OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
14hr ago
I'd agree with that failure mode. I don't think there's any single form of liturgy that is guaranteed to never fail - there is no substitute for constant vigilance.
One failure mode is that worship is just receiving a service. You go in, you don't interact with anybody else, you mechanically recite the approved words, the priest dispenses the Eucharist, you consume it, you leave, and you never experience any form of fellowship or community. But as you say, another failure mode is that worship is just a tedious bit of ritual you have to get through before you get the morning tea potluck. You're really just going to meet up with friends in the community and worship is just an excuse.
My sense, theologically, is that both the liturgy, which is fundamentally oriented towards God, and the community, oriented towards each other, are essential. Christian gathering is for and about God, but it is also gathering as community. It's a core Christian claim that God himself is a relational community, as the Trinity, so by having that fellowship with each other we are mirroring his own being. We come to worship to know God and to know each other and the two cannot be isolated from each other - the same way that, when asked the greatest commandment, Jesus weaves together our duties to God and our duties to each other. "On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."
OliveTapenade
1d ago
I remember a Catholic friend of mine once joking that there is nothing so Protestant as caring deeply about the Vatican's opinion on something.
To be fair to them this kind of casual disobedience of otherwise-well-understood rules is very common among religions. There are large parts of the world where Muslims casually drink alcohol. Most Jews don't entirely keep kosher, though many partially keep it. Catholics, of course, famously disregard the rules on everything from contraception to the Friday fast to the Sunday mass obligation. Even when the bright-line rules are universally known - as they generally are among practitioners of the religion - they are often only casually or partially observed.
In this context scrupulous observance is more common among converts than among people raised into the tradition. If you're born and raised Catholic, Muslim, Jewish, or anything else, you have nothing to prove - you are confident in your inclusion in that community. Converts, however, do have something to prove. They need to work harder to fit in, especially since they may not know all the subtle, hidden signs of membership in a tribe. Moreover converts are on average more pious than cradle members of a faith (since changing religion is a cost), and also more likely to have made some kind of study of their new faith.
I notice that the Catholic postliberals have a lot of converts in their ranks. Sohrab Ahmari, Adrian Vermeule, J. D. Vance, etc., are all converts. Not all of them are - Patrick Deneen is from a Catholic family, and I'm not sure about Pilkington, Pecknold, or Feser - but I think they're overrepresented. Converts usually take the official, legible doctrine much more seriously.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
I don't want to get bogged down in an assessment of his career or character - what I would say is that this is explicitly the position that he argues for. Whether he's hypocritical or ineffective is, strictly speaking, beside the point, and I would argue that even evangelicals that strongly disagree with or even loathe David French as an individuals adopt a similar strategy.
What is, say, Al Mohler's strategy for Christianity in a de-Christianising America? I think it is, much like French's stated approach, summarisable as "just win the argument". The base structure of the American polity is not the problem - Christians don't need to seize the government or radically change the meaning of the constitution. What they have to do is get out there and win the culture. In this way both Mohler and French are operating in an evangelical tradition that goes back decades. It's the same playbook that someone like Billy Graham followed. Teach the nation. Nourish the public square. Win souls to Christ through public witness.
For what it's worth there are absolutely Catholic apologists who will argue that the modern day Catholic Church resembles the early church in form and structure. For instance, from Surprised by Truth, a book of testimonies by former-evangelical converts to Catholicism:
[Paul Thigpen:] Second, when I studied the history of Jewish and Christian liturgy, I found that even if we could return to the “primitive” Christian experience, that experience would not resemble most of the Protestant, especially the charismatic, churches of today. The congregations I’d been part of were for the most part assuming that they had recovered a “New Testament” model of strictly spontaneous worship, local government, and “Bible-only” teaching. But the early Church, I found, was, in reality, liturgical in worship; translocal and hierarchical in government; and dependent on a body of sacred tradition that included the scripture, yet stretched far beyond it as well.
[Steve Wood:] During my Calvary Chapel days, I had a very low view of the sacraments; I was almost antisacramental. But when I discovered the true role of baptism and the Lord’s Supper in Christian worship and living, a corresponding appreciation for the role of the Church began to blossom. That’s when I did something really dangerous. I started reading the early Church Fathers firsthand. I had studied some early Church history, but too much of it was from perspectives limited by Protestant history textbooks. I was shocked to discover in the writings of the first-, second-, and third-century Christians a very high view of the Church and liturgy, very much unlike the views of the typical Evangelical Protestant. The worship and government of the early Church didn’t look anything like the things I saw at Calvary Chapel or in my own congregation. It looked a lot more, well, Catholic.
[Bob Sungenis:] Many Protestants claim that the Church of the first three centuries was a “pure” church, and only after the legalization of the Christian faith by the Roman emperor Constantine (in AD 312) did the church become “Catholic” and corrupt. But upon studying this issue, I found that the doctrines of post-Constantine Catholicism are the same doctrines, some in more primitive form, that were held by Christians for the preceding three centuries.
My study of the writings of the Church Fathers revealed that the early Church believed in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, confession of sins to a priest, baptismal regeneration, salvation by faith and good works done through grace, that one could reject God’s grace and forfeit salvation, that the bishop of Rome is the head of the Church, that Mary is the Mother of God and was perpetually a virgin, that intercessory prayer can be made to the saints in heaven, that purgatory is a state of temporary purification which some Christians undergo before entering heaven. Except for the perpetual virginity and divine motherhood of Mary, all of these doctrines were repudiated by the Protestant Reformers. If the Catholic Church is in error to hold these beliefs, then it was in error long before Constantine legalized Christianity. This would mean that the Church apostatized before the end of the first century, when the apostles were still alive! An absurd theory which even the most anti-Catholic of Protestants can’t quite bring themselves to accept.
[Julie Swenson:] John Henry Newman, the famous Evangelical Protestant convert to Catholicism, once said, “Knowledge of Church history is the death of Protestantism.” He was right. My study of the early Church showed clearly that it was Catholic in its beliefs and practices—in fact, it had begun calling itself “Catholic” at least as early as the end of the first century.
Now, most of this is cherry-picking similarities and ignoring differences, or misrepresenting an early church that is a lot messier than this text admits - but nonetheless "the early church looked like the Catholic Church" is a claim that apologists make.
(And who the heck thinks that John Henry Newman was ever an evangelical Protestant?)
Realistically, I'd bet that if you had a time machine, the very early church would not easily slot into any of these confessional disputes. The early church was a scattered, often incoherent mess, and Catholic attempts to, for instance, project an episcopacy (much less a papacy!) back into the early church are extremely implausible. Probably partisans of every tradition would find elements of the early church that feel uncomfortable to them. Unfortunately much of the early church is poorly-known, leaving it something of a blank canvas for later traditions to project their presuppositions back on to.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
In my experience that's just a Catholic thing? Every non-Catholic church I've ever been to, even the woolly, beige, mainline, progressive/hippie types, has had a social gathering after church, tea and biscuits, the whole shebang, and if you're new they will invite you to join them with almost aggressive friendliness. As far as my life has gone it's pretty much only Catholics who go to mass, receive communion, and then get out without socialising.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
This might be your view on "separation of church and state." But I've encountered quite a lot of people, over more than 20 years, who disagree. Who argue that no, you can't vote your faith; or, at least if you do, that vote can't be allowed to influence the laws and government, because if it did, that would violate the separation of church and state, because said separation means the government is forbidden for doing anything that originates in religious belief.
I remember it coming up on euthanasia as well: note the question "Is your personal conscience so intertwined with your faith that you can’t make a distinction?", as if the interviewer thinks that people of faith ought to somehow divorce their entire worldview from their decision-making process.
Now Williams gives the correct answer, which is that of course his thought process is shaped in fundamental ways by his understanding of reality, which includes God, Christ, and so on, but that he also understands himself to have an obligation to speak into the public square in ways that are morally and intellectually legible even to non-Christians, but I think it's still striking that he even needs to explain this very basic principle.
But of course religious people can and should make political decisions based on their faith commitments. How could they possibly not?
OliveTapenade
1d ago
This is probably the biggest barrier separating me from evangelicals at this point. I understand the temptation to burn down all the institutions, or to have our guy who hits back, or however you want to frame it, but I can't help but see that as strikingly inconsistent with the Christian behaviour, especially that of the early church, that we aspire to. Nowhere in scripture do I find anything that seems to support making pragmatic deals with villains for temporary benefit - on the contrary, the advice we are given is as follows.
Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honour. Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers.
Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are.
Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, "Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord." No, "if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads." Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
Does this mean to give into every single progressive cultural issue? No, of course not. But I think it does rule out a certain kind of means-end pragmatism, where we do evil so that good may come. As you say, this does not demand total and unqualified meekness. We don't have to be doormats. But we should show moral integrity, forgiveness, and mercy, even in the face of persecution. "Never avenge yourselves" is pretty darn black and white.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
Yes, I think that's fair. I do criticise Dreher sometimes, because as a person he clearly does not have his life together and I can't help feeling a lot of pity for him, and his post-Benedict books are generally bad, but most of The Benedict Option is basically correct. Evangelical emphasis on mission is good and necessary, and even if not taking power, navigating a world of politics and enemies is also necessary, but neither of those tasks supply their own justification. Without the internal formation necessary to sustain their sense of purpose, both will fail or become corrupted. Constant internal renewal, which is nurtured through things like discipline, community life, study, and prayer, is necessary. Insofar as the Benedict Option calls for that renewal I wholeheartedly endorse it.
I just sometimes can't resist taking the cheap shot, which is... well, as much as Dreher is annoyed by people saying Benedict is about retreat, the fault is at least partly his for poor communication, and I'd argue that the book does advocate a kind of retreat. It doesn't advocate unilateral retreat or surrender, but it does say that Christians should avoid or reduce focus on some of the fights they've currently been having while renewing a focus on internal cultivation. I'd say it's a call to pull back, or perhaps to fortify. I'd characterise that as a tactical retreat. I see that Dreher is not saying "we're routed, abandon ship!", but the change of emphasis or redirection of effort he calls for strikes me as a kind of retreat.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
Some people are able to win respect in both worlds. And that can be a very valuable role, able to accomplish things that few others can. But there is always a risk of “going native,” claiming to be more sophisticated than those rubes who hold to their evangelical convictions because you have accepted your field’s secular norms on the Bible, property, sex, abortion, other religions, etc.
I think this is a lasting fear that's characteristic of evangelicals. Sometimes it does verge on paranoia, but there's also plenty of evidence of it being a justified fear. Evangelicals are very distrustful of people who are successful in the secular world. If you can hold on to your evangelical faith in academia or politics, great, and there are some examples of people who've done that and retain credibility, but it's rare. There is a strong sense that these fields are solvents for faith, or examples of 'the world' in the biblical sense.
As a product of higher education myself I have to remind myself not to scoff at this fear. There are plenty of reasons to think it justified. It does also inhibit power-seeking in society. But that may be a feature, not a bug.
I am not sure what happened here. One moment, several Roman Catholic thinkers were exploring various critiques of American liberalism and alternatives to it; the next, they all fell in line behind some version or other of integralism. It’s like there was something in the water.
Oh, absolutely. Somebody - possibly me? - needs to one day delve further into that world and write an effortpost on the postliberal world. It's almost entirely illiberal Catholics now, and it seems like they all converged on this position very swiftly. I'm not sure what I think the common factor is yet.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
This has been my experience with Catholics, for what it's worth - even just anecdotally, I have heard plenty of jokes along the lines of, "I'm a Catholic and that's why I don't give a fig what the pope says".
I think you're right that some of it is due to different ways of identifying church members, at least. If you are baptised Catholic, you are on Catholic church rolls forever (or at least until you formally make them take you off, which almost nobody bothers to do), which tends to inflate the number of on-paper Catholics, and there are a lot of people who are 'Catholic' in a woolly cultural way without ever going to mass. By contrast, I think being on an evangelical church roll, or simply identifying as evangelical, is more likely to correlate with actually going to church.
So you're right that culture, so to speak, is often more powerful than written doctrine. Most Catholics have not read the Catechism, and those who have usually consider themselves free to disagree with it. Highly committed Catholics are a tribe unto themselves. Evangelicals don't have a single book like that (or, well, they are committed to their single book being the Bible, and nothing else), but evangelicals seem to more consistently hold to a set of common practices.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
Right, this is basically what I have in mind - 'liberal' as in classical liberalism or liberal democracy, which is to say individualism, rights and liberties, protection for individual conscience, and so on.
Evangelicals are the 'liberal' option here because the traditional political theology of American evangelicals accepts things like the US constitution, freedom of speech, freedom of religion (and resists the idea of state churches), and so on, whereas traditional Catholic (and to an extent Orthodox) political theology accepts that the state can and should use coercion in matters of religion.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
Ha! Let's hope so. One of my more cringeworthy opinions is that I genuinely like a lot of contemporary worship music. Liking Matt Redman is pretty lame, but you know what, those songs are catchy and uplifting, and there is value in that. I like Gregorian chants as well, but I guess I like all kinds of music. Heck, I kind of like Dan Schutte and Marty Haugen, so clearly I have no musical taste at all.
The figures are sobering, at any rate - for all that there's been time spent online talking about people flocking to Catholicism or Orthodoxy, those traditions are declining or at best holding steady. Evangelicals are the ones holding on. Maybe part of that is just because they are willing to occupy the public space, with less hesitation.
I wonder, though, how much we should factor in the changing nature of evangelical identification? There was a trend, I seem to recall, of otherwise-non-churchgoing conservatives starting to identify as 'evangelical Christian' without changing anything about their behaviour. Call that solidaristic identification, I suppose, because it seems like an identification with other parts of a political coalition. How widespread are changes like that?
OliveTapenade
2d ago
This is, as I understand it, largely correct.
Israel certainly isn't wholly innocent of persecuting Christians. Israel is, intentionally, a country where the normative religion is Judaism, and everything else is subject to a measure of hostility. It is harder to be an Arab Christian in Israel than it is to be a Jew, and obviously that has something to do with the state's constitution. It is, however, still better to be a a Christian in Israel than to be a Muslim, and perhaps more importantly for comparative purposes, it's better to be an Israeli Christian than it is to be a Christian in almost any other Middle Eastern nation.
Again, not perfect, there are difficulties, and Israel is by no one's standards a shining beacon of religious neutrality and liberalism. But Israel is very easily one of the least-bad countries in the region.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
It's just trolling - it's trying to appeal to internet edgelords even at the expense of the movement it supposedly endorses. The only correct move for pro-life activists is to denounce it immediately.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
I mentioned a little while back that I meant to write a top-level post about religion, denominational tradition, and political theology. I could draft and re-draft forever but an imperfect post that spurs conversation is better than a perfect post, so here we go.
In that previous discussion I described three 'options' for conservative or small-o orthodox Christian engagement with a culture that is largely abandoning Christian faith. I can't imagine I need to do much to prove that American culture is increasingly abandoning Christianity - the abandonment is especially obvious on the left, but even on the right, the Trump/MAGA right, despite occasionally making gestures in this direction, is substantially post-Christian.
The options I described, named after conservative Christians who have discussed some of these issues in the public square, are 1) the French Option, after David French, 2) the Ahmari/Deneen/Vermeule option, after Sohrab Ahmari, Patrick Deneen, and Adrian Vermeule, and 3) the Dreher Option, after Rod Dreher. (And of course choosing this language is riffing on Dreher's book The Benedict Option.)
What I noticed after writing that older post was that these options line up very easily with the three major branches of global Christianity - Protestantism (especially evangelical Protestantism, in the US), Roman Catholicism, and Eastern Orthodoxy. The identification of the French Option with Protestantism needs to be nuanced somewhat; French is an evangelical specifically, and I think all these three options rise out of the collapse of the former American mainline. Mainline Protestantism constituted a kind of religious default for American society and a grounding set of institutions and values alike, but as it declines, there is competition over the void. Arguably there is a fourth option I haven't named - Progressive Christianity or Wokism or something else, call it the Bolz-Weber Option or something - but for now I am restricting myself to options for more-or-less conservative Christians.
Let's delve into these options a bit more.
Evangelical Protestantism is the youngest tradition of the three and has developed under conditions of American liberalism. It is therefore the most comfortable with liberal norms. It also tends to be very skeptical of hierarchies, institutions, and regulations - in part due to its own origins in the late 19th and early 20th century, as a kind of rebellion against theological modernists. Buried deep in the DNA of evangelicalism is a sense that one might be betrayed by one's own leadership, and I think we often find evangelicals with an in-principle hostility to higher organisation. Thus there is no one Evangelical Church, but rather scattered networks of independent churches, affiliating and disaffiliating and splitting and fusing as they feel called to do so. Enthusiastic church planting and charismatic celebrity pastors are products of this culture, as is frequent doctrinal dispute. There are loose ways for evangelicals to identify each other, from the Bebbington quadrilateral to simply asking whether a church is 'bible-believing', but there is, intentionally, no umbrella authority. Evangelicals thus also tend to be the most overtly patriotic Americans and are the most tightly wedded to the American project as such - they're the most likely to put tacky American flags up around churches! National or civic identity comes in to provide some of the structure that might otherwise come from a church hierarchy. (It's evangelicals who will sometimes talk about the US constitution being inspired by God, for instance, something very alien to other traditions.)
The French Option is the one I would summarise as "just win the argument". The gospel truth is mighty and will prevail. All you need to do is get out there, present the gospel, and let the Spirit do the rest. Virtue and moral character are important, but they cannot be compelled or produced by any coercive institution - they come from local practices and must be nurtured in local, congregational contexts, attentive to the word of God. Liberalism and viewpoint neutrality are not problems to be solved, but rather are themselves the opportunities to grow the church and create disciples.
All that said, the French or evangelical option is complicated significantly by Trump, with French himself badly out of step with most evangelicals. To an extent Trump makes sense as a result of the evangelical absence of institutional leadership and embrace of charismatic leaders - if they're going to have a political vision, it will be grounded in dynamic individual leaders hostile to traditional institutions, like Trump himself. (And scandalous as Trump is, misbehaving mega-pastors are hardly new.) The more that evangelicals continue to feel that they're doing badly, or that their fortunes are sliding, the more seductive such leaders will be for them.
To put a positive spin on it, the strength of the evangelical approach is that it has deep roots in American folkways, is easily compatible with the liberal American project, and it has a kind of confidence about itself that ought not be underrated. Its great weakness, I think, is the question of what happens if it can't 'win the argument'. What happens then? That's where we might see more of this flirting with authoritarian politics.
Of course, authoritarianism is nothing new to the second tradition, Roman Catholicism, and its integralist exponents today. I should make clear at the start that Catholicism is by far the largest individual church tradition in America (and certainly worldwide) and therefore admits of a great deal of diversity and factional strife. In this context I'm interested in the advocates of an expressly political Catholicism.
Here it is worth noting that Catholicism's relationship with political liberalism has always been strained. Up until the 1960s, the Catholic Church was more-or-less openly at war with liberalism, and continued to hold that the correct formation of a polity was for the secular authority to be subject to, or at least receiving direction from, the church. The history of Catholic-state relations in early 20th century Europe is illuminating in this regard; even in France, up until WWII there continued to be traditionalist hardliners condemning secularism and laicite as mistakes. America posed a problem - you may recall Catholics around 1900 explaining that the church ought to "[enjoy] the favor of the laws and the patronage of the public authority", and should not support separation of church and state. (Note that that was Pope Leo XIII, whom the current pope named himself after.) I was struck by a 1909 defense of forbidden books explaining plainly that it is the church's duty to watch over society and ban immoral speech. Vatican II represented, in some ways, the Catholic Church making peace with liberalism, but it has been an unsteady alliance, and I interpret the modern-day crop of integralists as looking back to an earlier model of church relationship with the state.
They use a number of different names for it - Deneen's 'aristopopulism', Vermeule's 'common-good constitutionalism', and so on - but what unites this group is the conviction that it is both possible and desirable for the United States to be governed in conformance with Catholic social teaching. Liberal democracy should be limited in its scope, fundamentally reframed, or (in the most extreme cases) abolished entirely.
In its full extent this vision is almost certainly unrealisable, at least in the United States - it's hard to imagine non-Catholics ever acceding to it, even among Catholics it is a tiny minority, and Catholic religious authorities, up to the pope himself, seem at best uninterested and at worst actively hostile to this vision. But to smaller extents it may be realisable or even influential in trying to push the United States more towards morals legislation, and Catholic politicians like J. D. Vance may be swayable to an extent. Moreover, among the three options I describe, the Catholic integralists stand out as the only ones with a clear plan to seize and utilise state power, which makes the prospect of their success - even if only a partial success - much more consequential.
The third option is one I've associated with Rod Dreher and therefore with Eastern Orthodoxy, though Dreher himself is an odd duck and not a great representative of the majority of Orthodox communities in the US. The thing about Orthodoxy is that, despite a handful of prominent converts, it primarily exists in ethnic enclaves, owing to the Orthodox churches' historical links to particular national communities. Both Protestants and Catholics have, in different ways, worked out how to evangelise to entirely new people and communities; I don't think the Orthodox have. (They have historically, looking at the spread of Orthodoxy across much of Eurasia; I just mean the modern day.) Traditionally Orthodox churches have been closely bound to political authority, and in some ways that's a pattern we still today with the Russian Orthodox Church. However, the Greek Orthodox tradition spent centuries existing within the Ottoman Empire, which I think gave a lot of Orthodox churches a habit of bunkering up and focusing on surviving and passing down the faith under conditions of being a minority, with little chance of dominating the wider society. To an extent the pattern repeats with the Russians under Soviet control, though since then the Russian Orthodox seem to have re-established the traditional alliance with the state. The point is that there is a deep well of resources, in the Orthodox tradition, for how to exist as a kind of society-within-a-society, without realistic hope of either converting the masses or obtaining power.
In practice, then, Orthodox communities in America and other Western nations tend to be expatriate or immigrant communities, relatively less interested in conversion, and more focused on internal discipline and cultivation. You can easily see the appeal for thinkers like Dreher, who believe that Christianity as a whole in America is soon going to be in the position of Orthodox in the Soviet Union, or in the Ottoman Empire.
The obvious criticism to make of this option is that it is a counsel of despair - it takes for granted that the public is lost. While Dreher himself denies that he calls for any kind of 'retreat', this denial has always been unconvincing at best. To many in the first two camps, this is abandoning the field before battle has been truly joined. If the Orthodox were to give battle, so to speak, they would need to find some way to compensate for their low numbers and their lack of institutional strength, most likely through alliance with this or that other Christian group. I find it unlikely that this will happen.
Perhaps more relevant to America as a whole are non-Orthodox churches or communities who nonetheless take the Orthodox, Dreher option. The Benedict Option itself is primarily a plea for evangelical Protestants and Catholics to try this. You can indeed find people in those traditions taking an option like this, though so far it's too early to see how generative their efforts are. I don't predict entire evangelical or Catholic communities taking this approach, though, until it's clear that they have no other choice.
Where does this leave conservative Christians in the US overall?
I think they're caught between several bad options. Both the "just win the argument" and the "seize state power" approaches seem very unlikely to succeed in the near or even medium term; and "retreat inwards, focus on community formation" is good as far as it goes, but represents a cession of huge amounts of cultural territory that Christians are rightly reluctant to cede.
I don't mean any of this as a counsel of despair myself - these are all judgements predicated on a cultural situation that itself may not last. At any rate, Christians are called to follow Jesus without counting the cost, so in a sense stressing over tactics like this is beside the point, or at the very least, a second-order consideration.
In terms of my own bias, it should be clear that I have the least affinity for the Catholic, Ahmari/Deneen/Vermeule approach - I believe I called them 'bootlickers' last time. I admire the optimism and confidence of the evangelical approach even if I think it is often wide open to heretical teachings or pseudo-idolatry (which is how I think of most of MAGA), and I respect the Orthodox approach even if I think it is fundamentally limited. Personally what I hope for is a combination of the evangelical view of the world as mission space and its non-hierarchical, liberal approach to conversion with the focus on interior cultivation and community practice of Orthodox communities, but it is very rare that I get what I hope for in any field. So it goes.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
In the 15th century? We're talking about the end of the Reconquista, aren't we? I would have thought it would be hard to deny that in the 15th century the Spanish crown was definitely on the upswing. My thought is that the rise of the Catholic Monarchs, the successful (re)conquest of the entire peninsula, the Spanish Inquisition, and (some decades later) the colonisation of the Americas were all part of a big run of Spanish success.
I don't take the flow of American silver and gold into Spain as being the key factor here because the upswing we're talking about begins in the 15th century - we're talking 1480s onwards, aren't we?
OliveTapenade
4d ago
More wokeness benefits Nick Fuentes. The stronger the woke get, the stronger their right-wing mirror-image get. If America is well-governed by a functional conservative coalition and most people feel more-or-less happy with their governance, Fuentes has no audience.
Now he's doing well at the moment, but then, America is not well-governed at the moment either. Trump has disastrously low approval ratings and has failed to unify the country. In a sense, Fuentes was in a no-lose situation.
Extremists benefit from chaos and incompetence. Fuentes is no exception.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
By the same token you might point out that the First Amendment coincided with the rise of the United States from backwater ex-colonies to global superpower. X happening at the same time as Y just doesn't prove much about God's will.
In the case of Spain, there's an obvious common explanation - unifying the peninsula (except for Portugal) allowed for a huge increase in both the resources and more importantly the state capacity of the Spanish crown, allowing it to engage in a number of large-scale projects, including the colonisation of the Americas, the flourishing of early modern Spanish culture, and the inquisition. Some of these projects were good and some of them were bad. It's quite superstitious itself to declare that they must all be lumped together, or were all causative of each other. The inquisition caused cultural flourishing? Might as well argue the reverse as well - cultural flourishing causes religious persecution! This is not good logic.
As I've gotten older, I find I've become more tolerant of liturgical and musical diversity, while at the same time less tolerant of theological diversity. It has become increasingly evident that you can find faithful believers at Hillsong concerts or at Anglican evensong or even listening to incredibly tacky, Disneyfied worship music, or even the infamous My Little Pony mass, and I think I am scripturally commanded to be tolerant and broad-minded in matters of taste. At the same time, we are also commanded to not be neutral with regard to the essentials. So while I won't judge a church for singing hymns that I think are musically ugly, I will judge a church if, for instance, it omits prayers of confession, or denies original sin, or takes God's name in vain.
It's not that aesthetics are totally irrelevant - I tend to agree that worship should be reverent, or should be structured, as much as possible, to incline the believer's spirit towards God. Some music may not be appropriate for that. But for me the category of what can be acceptably reverent is an expansive one, and it includes everything from plainchant to something like Joe Praize.
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