he provided a character reference for a rapist in court and attended the proceedings to shake that man’s hand in front of his victim. His position in the Church has since been relegated to that of a “supply priest” — one with no official appointment. He, like a rotation football player typically resigned to the outskirts who has been called up to play the game, wanted to cause a stir last month, and those who most fervently disagreed with him unwittingly did his bidding. Sheehy is a man who should be beneath our contempt — and our attention, too.

The furious response to one priest’s bigoted comments reached such a fever pitch that one would think his comments were representative of Ireland. Except they aren’t. In 2015, Ireland became the first country in the world to legalise same-sex marriage by means of a popular vote. Two-thirds of voters in Ireland’s referendum on abortion voted to legalise it. The political parties arguing most loudly for social inclusivity and equality of opportunity are also those that have seen unprecedented gains.

Of course words can be hurtful, whether uttered by someone influential or by an irrelevant crackpot. Make no mistake, it is absolutely important to correct falsehoods as they arise and to stand up to bigotry. When confronted with prejudice and group-hatred, the right answer is not to politely sit on one’s hands in a state of permissive congeniality. These things must be opposed. There is a difference, however, between becoming complacent and this compulsion to single out the traditionalist du jour and make an example out of them. My point isn’t about protecting the feelings of retrograde bigots — it’s about thinking through what this trend of progressive over-reaction might lead to.

Fr. Sheehy is somebody that I could not disagree with more, but there will always be people with outdated and even abhorrent views in society. For example, another priest with a reputation for outlandishness came out in the media in support of Fr. Sheehy. On some level, crazy priests gonna crazy. The great physicist Max Planck once observed that progress occurs “One funeral at a time.” In reality, it’s more complicated than that. Many older people do in fact evolve and become more open-minded, and even if the most diehard partisans cannot be budged, the minds of the many onlookers can be. What’s missing is a sense of proportionality.

Another problem with the messaging of these anti-right outrage campaigns is that they are often shot through with fearmongering, either implied or outright, that “they're coming for you next.” This runs the risk of creating a sort of “boy who cried wolf” situation, where the general public becomes numb to the intensity, volume, and frequency of moral indignation and reprimandings. The sky can’t always be falling, and claiming that it is will only cause people to stop taking us seriously.

A better approach is to spend more time developing cohesive, convincing, and constructive narratives and policies for a fairer, freer, more prosperous future, and less time thinking about the most outspoken fringe of the “other side.” Let’s focus more on delivering concrete results. Let’s devote more time to thinking about how the world could look in 50 years and less time being outraged by the remanences of waning worldviews that may have been popular 50 years ago. We must remain vigilant, of course, lest the bigotries of yesteryear make a resurgence, but there is an opportunity cost of spending increasing amounts of time kicking the dwindling number of old fogies while they’re down. And there is an ethical cost, too. However much we may try, we cannot elevate our own moral status by putting others down. The annals of history record only a small handful of critics — and most only for their style, not substance. The rest of the pages are filled with doers. Getting on the “right side of history” means leaving petty one-upmanship behind, rolling up your sleeves, and doing the boring but indispensable work of progress.

Published Nov 21, 2022
Updated Apr 6, 2023