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Is it possible to be genuinely religious in the modern secular west?
My dad, as far as I know, was a lifelong atheist. But my mother’s family was pretty religious. Typical American, nondenominational but pretty hardcore Protestantism. My dad worked a lot when I was small and I didn’t see him too much so I was mostly raised by my mother and her side of the family.
We believed Jesus died and rose for you (you, reading this, specifically), Catholics are idolaters who need the gospel, Harry Potter is shady at best, every time someone sneezes in Israel the End gets one day closer, and Daniel’s fourth beast is checks notes the European Union.
Growing up, all this felt very very real. God felt like someone standing right next to me - even if you can’t see him, it would be ridiculous to think he wasn’t there. When I sinned it felt like God’s eyes were burning a hole in the back of my head. Once when I was about four, there was a car wreck outside my house and I rushed to the window to see if the Tribulation had kicked off. Whether I would ever grow up was a doubtful proposition because Jesus was coming back very, very soon to judge the world.
I stopped believing in middle school, partly because my dad was around more and he made no effort to hide his contempt for all this stuff, partly because I started going online and got drafted into the Internet Religion Wars of the 2000s. Long story short, after years of online arguments and reading I’m pretty well satisfied intellectually that Christianity is false (I’m less sure about theism in general), but I still feel it deep down.
I have an instinctive reverence for Christian symbology. I get uncomfortable when I hear jokes about God and Jesus, at least the more blasphemous ones. Sometimes I still feel that presence standing next to me, and it doesn’t seem completely out of the realm of possibility that one day I will find myself the unwilling star of my very own Chick tract.
But the vast majority of my acquaintances these days are secular liberals who were raised secular liberals. Some are nominally Jewish or Catholic but as kids they maybe went to religious services once or twice a year. God was a vague idea at most, they never prayed, whatever morals and beliefs their parents raised them with were totally irreligious ones.
When I tell them yes, I have family members who really believe God literally created all life forms as they are now by speaking them into existence, literal demons rejoice when you sin, and Jesus is literally going to come back on a white horse to destroy the wicked it sounds totally insane to them. It’s like talking about Star Wars. Just totally outside their conception of reality. And sometimes I wonder, if they were somehow began, as some do, to intellectually entertain the possibility that Christianity is true, even then would they feel it? If I read some really good apologetics for Islam (maybe they exist, I’ve never really looked) and started to think, “hey, this could be true” I'm not sure I would viscerally fear the wrath of Allah.
America becomes more and more secular every year, and more and more kids grow up like my friends did, and less and less like me. And yet there seems to be a sort of religious revival going on. It’s not really large-scale, at least not yet. But it’s real. On the left-liberal side of the spectrum, this mostly takes the form of ‘alternative’ spiritualities, astrology, energies, and witchcraft. I feel like everybody my age or younger knows at least one person who calls themselves a witch or a satanist or something. There are huge subreddits and other online communities dedicated to this stuff.
But I don’t think it’s real. I know “you don’t really believe what you say you believe” is one of the most infuriating things to hear, but in some cases I think it’s true. Sorry, not only do I not believe you can cast spells or commune with the great goddess, I don’t believe you believe you can cast spells and commune with the great goddess. Maybe you’re not consciously lying, but deep down I think you know you don’t actually have any magic powers. If you did, I think you would behave differently.
The right-wing equivalent to this is the surge, at least online, of young RW (mostly men) converting to various forms of conservative Christianity, whether it be traditional Catholicism or Orthodoxy or Reformed Protestantism or whatever. And I see it as almost perfectly equivalent to the “witchy art student” case. Sorry, twenty-five-year old guy raised by lapsed Episcopalians in New York who calls himself a “Catholic monarchist” on twitter but is totally considering Orthodoxy after reading Fr. Seraphim Rose, and will be considering sedevacantism by next week, I don’t care how many epic deus vult memes you post, I don’t think you really feel it in your bones that one day you’re going to stand before the creator of the universe and be judged.
In both cases I make allowances for exceptions. Some people, I’m sure, really do believe they have some kind of occult power. Some people, I’m sure, despite totally irreligious upbringings, really do have a Road to Damascus moment and come to deeply believe in Jesus Christ.
But for the majority of people, I think this sort of thing is a fashion statement more than anything. And that makes conversion–whether it’s to Christianity, Islam, or occultism–in the modern west different from revivals of previous eras.
Someone who responded to Jonathan Edwards in the 18th century or Billy Sunday in the early twentieth might not have been a very good Christian, but they were still raised in a Christian society where the existence and power of God were taken for granted. So when they heard a guy shouting, “therefore, repent!” it felt like a real threat. They didn’t have to completely rebuild their worldviews from the ground-up, they just had to be reminded, “oh, that’s right! God is real and he does want me to behave!”
Even if you decided to be a satanist a hundred years ago, you were raised believing that Satan was a real, terrifying being with very real power, so you would be making a serious commitment to serve a mighty god, even if you were choosing the other side. Nowadays someone who calls themselves a satanist probably doesn’t even believe Satan is real, and if they do their point of reference is maybe a TV show or a comic book.
In short, I think to really believe in gods and the supernatural, you have to be raised believing in gods and the supernatural, or at least raised in a culture that takes gods and the supernatural seriously. Even, say, someone who converted to Christianity in the 1st century is in a better position than a modern westerner. He already believed the world was in the hands of the gods, which were real beings of power, and had believed this since he was born. He just had to be told, “hey, this new god, he’s even stronger than Zeus or Ba’al!”
For better or worse, has succeeded in obliterating that fundamental sense that I think people have had for most of history that, “the gods are real, and they’re watching.” I find that pretty fascinating.
Lack of belief is ancient. See Psalm 14/53: "The fool says in his heart, there is no God…"
It's also not new that there's a social component. That too has always been the case. Do you think the Christians of the early first millenium did not have status play any subtle effect? What about the protestants or catholics in the pamphlet wars of the reformation? Both of these groups died for their faiths, but you would have them be insincere.
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I grew up a Christian in a full gospel (literal Bible) church which would today be reductively called fundamentalist. As a nerd (with what turned out to be autism and ADHD), I listened to the stories and connected the pieces. I looked for underlying structures, like I do with any sufficiently nerdy story-verse, like Star Trek, DC Comics, or My Little Pony. When I found theological radio shows (Chuck Missler’s 64/40, The Bible Answer Man, and the like), I was thrilled. To me, theology is worship s the Logos, the infinite and eternal mind of God, is the Person of the Trinity I’ve most adored since putting those pieces together. For fifteen years of adulthood, I spent Monday nights in a non-denominational Bible study group which is a local chapter of an international organization. I’ve expected the End Times to start soon, ever since I read a Chick Tract featuring mobile guillotines for Christians in the near future.
But I really didn’t get religiosity, or the atheist view of religiosity, until I read Robert Harris’ Cicero Trilogy, which brought the ancient world of the late Roman Republic to vivid and stunning life. Among the things Harris (not to be confused with Richard Harris) did was subtly but often mention the state religion. Not just the honoring and petitioning of gods, but the auguries, the seeking of divine signs in the entrails of small animal sacrifices. After seeing what reverence the Romans placed on auguries, it made sense that Caesar’s most public play for political power was getting himself chosen as the head high priest of Rome. It also suddenly made sense to me why the early Christians were called “atheists”: because they did not participate in the very public rituals and observances.
I still go to the same church I grew up in, though I’m one of only a few of my approx. age still there. I still believe in Jesus, though I’ve had several crises of faith. I still know the little details and nuances of the Bible and believe them to be real history, though I have an instinctive dislike of superstition and woo-woo pseudoscience.
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I disagree. You don’t have to be raised believing in gods and the supernatural (or such a culture). Even so, I don’t think anyone is truly an atheist, as David Foster Wallace said, “In the day to day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as atheism. Everybody worships.” We just call old gods by new, modern names that don’t sound supernatural.
Also, this assertion downplays the power of Jesus Christ to reach into someone’s life and soften their heart. To know Jesus is to know that He still performs miracles, today. Why can’t He quicken someone’s spirit and raise them from the (spiritual) grave if He wants?
Ezekiel 36:26-27 “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.”
John 3:5-8 “Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
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As I read more and more philosophy, I see more and more that "There is nothing new under the sun" (ecleiseiathies, or however the fuck you spell it).
Nietzche was as right then as he is now. "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him."
People leave out the most important part of the quote, though: "How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us?"
The service religion provided to people and societies in the past is no longer available to fully industrialized, scientifically advanced western style societies. If you want the binding moral force of religion back, you gotta give up all that other bullshit and live on a pillar in the desert.
It really is incredible how few people understood the point he was making or even realised how significant it was. I like to think that I'm a smart person but even I've got to admit a certain amount of awe at someone who managed to figure that out at the time he did.
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Several people in response to this have mentioned New Atheism and this is something I've been curious about for a while. Can someone explain the whole New Atheism / internet atheism wars thing to me?
I grew up secular. My parental figures were not particularly religious, and I myself saw no reason to buy into any organized religion when I was a kid or subsequently, either. I am not a physicalist reductionist. I'm one of those people who thinks that the hard problem of consciousness may well be beyond the reach of science. However, that does not compel me to become a Christian or a Muslim or whatever. I am basically an agnostic who has zero belief in any organized religion but who also thinks that there may well be true mysteries in the world that are beyond the reach of science.
In part because of my agnosticism, which I have never seen reason to revise, I missed the whole New Atheism / internet atheism wars thing. The issue of religion was just not very interesting to me back then. I neither could imagine that any Christian, for example, could really turn me into a Christian, nor did I need any more arguments for being an agnostic than I already had.
In the last few years I have seen many people refer to New Atheism and the atheism wars and so on, but I don't really have much context for it other than that it's something that people on 4chan refer to in order to make fun of stereotypical Redditors. While I am not a fan of stereotypical Redditors, I also fail to see why being convinced that a man 2000 years ago rose from the dead despite a near-total lack of evidence that this happened other than the writings of a few people who probably never knew him in real life is supposed to make one better than a stereotypical Redditor.
I know who Dawkins is, having read his The Selfish Gene, but I have not read any of his stuff about religion. I also vaguely know who Dennett is, he seems to be convinced that the hard problem of consciousness is not real, a position that I find rather absurd, but to be fair I have not actually read any of his stuff. For me the question of consciousness is orthogonal to the question of whether any particular religions are valid. Anyway, I would like more information about the whole brouhaha and the extent to which it is or is not important.
because people were:
okay so one of the things that you saw on reddit a lot was this complete disdain for anything Christian. probably because they were teenagers or whatever, but the people getting upset over people saying "bless you" or "merry Christmas" or their mom wanting to pray at Christmas dinner or whatever were absolutely flooring. it seemed like a caricature. the amount of people saying how they owned the fundies or whatever, whether true or not1 was absolutely flooring. you also had the professional quote makers acting with a complete lack of self awareness. or the faces of atheism people. or the people who would argue about it endlessly in YouTube video responses (remember when those were a thing?) and culture war forums.
people essentially made their identity about not believing in God and getting really really mad at anyone that found comfort or peace within religion. it kinda dominated the internet. and when people would discuss how not everyone are like these knuckleheads, it'd erupt into a well... holy war with everyone else being wrong on the internet in their view.
i imagine a lot of them were teenagers who were rebelling against their parents for making them go to church on Sunday or whatever. and no doubt, people do have legitimate grievances, but internet flamewarring and circlejerking didn't really do anything.
1: i would be remiss to not point out the MsScribe story where a woman spent years faking harassment from Christian internet stalkers for internet clout.
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America was going through its mini great awakening with a christian evangelical president when 9/11 happened, to which the Bush responded by starting his own holy war in the middle east. It seemed like religious fanatics would just keep ruining everyone's day forever and atheism looked very good by comparison. A few books were published about the topic, somewhat coincidentally and it sort of picked up steam on the internet, especially the nascent youtube.
The label "New Atheism" is mostly just a press label, like IDW, it doesn't really denote anything in particular. If you read arguments about atheism from the late 1600s almost everything is already there (minus evolution and geology).
And then the evangelical awakening died out, McCain lost to Obama (who acknowledged atheism in his inauguration speech) and there was no reason for the movement anymore. What remained ended up being the first victim of SJWs in 2012. Then gamergate happened and people from new atheism either became sjws or anti-sjw (the "skeptics"). The anti-sjw side of atheism doesn't really have a home in american politics (it can't be with the democrats but it also can't be republican because it would alienate the reliable evangelical voter base); when tech platforms (twitter and youtube in particular) moved to do politically biased content moderation (mid 2017 and 2018) the atheistic side of anit-sjw was essentially wiped out.
I think atheism is due for a comeback, this decade, because of all the dissident right people who are adopting orthodoxy/sedevacantism to own the libs.
Boy, you're opening a huge can of worms here...
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Until the Internet became a thing, atheists were pretty fringe - certainly they have always existed, but to actually declare yourself an atheist, let alone join an atheist organization, required a commitment towards nonbelief that, in those days, was very strongly coded as countercultural, antisocial, and quite possibly a dirty un-American commie. The most public figurehead for atheists was Madalyn Murray O'Hair, who founded American Atheists in the 1960s and was, by all accounts, a remarkably unpleasant woman.
Then came the Internet, and like every other niche tribe, atheists all over the world were able to gather, commiserate, and wage tribal war against their enemies. Early Internet atheism was mostly marked by edgy militants dunking on Christians (the "Invisible Sky Fairy" and similar memes were popularized in that era, though I'm sure someone had used that phrase much earlier).
New Atheism was basically a movement to put an intellectual, academic face on atheism. Instead of keyboard warriors flaming each other on the Internet or bitter legal nuisances like O'Hair, you had scientists and journalists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris presenting atheism as serious opposition to religion, attempting to attack religion's privileged place in society and education.
Then public atheism was largely consumed by social justice activism ("SJWs" in those days, "wokes" today). New Atheism fell to movements like Atheism+, which criticized New Atheism for being too Straight White Male, not feminist enough, and for criticizing Islam. (I am only kind of joking but not really with that last one.) The original New Atheists are still plodding along, but seem to have largely lost cultural relevance, while A+ long ago added their ideological and technological distinctiveness to the general woke movement and their culture was adapted to service it.
Very interesting. I did not realize that religion was still a powerful enough force in the West in the first decade of this century to motivate a backlash of this nature. However, I myself have pointed out before here on The Motte that there are many people even today in the West who grow up in oppressive religious environments, and I suppose that probably in their rebellion against those environments, they formed a large part of the core of the atheist movement.
The idea that there would be a movement to put an intellectual, academic face on atheism also surprises me. I have been under the impression that atheism was already predominantly an intellectual thing long before New Atheism and that it also very often expressed itself in an academic way long before New Atheism.
Atheism+ does seem pretty strange to me at first glance.
-https://freethoughtblogs.com/blaghag/2012/08/atheism/
To me, the political consequences of atheism have always been secondary to whether it is true or not. I can of course understand why people who feel oppressed by social conservatism would be drawn to atheism for political reasons, given the long-standing connection between social conservatism and organized religion. However, to me the above quote seems almost as silly as if someone wrote:
It might help to understand that the Atheist movement was sort of built around the idea that the Problem With Modern Society was that it was still beholden to religious superstition, and that if religion's stranglehold on the general population could be broken, a new era of reason and cooperation and enlightened policy could dawn. A lot of them weren't just arguing that religion was dumb, they were arguing that religion was the obstacle to a better world.
One of the problems is that this wasn't actually true. Once religion appeared to be on the run in the Obama years, it turned out that none of the problems were actually solved, and so they needed a new target, a new explanation for why everything was still so fucked up even when they'd won.
Hence, Wokeness.
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But this is the mistake of atheism in a nutshell. No, it doesn't actually matter if the symbolic lies are true or not, all that ever mattered was the political consequences.
And they, well we, learned it pretty harshly. Reason, skepticism and technics cannot stand alone, Man craves religion, and religion he will make even in irreligion.
The fogey christians whom we mocked for being concerned what it was we believed in if not Christ, those who couldn't fathom that there could be a lack of worship altogether. Far from the close minded fools we took them for, those people were just right if in a very roundabout way. And one of the cornerstones of New Atheist argumentation, which is essentially to say that we can have morality and 90s liberal society without Christ, whilst it sounded and still does sound very nice and coherent, was just wrong.
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Presumably you've read Scott Alexander's essay on the topic (if not, you should). Internet culture was just different back then. It was taken as given that the purpose of discussion and argument was to convince people, or at least to discover the truth.
This classic XKCD from 2008 captures the feeling. What made the atheism wars especially susceptible to this phenomenon is that it was not a disagreement of opinion or judgement, it was a disagreement of fact, which meant it was theoretically possible to literally prove the other side wrong. The idea, common today in the intellectual right circles that many users here frequent, that religion is important because it binds the community together, provides shared values, and gives meaning to the lives of the populace, should not be anachronistically read back into the discourse. That's just not what these controversies were about. People back then really thought that the Earth was 6000 years old, hurricanes were God's punishment for abortion, and that demon possession was a real physical occurrence. Some people still believe that, but they know better than to open their mouths about it in public now.
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I'm not able to help with the new atheism internet history but if you've read Dawkins that's probably enough to get the gist of the general sense of the righteousness of the atheist tribe and of course the rational points raised against faith beliefs.
But as you mention agnosticism and seeing the limitations of physicalism I really want to point you to the idea of non-theism. This is the idea that contemporary framings of religion and atheism share the same modal mistake in the focus on propositional beliefs, with say a literalist creed asserting that everything in the bible being literally true, and an atheist refuting those beliefs.
But in many ways, while the rationalist critique of atheism is valid, it is also a straw man. Religion has also always been about participating in relationship with a phenomenological reality that is beyond oneself. Atheism, mired in a reductive physicalism is not able to engage with this and so ignores it, also reducing religion to this limited frame.
I disagree with this, at least in the case of Christianity. I think the vast majority of Christians throughout history would agree that Christianity stands or falls on the proposition that Jesus Christ died and rose from the dead. If this is false, Christianity is false, and if it is true, Christianity is true. As Paul said, "if Christ be not raised, your faith is in vain." You can try to construct some kind of Christianity where the historical reality of whether or not the resurrection took place is besides the point (see, Shelby Spong) but such endeavors have always struck me as pointless.
There's truth in that of course, but your rebuttal somewhat proves the point as it's very reductive and misses a lot of what religion also is. Religion in addition to the creedal beliefs is also pointing beyond as it is about engaging with that which is greater. The Christianity of different times, say Meister Eckhart or Thomas Aquinas, is not sufficiently countered by Jesus never did miracles or was the son of God because it would be scientifically impossible.
The point is that atheism is lacking also, it is floundering on the rocks of reductive materialism. Religion points to some of what it's missing. What we do next is not theism as we've done, and it's not atheism, hence the idea of non-theism.
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I would guess a lot, maybe most, of the more obnoxious internet atheist warriors, such as I was in my preteen and teenage years, were probably raised Christian (and usually Christian of the more serious, fundamentalist variety). And for me at least, it started out as a quest to prove one way or the other whether or not Christianity was true, and once I decided it wasn't, morphed into a somewhat vindictive impulse to own Christians online. The 2000s, were also the height of Evangelicalism as a cultural movement in the US. Evangelicals had a much stronger cultural presence than they do now, which made it more fun to dunk on them. Bush was the evangelical president (even though, technically, he was a mainliner).
As to why New Atheism exploded in the 2000s, I think it was precisely as a reaction to the apotheosis of evangelical Christianity. Which in turn was mostly a backlash to the cultural revolution of the 60s and 70s. Which in turn...you get the idea. It died out mostly because evangelicalism receded from the public eye, and also because, yes, it became unbearably 'cringe' and uncool. I genuinely think there are a non-zero number of individuals who have more or less memed themselves into being religious just since they don't have to be associated with the fedora people.
I never read Dennett, Dawkins, or any of the 'four horsemen.' I never really got into the whole creation vs evolution thing either because I was never much of a STEM kid. I was more into arguing about the resurrection of Jesus, the historicity of the Exodus, etc. Things that remain abiding interests for me to this day, though I think I am less annoying about it now.
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Yes, people who profess religion because it’s fashionable are just larping, the twitter tradcaths have little overlap with the irl tradcaths(who are red or violet tribers practicing a very strict and very high-demand robustly supernatural religion), and there are generally more apostates from religion in the west than converts in(on a writ large scale- there are plenty of sects that have the opposite balance). However, there’s definitely non-larping believers in very supernatural forms of Christianity who didn’t grow up with it. It’s not impossible, and it happens often enough to be a known thing. Zeal of the convert and all that. Just because it’s foreign to your internal experience doesn’t mean it’s fake.
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In case it helps, here's my experience as an online rightish guy who's become interested in Catholicism, though I don't go around posting le epic Deus Vult memes. Would I feel the truth of it? No, and I worry about that sometimes. Currently, I consider conservative Christianity good, in that it binds families together, brings people together across generations, and have definitely noticed that the Christians I know lead better lives, etc. But I don't know if I can (or will ever) consider it true, which is a source of concern and some despair to me, because if I can't get to that, then I feel like I'm damaging their group by being there. As for the wilder stuff like sedevacantism, I was lucky enough that the group I found seems to have its head screwed on. I spoke to one of the lay Brothers about the Church leadership, and he said that they respect and obey the Pope while disagreeing with him, pray for him a lot to help him make better decisions, hold out hope that things will change, and believe they get the Popes they deserve.
But even from the secular pit I've dug myself into, there's been some interesting moments. Sitting and contemplating the quiet and stillness before Mass has been beautiful, and while I can't say I've felt presence there, it's been wonderful to enjoy the absence of outside noise and chatter. It's also been interesting to have spent a lot of time reading about and working on psychological integration and then have another parishioner just casually mention that "sin divides man from God, but it also divides man from himself". Duh! No wonder we're all such messes!
Just to offer my experience:
Raised Catholic. Became an annoying internet atheist during college. Started drifting back towards it due to the culture war, really started being pulled back largely due to Jordan Petersons biblical series lectures. My sister is also a very devout Catholic and lots of discussions with her.
A lot of influence has been reading about the early church, and the role of the church in maintaining a link between the modern and ancient worlds during the dark ages. (Read: a canticle for leibowitz for a fictional sci fi dramatization of what I’m talking about).
In the time since 2016-17 when this started, I’ve gotten married and had two children.
Obviously you can guess my influences given that history. I was a non believer (and never really believed as a kid), but the approach to the church and apologetics that my wife and I share, in my opinion, does make the miraculous and supernatural claims the church makes become literally true, and that is essentially the miracle.
I'm almost at the same place, time period, devout sister (and brother) and marriage and two children included (but Jordan Peterson not included), expect for Orthodoxy.
Good for you :). I really hope and pray that someday the Catholic and Orthodox churches reunite.
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This part is extremely relatable. That was the biggest thing that made me curious about religion as a tool to organize societies. I had heard about Chesterton's Fence from Scott, become curious about the man behind it and stumbled onto Orthodoxy. Then I looked at some of Bishop Barron's stuff and began irregularly attending local Masses. Started reading Lewis, and discovered many echoes of 2020 in his novel That Hideous Strength. And the more I read, the more interested I become, though I struggle with the actual faith bit and the idea of trusting the men right at the top.
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Now that I am a (functional) atheist, my position is that if someone thinks their life will improve by becoming Christian (or anything else), go for it. Why not? But I find the trend of people heading towards traditional Christianity because they feel it will improve their lives and communities interesting, because it is just about the exact opposite of what I was taught. Granted I grew up Protestant and not Catholic, but what I was made to understand was that you should expect Christianity to make your life worse. "You will be hated by all men for my name's sake." Now yes there was talk about finding peace and meaning in Jesus, and of course there was the fellowship of believers, but the expectation was that when it came to friends, money, love, happiness, even sometimes family, Christians will do worse than unbelievers, since the world is a hellbound, fallen place that rewards the wicked. Christianity was one big exercise in delayed gratification. Suffer now, redeem your suffering points in Heaven (or at the Rapture, if you're lucky).
I remember a tweet a few months ago, I can't find it now, but it said something like, "Jesus doesn't offer heroism, adventure, wives, or children in this life; he offers pain, service, trial, and tears." It circulated on RW twitter and occasioned a lot of blowback along the lines of calling OP a leftist, modernist, soy, etc. and "good luck attracting young men to the church with a message like this." It was sort of baffling to me because while I would have understood if it was something like "Jesus would be pro-LGBT" or "Jesus was a socialist," which I would agree are reading into the Bible things that are absolutely not there, the tweet as it stood was simply what I was told Christianity was by my very Christian and very-not liberal relatives. And of course we were taught that our job as Christians was not to make Christianity attractive to anyone, whether it was conservatives looking for patriotism and tradition or liberals looking for inclusion and egalitarianism, but simply to preach the gospel as it was, and if you didn't like it, well too bad.
Pain, service, trial and tears specifically attract young men. Like, not all young men, but a certain category of young men? Very much so.
I'm paraphrasing, but the gist of it was "don't expect worldly glory or success from Christ." Absolutely though there are plenty of people who are attracted to such a calling, including many young men. I think it was specifically some kind of in-house snipe at the whole "be like Achilles, put cities to the sword" side of RW twitter.
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This is very interesting, and I hadn't thought about it before. Yes, there's the persecution and all that, but I think there's some kind of "don't defect" at play here: teaching people to delay gratification until even after their death means that their communities can have very low time preference, and if you have few defectors you can possibly even get better immediate results than if you actively sacrificed the future for today.
I read an article a few months back about the cult popularity of Master and Commander, and how many young men love that movie. Not because they want to be Capt. Aubrey, but because they want to be in his crew and to sacrifice for each other and for a great cause. I'm also reminded of a video by Bishop Barron where he talks about how he thinks the interest in traditional liturgies has been specifically because it's hard: it's the call to sacrifice and spiritual challenge which seems to make people interested. (There's probably a big diversion about Vatican II here too that I'm not qualified to write.)
The people who did the most to attract me to Christianity never proselytized; they quietly lived their lives of faith, and I happened to notice. Whether that's because the Christian life does better in this world because God looks after his own, or because there are good memes baked into the religion, I don't know.
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I think a good exploration of this topic is John Michael Greer's series of posts on the "disenchantment of the world." While I have always found his religious sensibilities (the guy is an honest-to-god(s) Archdruid after all) a bit peculiar and had the same suspicions you might about the sincerity of his beliefs, I can't deny that he is about as good a translator as you could wish for of many concepts that we rationalist and rationalist-adjacent moderns have lost touch with.
This is a great read. I think this is exactly what I'm getting at. A lot of people have responded and said that most people were not religious fanatics, even in the most religious of times, which is true, but not really my point. My point is more that while most people may not have been zealots, most people did have a worldview in which zealotry made sense.
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I'm having a hard time understanding this argument. You read old books which constantly talk about God, divine providence, etc... and your conclusion is that people weren't religious?
If anything, modern people tend to vastly underestimate just how religious people were in the past. As you point out, in the 1600s of Europe, there wasn't a competing ethos. Christianity served not just as a religion in the modern sense, but as law, cosmology, and history as well. Religion permeated all aspects of society. That is completely gone now.
Great Awakening aside, Christianity has been in a near monotonic decline since the Renaissance. People today are less religious than those of 1980, who were less religious than 1950, who were less religious than 1920, etc...
It’s always been funny to me when people don’t see it in reverse now. And personally I hold the opinion that most of the religious fervor or lack thereof comes down to culture. People in general don’t read the texts, unless they’re going into ministry of some sort. They don’t really think about theology or anything else. If you’re raised in a culture that is absolutely convinced that the Eucharist is literal actually the Body and Blood, you will believe it.
A big part, to me, of the difference has been public education with its officially unofficial agnosticism. When the culture tells you that god/s don’t matter, and when public officials are reluctant to sound too religious, it’s basically creating a culture of atheism. People will almost always follow the party line of those aspirational figures in public life on most issues. And our political and social elites are at best deist in a vary vague sense, or educational institutions are atheist or agnostic (they aren’t officially going to mock you for being religious, but they’re certainly not going to acknowledge religion in a positive way), and most social heroes are atheists. Without a positive example of the elite being religious, the end result is the decline of the religion.
I didn't. I was raised in a culture that was monolithically christian (at least nominally) and I always took it as a metaphor until I was explained that it was actually meant to be taken literally (transubstantiation) and it seemed... idiotic? That was the first crack for me.
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It helps to be raised with religion for religiosity, in the same way it helps being raised speaking Chinese to master Chinese. But I think what you’re describing is adults having religious experiences. The absolute felt certainty of God is something like a blessing, not a pre-requirement of a religion. You mention the revivals of the previous eras. Consider John Wesley, one of the most important 18th century Christians, who founded Methodism:
I've been a believing Christian all my life, but it was only in the last year that I realized I loved God. It just came out one day while I was praying, "I love you God" and I was stunned that it was actually true. I had faith all my life that God loved me, but I didn't love Him. I just respected Him, and feared Him, and wanted to please Him. Not at all the same things. So your Wesley quote resonated with me greatly.
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I tend to agree that the old religions have been rendered obsolete, more or less empirically; science has reduced them to Russell's teapot. Some people still believe in them, genuinely, but that's more of a feature of their personal psychological ability to believe things as a result of cultural overhang or because they want them to be true than of any epistemological strength of the belief systems, the latter being similar in some sense to QAnonism.
Science taketh, but science also giveth, and thanks to the empirical advances of machine learning and the retreat of the soul in prevailing theories of cognition, there is now plenty of room for new religions. The Simulation Hypothesis is fertile ground for spiritual entrepreneurs to build neo-gnosticisms. Roko was the John Edwards of Yudkowskianism. Reports abound of the emotional tortures of EA types who have heard his brimstone sermon, and I trust their sincerity. Scott's The Hour I First Believed is a more sophisticated and pro-social synthesis.
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Hmm, not so sure about that, Aristophanes The Clouds was written in 423 BC and portrays a society where old-style paganism was already going out of fashion. Of course, Greece is not Rome or Judea. But there is an argument that Christianity was persuasive to people who were already cynical about the old gods. There is another argument that Christianity was a result of a fusion between old-school pagan-style personal Gods and Platonic/philosophical concepts about the nature of the prime mover of the universe, hence a God that is the Logos made flesh.
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Even though I lately try hard to believe people when they make claims about their motivations & internal experience, I think you're definitely onto something. Though perhaps a more charitable (if banal) take might be less 'you dont really believe that' and more ' "I believe X" captures a really wide range of intuitions, mental states and devotional intensity'. And we probably preserve some of that ambiguity more or less intentionally - I imagine piety-measuring contests are some of the least productive uses of human effort yet discovered.
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Yes. You're gesturing at the deconstruction of traditional values that we all lived through in the 2000s, the internet atheist wars. Elsewhere in the thread:
The thing is, though, the pinch-faces emerge for a reason. Social Justice is a trash-disaster, but it didn't come from nowhere, and the problems that drive it are, on the whole, real, unavoidable, and demand a response. That response is going to have to be some sort of formalized moral system, and such a system is going to need a mythic grounding.
The atomic individualist, morally-relativist state pursued by the secularist wave in the 2000s is not sustainable. People need structure, need guidance, and removing that structure and guidance isn't sustainable long-term; the resulting instability, combined with the human search for solutions to problems, will recapitulate an irresistible demand for legible social structures founded on metaphysical truth claims.
It seems you are presuming that the average believer in the past expected, for lack of a better term, legible magic as a routine part of life. I don't see why this should be the case. It seems pretty obvious from historical accounts that normal people did not expect miracles as a normal part of their existence; their epistemic grounding was not functionally different from ours. Believing that miracles or magic happen does not mean that you think they are going to happen to you; we all believe that the lottery exists, but none of us expect to win it. Then, too, it is easy to interpret things that happen as being miraculous, but this doesn't mean you count on them happening reliably either.
It always has been, though. Look back on historical accounts of figures from five or eight or ten or twenty centuries ago, and ask yourself if the people depicted are acting as though they actually expect to answer to their Gods. I've seen this argument before, that if people really believed, it would drastically modify their behavior. The thing is, it does drastically modify the behavior of a sizable minority, and it never modified the behavior of anything more than a sizable minority, even in the times when you're claiming belief was near-universal. That sense that you're going to answer personally to God is sustained by personal choice and effort, and unless it is cultivated, it simply goes away.
I've made this argument myself. Now I'm worried that its wrong.
Think about type II diabetes and morbid obesity. Call it the fat nurse problem. Nurses know that they are heading for trouble because they have treated patients a little older than they are who have already run into trouble. It is as if you go on holiday to Rome and the Vatican is doing tours of Hell. You wonder what became of some-one who died recently and who lived a wicked life. You take the tour and spot him among the damned, suffering. Later you return to the USA determined to mend your own wicked ways, and like the fat nurse and her diet, you fail to do so.
Yes, we see people who fail to modify their behavior. In the context of religious belief, we feel tempted to draw an inference: they do not really believe. In the context of practical matters, they have often seen with their own eyes. Of course they believe! And yet they fail to modify their behavior. What then becomes of our logic? In the religious context, we lack clear guidance about whether people believe, so we attempt to infer belief from behavior. In the practical context we have a contingent gold standard for belief: sometimes folk have seen the truth with their own eyes so naturally they really believe. There is no need to attempt an inference.
On the other hand, there is an opportunity to check the validity of our inference. The inference that we draw from behavior ought to agree with belief that we infer on the basis of noticing that some people have direct experience and must therefore believe. Whoops! Disaster has struck. In the practical case we notice people who must really believe, failing at responding appropriately. So the inference we want to make in the religious case is invalid.
What then becomes of the observation that true belief drastically modifies the behavior of a sizable minority, but only a minority? My guess is that in times of universal belief in God, most people really believe. They have a sense that they are going to answer personally to God. They sin anyway. They repent. They sin some more. They face death with a combination of fear and cope, sometimes dreading punishment, sometimes hoping the God is love and will not judge them too harshly.
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I think this framing is wrong. Ordinary people may have not expected to see a resurrection or a theophany in their lifetimes, but while moderns tend to conceptualize a miracle as God suspending the ordinary operations of an otherwise mechanistic, naturalistic universe, pre-moderns tended to view the hand of the gods in everything. Sickness is from the supernatural world. The outcomes of wars are credited to the gods. Natural disasters reflect divine displeasure. Everywhere they looked, there was evidence of the spirit world at work. People believed in the immediate reality of the supernatural and acted accordingly. As late as the 19th century, French peasants left peace offerings for fairies in the woods. To an ancient Israelite, Yahweh parting the Red Sea may not be quantitatively different from Yahweh empowering Israel to defeat its enemies in battle. We would call the former a miracle because we would consider it naturalistically inexplicable, but not the latter. But for an ancient, while the the parting of a sea would be much rarer and more magnificent than a victory in battle, it might not be qualitatively different, because everything only happens because the gods make it so, even if sometimes what the gods make so is more unique and incredible than other times.
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I've never once seen a Born Again TradCath Right Wing-Er IRL, it's very much online posturing looking for the mirror opposite of moralistic progressivism, especially since New Atheism got eaten from the inside by moralistic progressivism.
Only thoughtful weirdos ever really cared about genuine religious faith; most nominal church-going people were just getting an emotional high from being in a chanting crowd. The rest were conforming to get by; now they conform to the New Faith to get by.
Where have you looked?
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I agree that strict adherence to all the rules and regulations of any given religion has always been a minority affair, but I think the disenchantment of the world, to where there are no longer gods in the skies or spirits behind the trees, is new.
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