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Notes -
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.
I would question how many Evangelicals in America who know about David French (not many I expect) agree with this characterization of him. I am not an evangelical, but I do know a lot of French's work, and I'd summarize it as "just lose the argument". David has done many things over the last decade, attempting to win an argument from a conservative or Christian point of view is not one of them.
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.
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You're right to label "lets actually win the fight" as the Evangelical option: so far, Evangelicals have done the best job of fighting and surviving secularism. Ryan Burge over at Graphs About Religion has a post with some good graphs about this, but Evangelicals have gone from 18% of all Americans in 1972, to a height of 29% in 1991, to 19.5% today. In contrast Catholics have gone from 27% in 1972 to a height of 28% in 1994 to 22% today, with a long slow decline from 2010 to the present. Over the same time period Mainliners went from 30% of the population in 1972 and has been in steady decline ever since, now standing at 8.7% of the population. Of course Eastern Orthodox has remained at ~1% from 1972 to today.
In other words, from the 1970s (when 90% of the USA was Christian) to today (when 62% are) Evangelicals have treaded water while all the other major Christian traditions have declined. And according to Pew Research, the overall decline of Christian identification in the US seems like it has leveled off in the low to mid 60s since 2019. Pew also found that the number of Americans who pray daily has stabilized at around 45% since 2021, and the number who attend religious services at least monthly has stabilized in the low 30s since 2020. If Evangelicals could hold steady over the course of decades of decline in Christianity, who knows what they might do now that the decline has stopped? Perhaps the long siege is coming to an end and the Winged Hussars are coming, though this time they're bearing grape juice in communion cups and copies of The Purpose Driven Church while charging to the sound of CCM.
But how much of evangelical popularity traces to their own surrender to secularism? If you’re turning the religion into pop culture, with amphitheaters and self-help books and guitarists and fashionable speakers with private jets, then you’re losing to secular culture all the same. They may nominally believe that Christ was crucified but they never actually experience the spirit of that. They are allergic to solemnity; no mourning, only saccharine merrymaking. If you were to place behind the jocular evangelical some traditional scene of the Passion, the mismatch would be immediately obvious and the sermon would be shameful. The vibes are all off. Not all of them are doing Avengers-themed musical renditions of the crucifixion but they all seem somewhere down that path. And the lack of centralization leaves them defenseless against bad actors manipulating greedy pastors; they will be steamrolled in the future by more organized and serious competitors who will exploit their glib docility.
Tell us how you really feel!
If you define a Christian as someone who believes the Nicene Creed, then Evangelicals qualify. And they seem pretty good at following Christian practices: 72% of Evangelicals pray daily, compared to 51% of Catholics, 53% of Orthodox, and 45% of Mainline. 51% of Evangelicals read scripture (outside of religious services) weekly or more, compared to 14% of Catholics, 15% of Orthodox, and 18% of Mainline. 30% of Evangelicals participate in weekly prayer or bible study groups, compared to 8% of Catholics, 6% of Orthodox, and 9% of Mainline. And of course (true to their name) 32% of Evangelicals discuss their religion with nonbelievers monthly or more often, compared to 13% of Catholics, 12% of Orthodox, and 13% of Mainline.
When it comes to Christian beliefs, 93% of Evangelicals agree that "God is a perfect being and cannot make a mistake" compared to 75% of Catholics and 80% of Mainline. 92% of Evangelicals agree that "God is unchanging" compared to 76% of Catholics and 79% of Mainline. 82% of Evangelicals believe in hell, compared to 69% of Catholics, 60% of Orthodox, and 59% of Mainline. 91% of Evangelicals agree that "There will be a time when Jesus Christ returns to judge all the people who have lived" compared to 72% of Catholics and 76% of Mainline. 82% of Evangelicals agree that "Sex outside of traditional marriage is a sin" compared to 49% of Catholics and 55% of Mainline.
And as far as "surrendering to secularism", 61% of Evangelicals say that homosexuality should be discouraged in society, compared to 23% of Catholics, 39% of Orthodox, and 25% of Mainline. 64% of Evangelicals believe that greater social acceptance of transgender people has been a change for the worse, compared to 26% of Catholics, 20% of Orthodox, and 22% of Mainline. 65% of Evangelicals believe that abortion should be illegal in most cases, compared to 39% of Catholics, 37% of Orthodox, and 29% of Mainline. 84% of Evangelicals are in favor of allowing prayer in public schools, compared to 63% of Catholics, 63% of Orthodox, and 57% of Mainline.
Overall, despite your dislike of Evangelical worship aesthetics, Evangelicals seem to be doing a better job of keeping to Christian practice and beliefs than anyone else in the USA.
And as someone who has been in Evangelical churches my entire life, I was completely taken aback by your claim that Evangelicals believe Christ was crucified, but never experience the spirt of that. I mean...I feel like it got pounded into us quite a bit! I've heard a lot of sermons trying to drive home how much pain and suffering Jesus went through on the cross. Usually they went a bit overboard, in my opinion, but that's the better side to err on I suppose. And while the lack of centralization leaves individual churches more vulnerable to bad actors, it also prevents bad actors from taking over the whole movement. We're too decentralized to all agree to follow a single flim-flam man!
The data is very convincing, thank you for posting it. I suppose I have to take the evangelicalpill now.
Well, you're not wrong about the aesthetics. We Evangelicals famously have bad taste! Fortunately that doesn't seem to have watered down the message too much.
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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?
There is only one thing I can say to that.
Just don't tell me you like John Rutter's music! Incredibly popular, especially now that Christmas is coming so it'll be non-stop on our classical station, incredibly treacly that makes me gag. He should be writing Disney soundtracks, though that's probably insulting to Disney soundtracks.
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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As long as they don’t make me go to their rock shows and TED talks on Sundays, I can grudgingly bear this cross.
That is not the solution to "the laity were not permitted to receive under both species".
I would rather the Winged Hussars arrived to this 😁
As erwgv3g34 says, can’t fault your taste in Winged Hussar arrival music.
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Sabaton? Excellent taste.
You know, the charge of the winged hussars at the siege of Vienna is one of my favorite historical events. As much as I love, say, the ride of the Rohirrim or the battle of Cardassia Prime, they are marred by being fiction; they never happened. Even something like El Cid's posthumous attack on the Moors is most likely a legend, while other events like the undying loyalty of Spartacus's army were completely made up by Hollywood.
But the battle of Vienna actually happened. The winged hussars really did arrive. King Sobieski literally led a charge of 18,000 horsemen at the head of 3,000 Polish heavy lancers that broke the Ottoman army and saved the city right as it was about to fall; it's very well documented. Something out of stories truly took place in our world, and that makes me very happy.
Well, you know, some university course on how we need to be decolonised of our racist appreciation of this event is probably lurking in the wings somewhere, but until then it's a kickass song and a kickass video using footage from a movie about the battle 😁
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Haha... this is the best description of an evangelical church service I've ever heard. Did you make this up just now or is this a meme floating around Catholic circles that I haven't heard before?
As far as I’m aware, I’ve never heard it before I invented it in my one lifetime stroke of genius while in the car with my wife.
But now I hope you hear it elsewhere, otherwise I’ll use it in public one day and everyone will know I’m merely a breaker of goats and gnomes.
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Honestly I see Benedict as more of a redoubt than a full retreat. The idea is to make sure to protect the community and properly form believers so that they can actually engage the outside world without losing the basics of the faith. The problem with winning the argument or taking the government are the same — it only works if the people are properly Christian and know not to go along with things contrary to the faith. If you bring half-formed Christianity into contact with power, it’s likely to be co-opted and used as a veneer.
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.
Is just a personal observation. If you’re constantly connected to the firehose of culture, especially political culture, you’re going to absorb a lot of the ideas of that culture without thinking about it. I’ve found this post digital detox. A lot of political and social stuff seems crazy when you’re not swimming around in it. When your ideas come from your mind and your faith and your culture rather than whatever is current in the world.
And if Christianity is going to win the day in the political arena, it has to be real Christianity unique and different from the culture around it. It cannot be “American culture, but stick a cross on the flag.” It has to be Christianity, small o orthodox Christianity, and has to present itself as a zeitgeist wholly different from the rest of society. That will attract people. Christianity that says “this stuff is fine” and drinks from the same media and social media wells as the rest will just be American culture lite.
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Define your liberal norms, first! I agree that Evangelicalism has caved in on things like divorce and contraception, while abortion is a wavering standard. But what I've seen of the splits (as an outsider) is that the mainlines have indeed gone very much to the liberal side and are being shaped by, rather than shaping, the Zeitgeist. However, when it happens to the various Evangelical churches and non-denominational churches, they tend to either go "prosperity Gospel" megachurch where there's a thin veneer of Christianity over secular values (like the liberal mainliners) or they try and knuckle down to conservative theological principles, which may or may not adhere (see the struggles within the Southern Baptist Convention over trying to address perceived flaws and problems).
So it does depend what you mean by liberal values, and if you mean that the Evangelicals can influence wider society more easily since they are "most comfortable with liberal norms", or if they will go the same way as the mainlines, becoming more and more liberal in line with social changes while becoming less and less influential as religious institutions.
Based on him comparing the Evangelicals to the Catholic integralists, I think he is meaning "liberal" as in "liberal democracy": all citizens having a vote, freedom of speech and religion, that sort of thing.
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.
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Which is a very different thing from liberal social norms!
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I tend to agree with you. We're here on The Motte, and it seems to me that in theory there's a very clear synthesis with parallel institutions serving as a motte from which believers can sally forth to evangelize and retreat to in times of hostility. Dreher chose the name Benedict because the Benedictines ended up preserving so much literature that was later extremely influential on changing the course of history (if memory serves).
I think that, just in general, parallel spaces serve a potentially valuable role in terms of providing vital back-ups or redundancy, as well as a bulwark against tyranny and disaster. A city with a firmly established religious benevolence network will do better caring for the needy if government services shut down than one without; if the government oversteps its bounds, a place with alternative or parallel means of communication, organizing, and moving money will be much better prepared to resist than a place where all logistical and ideological endeavor is essentially routed through the same small cluster of institutions that, fundamentally, rest on a few fragile datacenters that can easily be accessed, subverted, and denied by a powerful government.
Obviously religious groups and institutions are not the ONLY institutions that can provide this. But I think it's important to note this because a lot of times Christians building parallel institutions invites hostility, and I think it's helpful to note that these organizations can actually provide a real public good (even if they are to some degree motivated by a desire for insularity).
And this sort of comes back to the Motte itself, I think: the Motte was created, as I understand it, precisely due to the perceived need to create a parallel institution without having to worry about a way of
lifediscourse being strangled in its cradle by a hostile culture. The Motte is the Dreher Option in action, albeit not intended for religious conservatives (which to be clear I am not complaining about!)I hear this a lot from Catholic intellectuals, but empirically it seems to me that Catholicism is far worse at teaching proper catechesis than evangelicals. You can see this in polling that shows that Catholics are more likely to reject core Christian doctrines, or in polling that shows they are less likely to go to Mass than evangelicals are to go to service (even though as I understand it this is much more of a religious obligation in Catholicism than in evangelicalism), or in polling that shows that a majority of US Catholics support abortion (performing worse on a cornerstone Catholic issue than evangelicals!) and birth control, where in practice Catholics are nearly as likely to say it is morally acceptable as Protestants, or in personal anecdotes (for instance Dreher talks about a priest counseling him and his wife to use contraception!)
Part of this, of course, is that Catholics who are essentially secular will still identify as Catholic in surveys, whereas lapsed evangelicals, I think, often won't bother to pretend. However, I also think there's a broader lesson here about human nature. People like control, and are entranced with the idea that a clear, rigorous body of rules, disseminated through a hierarchical organization, can give them some measure of control. But the facts on the ground often play out differently.
Now to be clear, I don't think this is the end of the story for American Catholicism – I suspect it's going to essentially shed most of its non-serious members and end up smaller but with a more committed (and conservative) core that will continue to have an outsized impact on US culture – but I think it's important to realize that just because the Catholics have One Big Book with all the answers to doctrine written down and evangelicals don't (or, if you prefer, have 2,184 competing One Big Books), doesn't actually solve the problem of getting people to read the book, let alone convincing people that the book is correct.
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.
This is actually surprisingly in line with Catholic doctrine. You do not have to listen to each interview with Pope and obey his suggestions regarding climate change or whatnot. There are only specific situations such as when he speaks ex cathedra where his words have binding power, but even then it is in conjunction with other bishops and clergy. Of course he is still the pope and thus influential, but he is not a dictator as he is sometimes seen by other Christians or atheists.
And both were "just" about Marian doctrine.
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Hence the question frequently asked of atheists in Northern Ireland: "But is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you do not believe?"
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.
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Oh, yeah.
But the other problem is a deeper one: Christianity is not about "let's all be charitable and help the needy", it's about "let us love, obey, and serve God" primarily. So we get the conflicts over "sorry, we won't foster children out to gay couples"/"okay you're losing your state funding" and the Little Sisters of the Poor case and the likes of that, and then people finger-wag over "but Jesus said be nice!" as if that was the whole of the Gospel.
So trying to build influence based on "But Christianity will be so nice for the social fabric" is going nowhere. There will be offensive doctrines and practices ("what do you mean you don't ordain women, you bigots?") and it will be either give in on these and be empty buildings kept up as historical and artistic show pieces, but nobody goes to church because spiritual not religious, dude or keep the doctrines and be out of step with the world and keep shedding membership.
Okay, sure. But. Really you do need both the “great commandments in the law”, Jesus was pretty darn clear about it:
Yes, duty to God comes before duty to your neighbor. That’s quite Biblical and Christian. But you can’t look at the actual collected words of Jesus and with a straight face and say it’s only “primarily” about serving God. You must have both. That they are ordered priorities does not grant leave to ignore the second on mere fear of being lazy on the first.
It seems you seem to be saying that overemphasizing love for your neighbor as a PR strategy will backfire by confusing Christians themselves about their own priorities? I don’t really buy that. It’s incredibly common for groups to have PR strategies slightly different than their own internal goals. Yes, bleedthrough can happen, but it doesn’t seem so existential to me.
While secular do-gooding doesn’t convert anyone, it is in a loose sense a prerequisite. Someone must think you’re a ‘good person’ before taking an interest in the more faith-oriented aspects. Any theory about Christianity making a comeback must acknowledge this, what to me seems a pretty fundamental fact.
True, but the problem here is that “being a good person” means very different things to serious Christians and to believers in modern morality.
Imagine that I am able to spend all of my time operating a Catholic soup kitchen. In my time running it, I have sourced donations, worked hundreds of long days, been a kind and welcoming source of support to many, and fed at least thousands of hungry people. Also, I adhere to Catholic doctrine that gay people are suffering from disordered desires and should not indulge those desires, and that gay marriages are definitely an invalid, sinful concept.
I would be willing to bet that locally, I would have some defenders, but what do you think the theme of any media coverage is going to be once they discover I’m actually attempting to be serious about the whole faith? Do you think anyone who doesn’t actually know me would walk away believing I am a “good person?” From the modern liberal point of view, can any of my good deeds wipe away my sin and create an opening for conversion?
I would argue no. Which is why, when presented with the opportunity of Constantine, Christianity didn’t say “No, no, the best way for us is to focus on do-gooding for conversions, we don’t need the backing of the state.” They understood in some fashion that if the state isn’t backing your morals and values, it will back someone else’s. And that having the state backing your morals and values is the optimal way to make them the sea the fish swim in, thus making it much easier to both “do good” and maintain and promote dogma.
This makes me seriously question your understanding of the faith and the situation in which it finds itself. The sole purpose of Christianity is to win souls away from death and to immortal life in Christ. That’s what all the do-gooding and theology and everything else is actually for. God, in his mercy, is willing to forgive everything we do against him, but people do have to understand that they need to repent and seek God’s mercy. Therefore, they need to know what is actually sinful and what isn’t. I can be a great giver of charity and beloved by all, but if I’m telling my hypothetical flock that God says it’s okay to shoplift, I’m going to have a lot of people unwittingly mired in sinful living when they die, at which point they’re in God’s hands.
On a related note, I don’t know if you’ve been in a United Methodist Church recently, but I have cause to be in a local one fairly often and they have more LGBT and Pride iconography than they do Christian at this point. And I live in a very not liberal part of the Western United States. This church has absolutely lost sight of the priority to save souls, by overemphasizing loving their neighbor. The thing you don’t buy is a real thing that is happening right now in broad swathes of the faith, at least in the West.
As an atheist I mostly stay out of these discussions, but I can corroborate this. We have a local Christian homeless shelter. I don't know about media coverage, but the randos on the city subreddit seem more interested in being mad that they proselytize than giving them any credit for running a homeless shelter in the first place.
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Christianity is not social work, but a lot of hard work has gone in to watering down the message to "Just be nice" (and as a Catholic, it's really ironic to get lectured about works over faith, lemme tell you) 😁
Christianity has a meaning, or it has nothing. Strip out everything doctrinal and we're left with playing dress-up in empty buildings once a week, and what remains fades into generic do-goodery, which soon turns into "that's the job of the state, not my job". Even the Effective Altruists need some set of foundational beliefs as to what they are doing and why!
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For me, the problems you describe make parallel institutions more appealing, because you are correct that Christianity is oriented towards serving God, which means that it will be treated with hostility by the world (Christian Scripture says this specifically!) As I said on a prior occasion, "you might as well be weird."
That doesn't mean, though, that you should tie one hand behind your back and not talk about the good that your religious group does. (And just as an empirical matter, nondenominational churches are actually growing in membership, even while most other denominations are shedding membership – so I am not 100% certain the choice for churches today is necessarily between quickly shrinking and slowly shrinking, as I think you are suggesting.)
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One of the issues to first spark debate among evangelicals after our definitive split with the mainline in the early twentieth century was how to relate as evangelicals to non-evangelical communities. Originally the question was how evangelical churches should relate to the mainline churches. Another question followed about how evangelical churches’ worship should relate to evangelism, which is often addressed to those unfamiliar or uncomfortable with evangelical culture. But more pertinent here is the question of how evangelical Christians should conduct ourselves in fields like academia and politics.
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.
There is a widespread perception within evangelicalism that David French has compromised more and more of his evangelical convictions to be seen as “one of the good ones” by the secular commentariat. I think that this explains his position on transgenderism in the public square, for example, better than principled classical liberalism does. So I don’t see French as an exemplar of classically liberal evangelicals.
Evangelical support for George W. Bush was much earlier and more heartfelt than evangelical support for Trump has been. Bush’s faith is, as far as I can tell, sincere. But while he himself may have had sympathy for the religious right, he also shared his father’s neoconservative convictions, and virtually all of his political appointments reflected the latter rather than the former. Bush didn’t move the needle much for conservative Christians during his terms: His political capital was spent on the War on Terror.
The Obama administration, by contrast, saw a flurry of progressive activity. The president did not shy away from using either the federal bureaucracy or the judiciary as a weapon against social conservatives. His administration issued a series of Dear Colleague letters threatening schools and colleges into complying with progressive norms on discipline, sexual assault accusations, and gender identity. He told the (Roman Catholic) Little Sisters of the Poor that they had to pay for contraception and the (Evangelical Protestant) owners of Hobby Lobby that it wasn’t enough to pay for several forms of contraception, they had to include those with abortifacient effects. Thankfully the Supreme Court forbade this, basing its decision on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 rather than the Constitution. At about the same time, Justice Anthony Kennedy (who had the deciding vote in such matters) wrote two decisions on same-sex marriage, imposing the socially progressive view by judicial fiat.
In 2015, Indiana passed its own version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and it was signed by Governor Mike Pence. Seeing that this could protect conscientious objectors to gay rights legislation, the NCAA and a legion of big companies made a stink, threatening to withdraw economic activity from the state. In reaction, the legislature passed another law effectively gutting the RFRA.
Trump didn’t do very well among evangelical Christians in the 2016 primary, but he did win evangelical support in the general election – running, of course, against Hillary Clinton. Picking Mike Pence as his running mate didn’t hurt. Trump promised to look after our interests. We mostly didn’t believe him; I don’t think he even knew what our interests were. But he rolled back Obama’s attacks, and he appointed conservative-leaning Supreme Court justices who would later overturn Roe v. Wade.
Yes! When it becomes clear that certain institutions are only used against us, why would we want leaders who leave them lying around?
I had hoped that Pence would come out of the first Trump administration with an awareness of the threat from progressive-controlled institutions and the need to fight them. Combined with his strong evangelical convictions and his small-government conservatism, that had the potential to make him a fantastic future president. But it’s not the lesson he took from his time under Trump, and maybe January 6 would have cut off that opportunity anyway. It remains to be seen what lessons (Catholic convert) J. D. Vance will take from his term as V.P.
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.
I would call it a semi-retreat, or maybe a fighting retreat to a more defensible position. But the question is: Is it defensible? I think the lesson of the Obama presidency is that socially progressive activists will not tolerate enclaves that do not submit to their norms. If you built such a community – and you were successful enough to be noticed – you could reasonably expect to face creative applications of the laws on land use, housing, health care, education, employment, and so on, to impose progressive values.
There is a fourth approach bandied about, but it’s almost as unlikely as Catholic integralism. When “Christian nationalism” became a vague talking point among some Democrats, a few different evangelicals decided to claim the term. One wrote a book on it, which I haven’t read. What they seem to have in common is that they want an arrangement like that the one that existed in America before the progressive movement, with evangelical Christianity in the place of mainline Christianity as normative, Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy tolerated but not normative, and non-Christian religions legal but marginalized to one degree or another. (This last in particular varies by thinker.) It would take some pretty radical social shifts to make that even vaguely plausible. And while radical social shifts have happened before, that’s not the kind of thing you can accomplish with a political program.
Those are a lot of words to say that I don’t know the best path forward. But hopefully they contribute to understanding the situation.
Or file an official form stating that they objected to doing so.
However, the Federal Government would then work with the insurance providers to fill the resulting gap, and some groups wanted to be able to opt out, not only of paying for their employees' contraception, but of anyone covering the cost!
...the 'socially progressive' view being that, the arguments against equal marriage all being rooted in their proponents' metaphysical assumptions, and the imposition of metaphysical beliefs by state power having spilt rivers of blood in 17th-century Europe (more recent to the Founding Fathers than the Civil War is to today), the official elevation of opposite-gender couples over same-gender couples cannot be justified as government policy. (I wonder if 'state government issues Civil Unions for all couples, leaves marriage to whatever church/other religious organisation/other private entity the participants see fit to involve' would have been accepted.)
The reasoning behind that being that they considered it the equivalent of the installers of these water fountains claiming, per some guff about the Curse of Ham or Hex of Corned Beef or Jinx of Turkey or whatever, a Conscientious Objection to letting [hexagrammaton]s use the same water fountain as white people, or a separate but actually equal one off the same production line.
There are many secular arguments for elevating opposite sex marriages. One of the better ones defines marriage as an institution primarily aimed to form families and raise children. It is because of this social good that marriage is elevated, and it gives the couple certain benefits. Marriage is not a certificate that two people love each other and its primary function is not tax benefits or shiny paper or anything like that. This intuitive family/children connection is also behind the fact, that it is not possible to marry your parent or your sibling.
To which the inevitable reply is that, okay, then where's the law banning infertile people from marrying? Because on the axis of "family formation," there's no difference between them and the gays, is there? To ban gays from marrying on the grounds they cannot produce children, but not similarly ban straight couples who cannot produce children, would clearly be anti-gay discrimination.
Now, I have my own secular, philosophical argument against this, complete with toy analogy, that I've posted here before, about teleology in an imperfect, entropic universe. (But I'll admit that sort of Aristotelian thinking is pretty far from most mainstream thought.)
There is a difference between infertile, opposite sex couples marrying and same sex couples doing so. Opposite sex marriage reinforces the norm that you should marry someone of the opposite sex and encourages conformity to traditional morals, same sex erodes those norms and morals. That's why atheistic communist regimes were ok with infertile marriages but not homosexual.
And the gay marriage proponents argue that the norm you posit is bad and discriminatory; that it is contrary to civil rights law, equality, and anti-discrimination; that it is nothing but anti-gay bigotry. They argue that the "traditional morals" you speak of outdated, and motivated purely by religious sentiment — which, again, makes it a violation of the 1st Amendment to enshrine into law. That, contra illiberal communist regimes, liberal Progressivism says we should erode these norms because what reason do you have that we should even want to "encourage conformity to traditional morals," if not some flavor of "because God says so"?
Conformity to traditional morals is supported by perfectly secular reasoning: our society is astonishingly good by historical standards, tinker with its fundamental institutions at your peril.
More specifically to marriage: even infertile hetero marriages encourage property ownership, reduce crime, and generally put couples on the normal, successful path. Homo relationships only achieve some of that same benefit but also erode the desirable pro-fertility, norm that everyone gets married to a member of the opposite sex. More controversially, the visible difference of homo marriages also weaken societal conformity in general.
The progressive is probably tempted to say that this is just a thin secular veneer over what is at core a Christian sentiment. This is flatly contradicted by the fact that Buddhist, Confucian, and Communist societies held essentially the same position (no legal/social recognition of same sex marriage, full recognition of infertile marriage). I think even ancient Rome and Athens, despite being open to same sex dalliances, also allowed infertile but not same sex couples to marry.
Edit: I bring this up mainly to counter the notion that the prohibition on homosexual marriage was not the result of a particular metaphysic, but the widespread consensus of major human societies regardless of their religious beliefs. This supports the upthread assertion that overturning that prohibition was the imposition of a new moral framework with it, not the neutral stripping away of an old one.
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As mentioned below, there are actually laws saying that some people couldn't marry unless they could show that they were infertile. Your entire frame of reference simply does not make sense, and you need a pretty significant perspective change.
Further, rather than there being "no difference", there is actually quite a huge difference, particularly in terms of intrusiveness to privacy. The government can very very simply look at the government documents which state that they're the same sex. What kind of standards, and what kind of intrusive nightmare would it be to require something like proof of fertility? @WandererintheWilderness would call it "Chinese-style authoritarian social engineering". These examples are worlds apart rather than being "no different".
It's not my perspective — as you'd note if you'd read the part I'd linked — it's just the most common counter-argument the pro-gay-marriage side presents.
What doesn't make sense about it? If you are saying the line between who can marry and who cannot, which puts gay couples on the "cannot" side, is drawn on the grounds of who can produce children and who cannot — that you're barring gay couples because they're non-reproducing rather than because they're gay — then the line has to be drawn between (straight) couples who can reproduce and couples, straight or gay, who cannot.
People made the "privacy" argument you made here, back when the debate was live. The first answer was that age is just as legible to the government "in terms of intrusiveness to privacy" as sex, and yet we let 70-year-old straight couples get married, despite being just as clearly not about producing children as in the case of gay couples.
(My reply to this is my linked argument about teleology, and "inherent" versus "accidental" characteristics in regard to such teleological orientations.)
The other is the argument (a much better one, IMO) that differences in the intrusiveness to enforce a rule between groups do not justify enforcing the rule unequally. Just because it's easier to enforce a ban against gay couples marrying than it is against infertile straight couples without massive state intrusion does not, under modern anti-discrimination law, make it acceptable or non-discriminatory to enforce it in a discriminatory matter, let alone set down such discriminatory enforcement in the law itself. If the rule is "too intrusive to enforce" against a particular group, then it can't be enforced, or a rule, at all.
This "if" is precisely what my example points out is not true. The entire premise of the argument is simply false. The entire frame of reference simply does not make sense. Basically the entire remainder of this comment is sort of pointless from the get-go because of this flaw.
Well then, if the line between who should be allowed to marry isn't about who can produce children, then what is it about? What is the difference that justifies, in purely secular, non-religious terms, treating gay couples differently than straight ones?
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This seems rather trivial--create a "provisional marriage" that just signals intent and becomes a legal marriage upon birth of the couple's first child. We already track births, so there would be no new privacy intrusion.
This sounds like needless complexity, and it would invite a whole host of additional complex questions. Is there an expiration on a provisional marriage? Suppose you want to get married early, but delay having children a bit, is that allowed? Why or why not? The outrageous news stories will kill you, too. "This couple has had two miscarriages and is now about to hit the deadline on their provisional marriage!" This kinda thing will never fly with the public.
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Yes, but as pointed out elsewhere on the thread, that argument is seemingly defeated by any system which allows provably infertile people to marry one another. If you allow that, then you've allowed the expansion of the right to marry to inevitably-childless couples, and withholding it from homosexual couples is just haggling over price.
This is the classical example of exception proving the rule. Let's take another example of a state supported institution - incorporation into limited liability and other companies. The institution is there to support businesses, which are formed to pursue profit. The upside for the society is economic dynamism. Everybody understands, that there are unsuccessful businesses which fail to fulfil the imperative. Nevertheless it does not mean that the institution is without merit.
And it for sure does not mean, that just because there are some failed businesses, the whole institution should be hollowed out, because it is a "discrimination" that people cannot create companies for other things - such as group of bros creating a company in order to drink every Friday, which they can write off from their taxes.
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Marriage originated in a time when it was virtually impossible for medical science to tell ahead of time that someone was infertile. The only way to know was if a spouse proved unable to conceive after several years, and such was grounds for an annulment (a document saying the marriage was never valid in the first place).
That said, if you want to redefine modern marriage to exclude people who are provably infertile in advance, I'm all for it.
This is to large extent already happening, as the institution was hollowed out for decades, many people especially secularists are now questioning the meaning of marriage altogether, as they realize that all these Disney stories about love don't make sense. Nobody needs a paper from government certifying that two people love each other, especially if it is extremely easy to get a divorce and secularists are raving about and supporting "alternative families" anyways. The societal advantages are evaporating every year, less and less people care if somebody is married or not, with or without children. Every year there is less social stigma, but in turn marriage also has less support from communities.
Modern secular marriage is something akin to cargo cult, an idea running on vapors, mimicking the outside appearance of something that worked in the past. I think this was also the main drive behind gay marriages - they wanted to leech off of the legitimacy and high status of the institution in order to normalize their lifestyles. As with everything, each action has a reaction, and all these things changed the institution itself. I am not solely blaming gay marriages for this, the trend began long before that, but legalizing same sex marriages kind of hammered the idea home - do you really want to be in a marriage club with gays and weirdos running various marriage frauds?
As of now the marriage only make sense in religious communities, where it retains its inherent meaning, purpose and where it is seen as a sacrament with sacred vows and everything. The differences are stark enough compared to modern secular marriage, that it should probably get a new name. Maybe something how Catholics use it: secular union is a concubinage, while religious union is sacramental marriage. Then who cares what secularists and atheists declare themselves - they can create a secular union with their gay sex partner or with their polyamorous polycule out in Vegas in front of Elvis or just a two (or three or ten of them) exchanging ribbons under some old tree or whatever as a proof of whatever they want to declare and capture for their TikTok audience. It is still not a marriage from Christian standpoint.
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Yes, but that just means that definition is obsolete — as science and medicine evolve, the law must evolve with them, no?
I don’t see why that follows. The old law could be perfectly good for humans as it stands, and trying to make adaptations for improved science and medicine could wind up making the law worse.
It is a tough sell to assume that the old law, made with incomplete information, was accidentally so perfect that attempts to improve it with more complete information are going to make it worse.
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If requested - but it did not, to my knowledge, equal an annulment in the sense of an infertile marriage being deemed to have no legal value. I've never heard of a third party suing to break up a couple's marriage against their will by seeking to prove that one or both of them were infertile. (I'd be genuinely curious to know if that did ever happen anywhere, but even if it did, I would remain skeptical that this was a broadly-understood principle as opposed to a weird legal loophole.)
This is at least coherent, and I would find it more respectable than the status quo ante. That being said, I doubt you'd get much of a constituency for it even among normie conservatives. It smacks of Chinese-style authoritarian social engineering, and at the human level it'd be fundamentally counterintuitive to say that infertile people can't get married even though people who become infertile can trivially stay married.
(And the same standard would, of course, raise further questions. With rapid advancement in medical science, how definitively can we assert that a currently infertile couple won't be able to use IVF in 10 years using some funky CRISPR stem-cell wizardry? But then by the same token, can we really rule out IVF for homosexual couples as a real possibility within the lifetimes of gay couples currently seeking marriage? For lesbians at least, to set aside the surrogacy problem for M/M couples.)
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I view this as an almost definitional/textbook deal with the devil. “What’s the harm,” evangelicals say, “if we grant power to an entity that we think we can control, who is evil, if it grants us short term wins?” I’ve seen this reasoning before. “We can control the Devil, and avoid his temptations, and look at all the power it will grant us!” Trump’s amoral and even explicitly anti-Christian character is well known and most evangelicals - the ones aside from a minority that fell into the personality cult (idol worship) - seemed to have concluded exactly this: who cares if he is personally odious if he gives them what they want (a potential champion VP, SC dominance, generalized right wing laws)?
If for some reason it wasn’t clear, this will backfire, like it always does. The shortcut to power and respect and moral victory is always a shortcut. It’s built on a foundation of sand.
If Christians want greater respect in society, they need to live more Christlike lives and support more Christlike behavior. It is truly baffling that so many have deluded themselves from the plain teachings of the New Testament. They need to be servants. They need to offer help to the poor, associate with the downtrodden, praise and seek humility and virtue, resist the temptations of domination, pride, vanity, wrath, cover-ups, revenge, and immorality. To be clear, this doesn’t necessarily imply unqualified meekness; you can be zealous to some extent if your own house is in order and if it comes from a place of love. You can make bold stands, as long as at least you’re occasionally demonstrating forgiveness. There’s a reason even Jewish law had periodic jubilees, granting debt relief and freedom, and that was the lesser law.
This is the only way an increasingly secular America will be tempted back towards a Christian path. The communities need to be strong and “so good they can’t ignore you”. Revenge is not a Christian concept. In fact the opposite. Yet some evangelicals have embraced the doctrine of revenge. And as you say, some Catholics have embraced a doctrine of domination, equally as antithetical.
Along those lines, your comment about winning respect in both fields. I think that said respect should be idealized as happening in spite of differing opinions. You know, “disagree better”, which maybe sounds short term foolish but long term is way better at persuadability. The cardinal sin of modern woke-style liberals has been burning bridges, carrying out moral purges, and claiming that differing values means exclusion and shaming is correct. In the short term they had their decade of power, but as we now see in the medium term it’s limited their coalition significantly. Conservatives and Christians alike should not make the same mistake. No-contact means no future persuadability due to decreased interaction surfaces. To be clear, exclusion can be an important Christian tool, and with good scriptural basis too; it’s just that said tool is one to be used with extreme caution.
"Do not call up that which you can not put down."
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Remember that the standard for right-wing support in the 2016 general election was “better than Hillary Clinton.” I don’t think that anyone really expected to control him. He was occasionally analogized to Cyrus, king of Persia, who freed the Jews from exile – a pagan whose actions benefit the people of God, whether from benevolence or from reasons of his own.
In the gospels, Christ is not nearly so understated as this implies. But, in any case, Christians in general and evangelicals in particular do quite a lot of charity. We mostly don’t do it for influence, which is good because we do not win much influence from it.
Many people are in social circles or media bubbles where they get told over and over again that socially conservative takes are acts of hatred. My personal experience is that high decouplers who know you well can sometimes overcome this to see that you are coming from a place of love. But low decouplers struggle with this; if they live in one of those bubbles, they will most often reject their past experience of your love in order to conform to the social norm that regards people like you as haters. This has been a source of frustration and sadness for me.
That applies to politics as well. We don’t support socially conservative policies because we want you to eat your Brussels sprouts or whatever; we support them because they are conducive to human flourishing. Gender transitioning children is a sin, yes; but it’s also profoundly bad for the children, and we should reject it for that reason. That is in fact a politics of love.
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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.
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.
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I think the key sticking point is that they will not tolerate such enclaves being trusted with children's education. A enclave of committed adults is free association; but an enclave which raises children on its doctrines is an anti-liberal cult which must be destroyed for the preservation of democracy. I think "should parents be free to educate their children as they see fit" might be one of the biggest under-discussed scissor statements in modern politics, where one side views the idea as self-evidently illiberal and abusive, and the other views opposition to the principle as self-evidently tyrannical and unnatural.
This is just obviously false. There are tons of Catholic schools. If that's not "enclave" enough for you, there are tons of Amish schools as well. You probably haven't heard of the Bruderhof communities (they're basically Amish without the name recognition), but they run this school which I've been to (not as a student): https://www.mountacademy.org/. I can attest that their lives are as enclave as you could possibly get and that they are doing just fine.
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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.
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.
I still remember the day my dad said he was worried about my job prospects and said he didn’t get the impression I had ambitions. I was flummoxed; as a good autistic Christian I had always equated ambitions with being worldly and prideful, so I’d never bothered to cultivate any.
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Overall, I think this statement is accurate. There was pretty substantive debate over a few cases that come to mind, though: embryonic stem cell research and right-to-die in the Schaivo case. The former was banned, and seems to have been mostly routed around in research since, and doesn't seem likely to have been majorly impactful long-term (do they still ask about cord blood during pregnancy?). The latter seems to have been sliding towards acceptance (more so for "removing a feeding tube" than for active euthanasia), but could still flare up, I think.
I think those are interesting cases partially because the culture war has moved on and show we aren't strictly doomed to be at each other's throats forever.
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On Catholic Integralism
Integralism won't happen in a meaningful way in the USA. Even if it could, that's a tricky path because, as @georgioz and @Treitak pointed out, it would open up a pretty epic failure mode; those with purely temporal and political goals would infiltrate whatever clerical or secular organizations (in the Catholic sense, like secular priests) they need to in order to grasp political power. We saw this with multiple Popes during the Borgias in Italy. More recently, we see this all over the South with various state and even federal level politicians holding some sort of "deacon" or "reverend" title. I mean, let's not even get started on the MLK line of succession (Sharpton, Jackson). So that you can see I am Fair and Blanced, Here's Josh Hawley doing a great Youth Pastor / Creed frontman impression.
The sneakier failure mode is something like the Orthodox Church in Russia. Orthodox priests and bishops aren't getting elected to the Duma, but they're part of the palace Kremlin intrigue to an extent. In order to preserve themselves, however, they mostly function as an elevated nationalistic cultural force. If you want to be really Russian, you hang a picture of the Patriarch next to your picture of Putin. Is there a supranational theology? Sort of, maybe. For Roman Catholics, this is a non-starter. If you really want to be Catholic but also totally embedded in a national or ethnic culture, you can try one of the Eastern Churches (Maronites etc.). Fully in communion with the Holy See, but autocephalus. Could there be an "American Catholic Church" probably not because that's goofy and because most of the Traditional Catholic groups explicitly trace their history to non-American origins and "liberal" Catholics don't care.
On Separation of Church and State
James Buckley (Wiliam's brother) has the best take on this. The "Separation of Church and State" was intended to prevent church authorities from dual-wielding power as elected officials. Furthermore, national laws couldn't be contravened by a religious leader. If you look back at the anti-catholic propaganda against Kennedy, this is what it focused on; not that Kennedy's catholic faith would lead him to make bad decisions, but that he would have to "change the laws" based on a decree from the Pope. Serving two masters and all of that.
You can vote your faith. Most actual theologies are also complete moral prescriptions. Would it be unfair to say that a secular humanist can't vote their morality?
The tricky part here is the 14th amendment. If a locality, say in Dearborn, MI or St. Marys, KS, wants to have public worship, ban LGBTQ books, and close all businesses one day a week, and that resolution passes overwhelmingly in the local municipality, is it illegal? There are a lot of legal groups not based in these areas that think it is and will create the necessary Rube Goldberg machine to get it in front of a Federal Judge. In fact, this was perhaps the central point of Willmoore Kendall's arguments against de-segregation. If the people of Alabama vote for it, why do the people of D.C. get to say no?
But then, the constitutional conservative in me does remember the Tyranny of the Majority. FLDS communities, Kiyras Joel in NYC are notorious for creating extremely hostile environments to their own people who then have no real recourse to secular authorities. As much as I LARP hard as a TradCath, I get worried that St. Marys, KS could turn into Waco 2.
On Which Option to Take
I've stated my position before; my idea is that anyone who wants to Trad/Orthodox/Snake Handel should just ... do it. Don't worry about the loss of cultural salience. There are dozens of biblical verses that all say versions of, "Don't seek the approval of those you hate." The revitalization of TLM Catholics over the past dozen years has been pretty specifically in response to the failures of modern liberalism, not rabid evangelization efforts. Ideas, like Dreher's, that Christianity is going to be outlawed are hyperbolic and logically unsatisfactory. If you watch his interview on the Pints With Aquinas podcast, it becomes obvious that this guy had a lot of personal trauma that he then transformed into a big part of his world view. At various times he was all of a zealous evangelical from Louisiana, a devout TLM Catholic, and, now, Orthodox. When I see someone dip into all three - but assure me that this time, I mean it! - I'm not going to put a lot of stock into their "well researched ideas."
On Where I Could Be Wrong
Again, a hat top to @WhiningCoil. I'm not worried about the Gub'ment coming after me for my beliefs alone, but I am worried about them going after the kids. When they no longer let you help children because you didn't sign the WrongThink waiver it gets spooky in a hurry. I've heard some shady rumours about TradCath households receiving visits from CPS because their neighbors were worried about six or seven kids running around. Because, like, who would have six or seven kids besides crazy cultists? Again, disclaimer, this is internet rumors, but I can see the path that leads there.
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 being quite prevalent in the debates about gay marriage. Arguments that since all arguments in opposition to gay marriage are religious in origin, letting them influence the law in any way whatsoever violates separation of church and state. I also remember that when people, in response to these claims that "there are no secular arguments against gay marriage," would present such secular arguments, their interlocutor would note that the people presenting these secular arguments were not atheists, but some form of religious believer. Thus, they argued, the secular argument was, to borrow a phrase, "not their true objection," but a pretextual argument for what was still ultimately religiously-motivated, and thus still barred from influencing the law.
So, it's not just that you have to find non-religious reasons for your preferred policies, it's that sincere religious belief playing any role in them puts them on the "church" side of the divide, to be kept completely away from the state. While, in contrast, your secular humanist can vote their morality, because their morality doesn't involve religion, and thus is perfectly fine being pursued by the state.
Yes, it's all very much an example of the metaphorical 'secularism going from neutral referee in the competition between religions to being a player on the field' transition.
(And, once again, I find myself recommending Winnifred Fallers Sullivan's The Impossibility of Religious Freedom, particularly her conclusion that the only way to make First Amendment religious freedom "work" is by basically reducing it to freedom of conscience plus freedom of worship — you can believe whatever you want about the supernatural, and attend whatever church/synagogue/temple/mosque/etc. you want… but you 'leave it behind at the church door,' as it were, and must behave in accord with broad secular norms outside that.)
I think that the division might be better described, not as 'religious' vs. 'secular' so much as 'metaphysical' vs. 'material'. Material assertions can be settled empirically¹, whereas metaphysical debates are often predicated on diverging axioms, and thus, if placed as support for state policy, tend to lead to bloodshed; the most salient example to the authors of the Bill of Rights being the European Wars of Religion in the XVII Century. The disputants in that example being competing religious institutions led to the principle being phrased in terms of 'separation of church and state'.
To take a different example, imagine two opponents of a nuclear power plant. Alice claims that it will release a metric arse-load of radiation every hour it operates, exposure to the tiniest bit of which will cause eleventy-hundred million cancer deaths; Bob asserts that splitting atoms is a contravention of the natural order, and making human existence easier and less precarious by the provision of abundant energy is an impermissible defiance of the Will of Gaia. Alice's claims can be refuted by measuring the radiation levels outside and inside existing reactor sites with a Geiger Counter, and referring to the health statistics of the inhabitants of Ramsar and Karunagappalli². Bob's argument, however, rests on assumptions (the existence of a natural order which does not include human-built technology; the notion of a personified environment rightfully possessed of an authority outweighing human well-being) which are not amenable to testing by experiment or observation¹, and therefore can only either
(a.) be set aside as not legitimate groundings for state policy (hence 'separation of church and state'), or
(b.) be decided on the battlefield.
The Protestant and Catholic churches in early-modern Europe chose the latter, and caused such devastation, for so little gain, that even fourteen decades later, people knew that allowing the sword of the state to be wielded on behalf of metaphysical assumptions is playing with fire.
¹cf. Newton's Flaming Laser Sword: "What cannot be settled by experiment is not worth debating."
²Locations in Iran and India with high levels of background radiation and no obvious increase in cancer rates.
The 'secular' arguments I have seen for state non-recognition of same-gender marriage while recognising opposite-gender marriage³ include arguments based on 'complementarity of male and female' (not religious in the narrow sense of "God/the Church/Scripture says so"; nevertheless metaphysical in nature), and arguments relating to parenthood, (entirely material, but do not support discrimination between same-gender couples and opposite-gender couples one or both members of which is entirely infertile.)
If you know of any other secular arguments for the proposition that the state ought to distinguish between 'two men' and 'one man whose testicles have been disconnected and one woman who ran out of eggs ten years ago', I am willing to consider them.
³As opposed to the arguments that the state shouldn't involve itself in marriage at all.
I'd phrase it more as "Do not impose your religious beliefs on people who do not share them."; or as it was put in the 2000s, "Don't tell me I can't have cake because you happen to be on a diet."
Except that pretty much all of our "culture war" issues are more "metaphysical" than they are "material" — and are equally so on both sides.
The existence of "inalienable human rights" is not a material question. Unlike your radioactivity example, there's no Geiger counter for detecting the presence or absence of, say "the universal right to free speech."
While they may not be as explicit as in the case of the anti-gay-marriage side, the pro-gay-marriage side is just as grounded in metaphysical commitments. On the question of "is there a universal human right to free speech?" both the answers, "yes" and "no", are metaphysical commitments. And if no positions based on metaphysical commitment cannot be "placed as support for state policy," then the state must reject both answers — and what does that even look like?
It's impossible for any state to be truly neutral on metaphysical commitments; the attempt appears to mean that victory goes to whoever can keep there metaphysics as implicit and hidden as possible. And again, that means those whose metaphysics aren't explicitly grounded in theological beliefs (often, it seems to me, because they aren't grounded in anything) get to win over those who are. Which, again, equates to religious versus "secular."
The state is still picking sides on metaphysics, it's just picking the side that pretends not to have any.
I posted an argument, by toy analogy, a year ago here. The tl;dr is that "hat teleology can constitute a valid "joint" upon which reality may be "cleaved," particularly when it comes to law" even in an imperfect, entropic universe.
The parallel in that case is the observation that:
In the Sequences, this is referred to as an Ethical Injunction.
...but some states are closer to it than others.
As metaphysical beliefs are not falsifiable, disagreements about them, if derived from diverging axioms, can only end in one of two ways: either the sides agree to disagree, and mutually refrain from attempting to forcibly impose their beliefs on others, or they wage war against each other until one or both is dead.
Liberalism is the 'agree to disagree' option; for the other, see 17th-century Europe.
More the side that is willing to agree to stop the bloodshed even if those people keep thinking and living in a way which, even if it 'neither picks anyone's pocket nor breaks anyone's leg' (as Jefferson put it), is nonetheless heretical/problematic/unnatural/[insert snarl word here].
....which rests on the metaphysical assumption that 'same-gender couple' and 'infertile opposite-gender couple' have little XML tags saying that the latter is supposed to be able to bear children while the former isn't.
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To what extent?
The whole of philosophy of science and epistemology grapples with exactly this. Karl Popper's problem of induction, Bayesian inference, and the entire rationality sphere online (as insufferable as it may often be) are all oriented towards trying to determine the limits of empiricism.
This line of thinking, taken too far, gets towards scientism and "trusting The Science (TM)." It wraps back around the horseshoe and becomes a faith all it's own. "The men in the long white robes (scientists) said it must be so!" Even though the entire idea of the scientific method is that everything is held as, at best, the current state of research and theory and, almost never, and iron law of the universe.
In terms of policy and legislation (to speak to your Bob and Alice example. Thank you for using the canonical names, BTW) policy is even more fraught because of capital-C Complexity and second, third, fourth, nth order effects. Our ability to predict these things is approximately zero. The Yellowstone Wolves example is legendary in this regard.
I am hyper suspicious of anyone who makes some version of the statement "this legislation is good because X will happen after it passes." Perhaps X will absolutely happen, but the entire system of laws will necessarily adapt because of it as well.
To a greater extent than metaphysical propositions.
They are, at least in principle, amenable to some form of test to determine which side is correct, even if we do not yet know what form that test might take.
Yes, sometimes people use science as attire, using appeals to authority rather than facts. "We gave $PILL1 to 250 people with $DISEASE2 and a placebo to another 250; 237 of the first group got better while 71 of the second group did; therefore $PILL1 treats $DISEASE2." is science; "Dr Weißmantel has umpteen Oxbridge/Ivory League degrees; he says $PILL1 treats $DISEASE2; therefore $PILL1 treats $DISEASE2." is not the Scientific Method being tried and found wanting, it is the Scientific Method being found difficult and left untried.
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Interestingly, many states had laws on the books that some people couldn't marry unless they showed that they were infertile. Namely, close relatives.
This has been trod over time and time again, but people still draw on this silly argument.
Do not impose your atheistic beliefs on people who do not share them.
For the purposes of civil liberties/avoiding sectarian conflict/&c., atheism is a religion.
Thus, if Alice believes in a deity or deities, and Bob does not, they are equally obligated to refrain from imposing their beliefs on each other.
This is why many New Atheists drew such ire; they promoted their Views in a manner that would have been seen as inappropriate in the other direction. However, the symmetry breaks down in that atheism per se does not impose demands founded on metaphysical assumptions, although some atheistic ideologies do, e. g. Gaianism ("Thou shalt not eat of produce that groweth not where thou livest, even if it be transported in a minimally-damaging way, for it is an Abomination Unto Gaia for people in northern climates to make it through the winter without developing early-stage scurvy.") or
WokismThe Ideology Which Refuses To Be Named Because It Considers Itself Entitled To Have Its Precepts Be Unmarked ("Thou shalt not eat of ice cream from an ice-cream truck, for the song they use has the same tune as a racist song used by ice-cream places during the Wilson Administration"; "Thou shalt not avail thyself of the easing of thy toil by human-shaped machines, because certain pre-civil-rights-era attempts were designed to resemble caricatures of black people and called Mechanical Negroes-with-two-Gs.")The same principle applies to those demands as to "Thou shalt not engage in coitus with a consenting adult of thine own gender because the Bible says something that, if you squint at it, looks like it says not to; never mind that the relationships to which Paul was referring to were probably the older man/young boy type often seen in ante-Christian Greece."
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I don't follow how the first sentence leads to the second.
No one's asking religious people who are against gay marriage to get gay-married against their will.
Yeah, I remember that line. And the companion line about how gay marriage was not going to affect your (straight person's) life at all. Funny how soon it morphed into "bake the cake, bigot!"
Just try the line "hey, if you don't want to own slaves, nobody is forcing you to do so" and see how far it gets with regards to "this law will not impinge on you" and "you can't legislate morality". Owning slaves is bad on the face of it, and we cannot permit people to have their own opinions on whether it's a sin or not, or if they are good, kindly slave owners or not. This is the law and you cannot be an exception to it.
The baker was trying, in a small way, to impose his beliefs on the couple. A hypothetical symmetrical case could be imagined in which 'people being allowed to believe in God and attend religious services' does not affect atheists' lives, even if Mr Euphoric-Fedora, who owns a hotel and sees no difference between religion and psychosis, is expected to provide rooms to religious people on the same terms as he provides to non-believers.
But it impinges on the enslaved persons. There is a difference between 'I am imposing my views on you' and 'I am not allowing you to impose your views on someone else'.
"I won't make this for you, but you can buy it elsewhere if you want" is not the same as "No, we want to force you to make this".
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From what I recall of reading the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, the proprietor was willing to sell them one of the generic cakes. The issue came up when he was asked to provide one with personalized, theme-appropriate decoration.
Which is to say, to produce an expression of the beliefs the couple had regarding their wedding. And so in that way the couple, too, was attempting to impose their beliefs on him.
Now, it's a very mild sort of imposition I am talking about, of course. That kind of economic incentive to get someone else's expressive faculties dedicated to your cause for a moment is quite common, and in fact it is a good thing that the modern world lets those of us with less training or talent harness the voices of others that way. But it is nonetheless their voice, and many people are leery of forcing someone to say something they disagree with.
For comparison's sake: imagine Mr. Euphoric-Fedora advertises a service where he will leave one of a selection of texts in the hotel drawer if the person renting the room requests it. The local newspaper, or a copy of Godel Escher Bach, or one of several others from his collection. At his discretion he may even purchase a new one if you contact him ahead of time. But he won't put a Bible in it. Is that a failure to "provide rooms to religious people on the same terms as he provides to non-believers"?
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This is not in fact a cosmically-preordained consequence of legalizing gay marriage.
And yet somehow it fell out of the air that a man was found guilty of not recognising a ceremony that was, at the time, illegal in his state and punished for the same. Schrodinger's gay wedding: it both exists and does not exist? Fail to recognise that you should celebrate what is technically non-existent and feel the consequences?
Some lawyers help me out here: if something is not permitted by the state constitution, does that make it illegal/a crime, or just "no don't do it but we won't stop you"?
What does "prohibited" mean here? And if you don't agree to be complicit in a prohibited act, how come you are the bad guy?
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That might be the case in a world where modern liberalism doesn’t exist, but in this world, it’s at least the next closest thing to cosmically-preordained.
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What do you think the purpose of such laws is?
I think this debate would go rather better if you told me.
Possibly. Possibly not. I'm not really viewing it as a "debate". I'm just encouraging you to think about things. It would be nice to get your perspective on how you think about it. Perhaps it's something you've never thought about before; it would then be useful to get your fresh perspective on the matter rather than simply treating it as a "debate" to be "won", because that often leads to people simply trying to shove things into a pre-canned bin where they think they can just draw from their pre-canned set of talking points. So far, I think it's apparent that you don't have a simple pre-canned talking point for this, specifically, so it's useful to get your first impressions concerning the brute fact of such laws.
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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?
Thanks to Canada, I don’t have to worry about that anymore. It went from “this poor stage 4 cancer patient can’t bear to suffer anymore” to “the State has determined you to be a useless eater, please stand by the ditch and allow the nice man with the MP-40 to perform the procedure” in about six months.
Source?
There was a case of former soldier paraolympic medal winner who asked for 5 years to get assistance with ramp for her wheelchair in her home. Instead Canadian government offered to finance assisted suicide if she is "desperate". Euthanizing war veterans on wheelchairs seems to me as Nazi as it can get. And that was back in 2022.
Many other such cases, it will only grow. The overall trend goes up, the number of people euthanized by MAID in canada rose from 5,000 in 2018 to 15,000 in 2023 and is was fifth leading cause of death in Canada in 2022 and now is probably 4th.
Where is the use of force implied by the poster above me?
Like... sure, I don't like that the state wouldn't provide actual support to the veteran. I assumed that most people here were against their taxes prolonging the existence of the infirm, but whatever. It's still lacking the very crucial aspect of Nazi executions where you didn't actually have a choice to say no and die in your bed on your own (or rather, your old age and illnesses') terms.
Even nazis didn’t start like this, they had the Madagascar plan. Call it an intuition when government proposes death as a solution to a mundane problem. And what is next.
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Charitably, the interviewer may have been thinking of the notion that some divine commandments as more law than morality - i.e. "arbitrary" rules that Christians must obey to show obedience to the Lord, but which a moral philosopher could not conclude ought to be forbidden from first principles if God had not specifically forbidden them. C.S. Lewis once wrote to a girl that she should not feel guilty for euthanizing her ailing pet cat but rather "rejoice that God's law allows [her] to extend to [the cat] that last mercy which we are forbidden to extend to suffering humans". If this is how one thinks of the Christian ban on euthanasia, then it makes sense to say "sure, as a Christian, your faith forbids you from performing euthanasia; but surely your conscience still allows you to see that had God not forbidden it euthanasia would be a good thing?".
And prima facie it is not absurd to go even further and tell a Christian "it makes no sense for you to ban us atheists and heathens from performing euthanasia, unless you are also trying to forcibly convert us; you are barred from performing it for much the same reason that Jews are banned from eating pork, and however seriously you take that interdict, there is no reason why it should translate into trying to force the same interdiction on people who don't inwardly share your faith".
Can I just say that I, as an atheist, have always found this view ridiculous? Particularly when Christians use it as a reason to react with confusion or hostility when I, an atheist, agree with them on an issue (such as, say, masturbation).
This seems strange to me, as one of the cornerstones of at least Catholic doctrine is the concept of Natural Law, which is basically God's law written on human heart, even that of secularists. The idea is that God's law is immutable and universal, and Christians should not be surprised if other people hold facets of it.
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Eh, I don't know. It depends on the religion and how they think of God, but if I believe that God exists and serving Him is important then it doesn't seem especially surprising for there to be more-or-less-meaningless rules which I am encouraged to follow as a demonstration of loyalty. Compare patriotism - it doesn't inherently matter what I do with a square bit of stripy cloth, but if I want to be a Good Citizen then I still shouldn't disrespect the Flag.
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"canst neither deceive nor be deceived"
In the
one, true, Catholicfaith, God's laws are not arbitrary. They may be impossible to fully comprehend in our limited mortal brains and may, very frequently, be exceedingly frustrating. They are not, however, arbitrary.Turning your argument around just a little bit, it would be very refreshing if people of faith could look at atheists and secularists doing atheist and secular things and simply go, "lulz, enjoy hell." But we are called to love all men and to strive to look out for their benefit. Now, don't take this to an extreme and propose that all good Catholics start trying to hand out rosaries at San Francisco BDSM dungeons. But, in terms of voting for legislation, it isn't enough to be a Catholic in San Francisco and go "yeah, okay, they can make fentanyl legal. I just won't do it personally." No, you have to vote your conscience (i.e. against sin) and, to the extent you are compelled, try to organize the best you can even if it is an obvious losing effort. Remember, starting with Roe V. Wade, Catholic America waged about a 50 year campaign to over turn it. It is not as if, during that time, millions of Catholics were aborting babies left and right.
All of this is to say that faith and conscience aren't really separable if you take them both seriously. "Cultural Catholics" (Biden, Pelosi) aren't actually Catholic. Secular pro-lifers might have really ornate and air tight arguments against abortion, but they aren't operating in the realm of metaphysical faith. This does not make their arguments somehow more "valid" in a political context than people of faith. If that were the case, we'd have a weird situation where everyone would be in a rush to prove how atheist they are while also borrowing heavily from moral theology. It's actually kind of comical to think about - "Look at how excellent my purely rational reasoning is. DON'T LOOK AT THE GOD SHAPED HOLE"
Maybe this is the case in Catholicism; clearly it wasn't the case in Lewis's understanding of Anglicanism. The idea is also, of course, pretty mainstream in Judaism. I never meant to claim that God's laws are always viewed as arbitrary in all religions, which would be silly, only that there are cases where we can reasonably expect some religious people to distinguish between things they do out of conscience, and things they do out of faith alone; and that euthanasia might be one of them; and that this may be what the interviewer had in mind in that particular instance.
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According to much 1st Amendment jurisprudence, and the popular understanding thereof, it absolutely does.
As I see it, this perfectly describes the post-Puritan offshoot that is
Wokismthe Ideology That Will Not Let Itself Be Named, and how it rose to prominence. America, as a predominantly-Protestant country, developed a legal tradition of treating "religion" as being defined first and foremost by one's beliefs about God(s) and the supernatural, and in the doctrines derived therefrom; and so developed "antibodies" against religious "establishment" along these lines. Thus, the first dogmatic, crusading faith to ditch all that, make all their metaphysical priors as implicit and unspoken as possible, (yes, even with the glaring "God-shaped hole") was able to to get it's moral doctrines established without tripping the metaphorical immune response (like a virus mutating to shed a critical antigen), and become our unofficial official religion.More options
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I am (gallows-humorously?) tickled by the two possible interpretations of this sentence, and I hope you meant both of them.
As much as I’d like to claim him, I don’t think he’s ever been a zealous evangelical. He was raised a cultural Methodist.
Yeah, I am never sure what to think on that front. On the one hand, you hear stories of CPS folks who have seen enough real abuse to laugh off accusations against merely countercultural Christians, and I believe it. But then you hear about cases where the investigators have gone completely off the rails.
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I consider “insular community formation” to be the only way forward for Christianity. Christianity was engaged in this even before Constantine, with Tertullian forbidding Christians from enjoying pretty much any Pagan leisure activity. The rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire coincided with the religion becoming more insular and exclusionist than before, which is important to recognize: the disciplina arcani meant that little about Christ was told to outsiders and only gradually taught to catechumens over an elaborate three-year initiation process. Catechumens had no knowledge of the Eucharist except late in this process and only learned the Lord’s Prayer days before their baptism. It was in this period of secrecy and insularity that the church grew from 1% to 50% of the empire. This was the period of the agape feasts: the most important weekly leisure activity of the Christian with meal and wine and prayer was totally forbidden from mention to outsiders. I imagine if we went back in time and saw the early Christian community of 150ad we would be shocked at how insular they were; so much of what they do would have been explicitly Christian.
This is optimal for a number of practical and psychological reasons. If you have your own schools, you can disseminate your culture and values more readily to your own children while increasing their retention to the faith, and you can ensure they aren’t reading things that are bad for them. If you have your own town, you can invest in it longterm because you know no one will take it from you, and you’ll actually love the inhabitants; this means a return to traditional architecture and beautiful design. If you have your own feasts and rituals, then you can stave off the
demonsmalevolent spiritssocially-infectious vibes that lead the youth down bad paths, eg binge-drinking and gambling and nihilism, while promoting the good path [cf “you cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons”]. If you have your own dress code, you will be saving boys endless distraction and girls ~5 hours of thought on their appearance a week (at least!). It’s really in its social form that religion successfully improves people; today it is essentially antisocial.And if a hostile state forbids you your own schools, your own towns? If they pronounce your suppression of your youths' "freedom" to go down those bad paths "oppressive" and "abusive"? Or the same with your dress code (which also provides them a nice, visible identifier for targeting your group)?
But, you might say, Christianity survived as minorities under Roman persecution. I acknowledge that, and I first counter with Tokugawa Japan. Then I note (as people often argue whenever I, or other monarchists, compare the level of intrusiveness in daily life of modern democratic governments versus that of monarchies past) that technological and economic progress have been greatly expanding state capacity for centuries at least, that even the most "free" modern states intrude more into daily life of the average citizen than Rome ever could, and thus, any modern state has tools of repression at their disposal that the Romans could only dream of. And the trends in things like drone technology and LLM processing of omnipresent surveillance data make it look to become even worse in the near future.
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Great post.
I don't follow. Perhaps this was a typo?
One of the non-theological differences I've noticed in Traditional circles vs "beige Catholicism" circles is how much the former genuinely enjoy hanging out with one another. When we have a social after Mass on Sundays, people will hang out for hours. At the Novus Ordo parish I grew up at, the "social" felt like a non-required extension to the Mass. You go and get a coffee and a donut, shake hands with Father Friendly, awkwardly make small talk with some randos for a few minutes, then give up and flee back home before NFL kickoff.
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.
This makes sense to me. Can't say I've been to many protestant services.
I see this, however, as potentially a theological failure mode. Is the service really about God, or is it a highly ritualized potluck? Again, this is a theological argument. Having a good, regular social interaction within the context of a moral values system is something I am highly in favor of.
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."
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Nobody can seriously doubt this. Catholicism and the unbroken link back to the first Apostles is all predicated on the idea that the Christians of today are living exactly the way the Christians of the first century did if you were to go back in time. The two groups would be indistinguishable.
People intuitively know this is absurd and that the church has changed enormously over the centuries. The earliest liturgies weren’t even given Latin, they were given in Greek. And the changes tally in the hundreds if not thousands with the passage of time.
One of the major advantages Christianity had in its formal development was it gave people a comprehensive life script and path to follow. Today’s contemporary and modern western ethic can’t tolerate anyone that comes along and tries to pin someone down along a predefined path that tells them what to do and what they should find important. Until there’s a major restoration of paternalistic authority, I don’t really see these negative trends becoming reversed for the better. Things that were done to us as kids would get us jailed today if we did them to our own. And some of them justified. Yes. Abuse was a thing. Spanking? Apparently that’s a questionable thing now. Not to mention a host of other things.
That isn't true. The unbroken link held by the Catholic and Orthodox churches is predicated on the idea that the first Apostles appointed successors, who appointed their successors in turn, and so on all the way to today. It has nothing to do with the liturgy remaining the same, or the people's lives remaining the same, or anything like that.
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:
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.
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When you say "worship" do you mean "offer sacrifice to God" or do you mean "say ritual prayers?"
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I think that one advantage that Christianity has is that in the beginning, it was not married to temporal authority. Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's. Early Christianity thrived in an environment much more hostile to it than anything the SJ or MAGA people are likely to inflict on it.
It rising to a position of temporal authority only came later, starting with Constantine. As an atheist watching from the sidewalk, I have to say that I liked the version of Christianity before the sociopaths took over better.
It might be illustrative to compare Christianity to the other religions of the book. Judaism started out as a tribe/state religion, but thanks to the zealots picking fights they could not win, they got a head start of 2ka in learning to live as a religious minority. (Again, from the outside view, diaspora Judaism seems a lot more palatable than whatever orthodox factions are bent on Making Israel Great Again.) Islam started out with strong claims to temporal authority, Muhammad was a warlord as well as a prophet, after all. While there are certainly Muslims who are good citizens to secular nation states, my feeling is that it is that they have an even harder time justifying that stance theologically than Catholics do.
In short, I think that the wall between religion and state protects religion as much as it protects the state. If organized religion meddles in matters of the state, the consequence will be that it will attract the kind of people who look for temporal power, and before long your religion will be run by sociopaths who sell indulgence to their believers, burn heretics and organize crusades.
It helps that (from my understanding), in Christianity you can be saved even if you live in a sinful state in this fallen world. If you believe that eating seafood or gay/unmarried sex or abortions condemn you to hell, liberalism is very compatible with not committing any of these sins. (Things do get a bit hairy around religious objection to military service though, or if you object to paying taxes which finance what you consider to be sinful behavior.)
Unfortunately, during my edgy teenage atheist phase I blasphemed against the holy spirit - so I can't actually be saved, because that's an unforgivable sin that not even Jesus can get rid of. Since becoming an adult, I've actually pursued a religious faith that's not Christian at all, so even if you expand the definition of blasphemy against the holy spirit to include a continual hardening of the spirit's pull to Christ (which I haven't ever felt) I still qualify. As a result a lot of Christian evangelism doesn't really land with me because there isn't actually any offer of salvation - if I become a Christian I am just guaranteeing my place in the lake of fire. The buddhists at least promise an end to suffering, rather than a guarantee of infinite torture forever no matter what I do.
I remember that; good times. Did you at least get a copy of The God Who Wasn't There in exchange for your immortal soul?
Truly, they had such a refined and rational understanding of Christian doctrine that they failed to so much as open a book and completely misinterpreted it.
I’m glad the Motte exists because it’s a good place for everyone to get their witchy opinions out on the table with minimal drama, but rationalism as a movement has always been a joke.
This was back in 2005; it was part of new atheism, not rationalism. Rationality as a movement didn't start until Eliezer wrote and published The Sequences in 2006-2009 (though, obviously, rationalism was heavily influenced by new atheism).
I know people make this argument, but they are the same movement to me.
Ghostbusters is not heavily influenced by I Want a New Drug, it is I Want a New Drug with some extra cruft added. The heart of the thing is the same. Arguably, they have the same heart as the Enlightenment, which was often equally cringe as the New Atheists and rationalism.
A reminder that this is not a rationalist forum. As for new atheism and rationalism being the same thing: no, they definitely are not. There is definitely some overlap, but new atheism spawned Atheism+ and was a driver of SJW/wokeness, which rationalism has always been ambivalent-to-hostile towards.
As for not knowing Christianity, I kind of agree with you that a lot of people don't actually understand Christianity at all, but at the same time, there are many, many "Christian" doctrines, and even the Christians here on the Motte have a habit of expressing their own interpretation in a doctrinaire fashion as obviously the correct and orthodox form of Christianity, from which any deviation is a misunderstanding at best, heresy at worst.
As for blaspheming against the holy spirit, you know, that is a pretty hard one to get around if you actually believe in taking the Bible literally. As a kid, I once made a Halloween joke about the holy spirit being like a ghost in a sheet or something, and the Sunday school teacher very seriously read me the verse about mocking the holy spirit being an unforgivable sin. Imagine telling an eight-year-old that he's just irreversibly damned himself to hell with a joke!
I get that you have very strong feelings about this, but that’s just, like, your opinion, man.
There is no meaningful difference between the tentacles of the octopus. The guys touching the trunk, the tail, the ears and the legs of the elephant are all actually touching the same thing. You can say that they are definitely not the same thing, but from over here it just looks you’re touching an elephant.
Calvinism is Christianity just like Catholicism is Christianity. In my opinion, it is weird, dumb Christianity that gets many things wrong and is just barely better than not being Christian, making me at best ambivalent to hostile towards it, but it’s still Christianity. It wants to save souls, its works are intended to save souls, and God willing, maybe it has seen some success doing that. Do I think it would be better if they were all Catholics? Sure, but they’re still part of the elephant.
Fortunately, in no church anywhere is dogma defined by the Sunday School teachers. I’m sorry that happened to you and I bet it was a little traumatizing, but I’m also willing to bet your Sunday school teacher was an untrained volunteer with a minimal grasp of theology beyond Bible stories. That’s why he/she should stick to reenacting Bible stories on a felt board.
This, incidentally, is a point for why I am Catholic. The kids stay in the service, and so a priest is available to catechize. Plus, when catechizing, they have to work out of the literal book of answers to dogma questions.
Maybe it’s a bit of a limb to be out on, but I’m going to trust the past 16-1700 years of Church teaching on what is considered blaspheming against the Holy Spirit, over the opinions of the Rational Response Squad or the knee-jerk reaction of Mr/Mrs Woebegone at Sunday School.
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Nothing you did in your edgy teenage atheist phase is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.
Final impenitence, that is, dying without repenting, is the only way someone can permanently reject the Holy Spirit.
Seriously, God is more thoughtful than edgy teenage atheists.
Also, I don’t know if someone told you this directly or if you picked it up somewhere, but this is diametrically opposed to the doctrine of Christianity. Even diehard predestination Calvinists don’t believe this. The offer of salvation is always open to everyone.
Anyways, I personally hope you return to the Church one day, but whatever you do with your spiritual life, at least don’t go through your temporal life thinking edgy teenagers found the One Weird Trick.
Sure, but a plain reading of the verse that describes it and its surrounding context is still highly infohazardous to Christians, especially the kinds that actually read Scripture. And then we get the "don't worry about it, it's basically an inkblot" dismissal of the argument which is even worse.
Ironically the reason why it's so hazardous is because what the verse [is argued to] say here is already so solidified in our own cultural context (and has been for the past... millennium, maybe two?) that even the non-believers are aware of "dying unrepentant means you go to Hell." It's everywhere in their memes, too.
And sure, we can say "obviously this wasn't common knowledge in Jesus' time, so that's why He had to say that", but that realization is very much not obvious (especially on first encounter with that information and the... corresponding mental states it tends to leave one in).
Or at least, that's the claim being made here. The Church doesn't [know to] just lead with that and "don't worry just forget about it" has a moral hazard in it too. That is, from extensive personal experience, detrimental.
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I am not a Christian, and I am a practicing member of a faith that has a very different view of the world than Christianity - I'm as likely to return to the Church as a buddhist monk and have in fact permanently rejected the call of the Christian holy spirit. I'm aware that there's a more expansive definition, but I still actually meet it - Christianity just doesn't reach me, and my own experiences with religion don't fit into the Christian worldview.
I understand what you’re saying, and I obviously feel similarly about Buddhism. Such is life.
But what I’m saying is that you are intellectually wrong about the dogma. You can’t have committed this sin or meet any definition for it because you’re not dead yet.
If you come from a Christian tradition that was super literal about this, okay, just know they are in the minority here and I would be very interested in what their actual dogma said, as opposed to just a rando (such as myself), opining.
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Agreed. That entire reply was cosmologically incoherent and probably facetious: if Christianity is true, then no other faith’s afterlife even exists, nor do their rules apply.
As for blasphemy, “You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain”, the actual commandment against blasphemy, is not about hitting your knee and using God’s, Jesus’, or the Holy Spirit’s name as a profanity. (Though doing so is unhealthy to the psyche.) The better way to read it is “don’t claim to be authorized by God,” which is why false prophecy carried a death sentence in BC Israel.
An intriguing and sobering clue to the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is found in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount: “You have heard that it was said to our ancestors, Do not murder, and whoever murders will be subject to judgment. But I tell you, everyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment. And whoever says to his brother, ‘Fool (raqa)!’ will be subject to the Sanhedrin. But whoever says, ‘You moron (morē)!’ will be subject to hellfire.” (Matthew 5:21-22, HCSB)
This detailed scholarly analysis of insults in the cultural mileu in which Jesus taught His disciples summarizes Jesus’ likely intended meaning thus:
In other words, a dismissive or dehumanizing attitude toward someone you’re angry with is what becomes a danger to the soul’s destination. This means social media is a moral hazard and Christians should be extra wary about opining online. And calling someone a retard is a highway to Hell.
Interesting that The Motte itself moderates along these guidelines! Claim that someone’s wrong using detailed rebuttals all you want, but hurling insults and dehumanizing your rhetorical opponents is subject to immediate moderation or bans.
I am very suspicious of a Jew trying to tell Christians what Jesus akshually meant.
Nevertheless, no argument here.
This just adds to my expectation that I’ll have a lot of time to really get to know purgatory on a personal level.
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I’m curious who think the sociopaths here were. The ancient ones, or the modern ones?
To circle back to the commenter who brought up Tertullian earlier. Tertullian was quite the misogynist and sadist if someone has read anything he ever wrote. At least by the standards of today he is. He thought one of the greatest pleasures of Heaven was in looking over the skies and relishing the pain and torture of those who were damned.
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This is basically the one insight that Moldbug has contributed to our pop socsci blogging circuit that (in my eyes) has lasting value: we are looking at a classic case of power leakage. If those holding power grant any influence over their wielding of it to some other institution, then that other institution becomes a niche to be colonised by the sort of organisms that feed on power.
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Of course that organized religion will meddle in matters of state. There is no other possibility, as organized religion impacts moral stance and worldview of adherents who in turn then apply these ideas in their lives - including things like how to vote, which laws to pass etc.
In short, I think that the Christian wall between liberalism and state protects liberalism as much as it protects the state. If unanchored degenerate ideologies meddle in matters of state, the consequence will be that it will attract the kind of ungodly people who look for temporal power, and before long your institutions will be run by sociopaths who want to castrate children, censor preaching as hate speech and who want to send people into gulags.
It helps, that from my understanding, in Liberalism you can function even in a state with various laws impeding on certain liberties. If you believe that let's say eating meat is killing the planet, Christianity is very compatible with not committing these sins. See, Christians are benevolent like that, and they even have historic record to prove it.
Granted. It would be weird if a moral framework never influenced how people vote.
However, there are different stages.
The religion teaches tenets (love thy neighbor, blood for the blood god, etc) and leaves it to the individual member of how to interpret them in the voting booth.
The leaders of the religion routinely endorse political candidates, and their followers mostly vote for them.
A religion or groups of religions form a large voting block.
Religious organizations are a load-bearing part of the countries power structure. (Think medieval Europe, Iran, Taliban).
It took me a while to parse that sentence, because I took "liberalism" as a founding principle of the US, not as a group of political ideologies such as democratic socialism or social justice progressivism.
My reply is that SJP is just a political ideology. If its proponents do not meddle with politics, there is no point to it at all. And of course that means that it attracts plenty of sociopaths who play status games. But they have literally nothing worth protecting by keeping out of politics.
By contrast, the founders of the US had experienced life under a state religion, and they knew that this was not what they wanted. I would guess that their thought process went something like this:
The tenets of a religion being twisted under the pressure from realpolitik the way the SCOTUS has twisted the text of the constitution (e.g. commerce clause, Roe) is not something I would wish on my worst enemy.
If you look at Christianity from the standpoint of Secular Humanism, it is also just an ideology as any other. Christianity is a just group of people who meet on various councils, put together some philosophical texts etc. What is a difference between Christians and secular humanists themselves - who also go around on meetings, put together things like humanist manifesto etc? Or socialists, who gather around communities, discuss things every 5 years as part of socialist international and so forth?
And of course secularists have a lot of things worth protecting by keeping out of politics - like their moral status where they feel as if they have the high ground from which they can criticize everybody else. Things like running secular communist experiment #45 with another disastrous result will only discredit beautiful ideas behind, that may work in smaller communities. So all the arguments that you use when supposedly "protecting" Christians by banning them from attaining political power also work for secularists.
Christianity survived 2000 years of tenets twisting by everybody including bishops and popes. Don't worry, Christians will be fine.
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I do not think that there is such a stark difference between these options and specific denominations. You can walk and chew gum at the same time. You can move yourself and your family into religious enclave, creating space for the community to flourish. You can vote for laws in accordance with Christian ethics inside your local community and promote for these laws to go state or even nation-wide. And you can also go into enemy territory and "win the argument".
The same goes for going backwards in time for similar analysis. Yes, protestants were always fractured and individualistic. But they were political power of their own and Christians were able to push for things that David French would now maybe see as unimaginable. For instance, it was absolutely common to have prayers and bible readings in public schools up until 1960s. It was not until 1952 supreme court ruling that stroke down blasphemy laws in favor of supposedly neutral and secular reading of first amendment, the same goes for porn and other things. Christians held bottom up political power, and politicians they voted in had to reflect their moral preferences and uphold their worldview. It does not have to be anything coming top-down from a pope or archbishop.
I think this is exactly what is going on now. For instance if Muslims can create their own communities and then pass laws in line with their preferences like anti-LGBT laws in Dearborn, Michigan - all in line with supposedly "neutral" and pluralistic views, then why cannot Christians do the same? The supposed neutral "French" position does not even make sense in many instances as they are quite binary - you either allow children to tansition or you don't. You either have progress flag displayed during July in your school or you don't. You either allow or disallow crosses or prayers in public schools. In the end, there is no "neutral" position. If you have population of progressives in a city, then they will remove religious symbols from the school and replace them with their own things. What many people start to realize is that they can utilize their political power and implement their ideas in the same way as all these other ideologues do.
I've always balked at most Protestant notions of belief and conviction in the US. Their doctrinal and interpretive anarchy across tens of thousands of different sects perfectly exemplifies what's wrong with their thinking. Not too long ago this debate was pointed out to me by a relative that I found funny as fuck. Watching the Catholic (Gordon) and Dyer (Orthodox) bully the Protestant (some random dude) I couldn't help but laugh at, while he kept trying to insert himself in the discussion to remain relevant to the debate. And then later this debate by Gordon and Dyer again I could tell was largely unintelligible to most people. It took me a couple days to get through but I enjoyed it solely for the bloodsports.
Theologians like WLC think as far as separation between church and state go that Christianity should always and forever remain independent of the state and that the strength of our belief should stand on its own merits. I think he's wrong about this. Several states in the world if you go back in time were massively Christian save for the later influence and spread of Islam which came to preside and dominate over a majority Christian culture and way of life. Turkey has always been one of my favorite examples of this. And Christianity historically (in addition to Islam) didn't largely become influential through Jesus' preachments in the NT. It spread through war, military and economic might; and force. For better or worse, I think any honest person has to admit the state has a relevant role to play in promoting religion, lest you end up getting dominated by the religion of those who think opposite to you. My historical/biological lineage is rooted with the Nordics in Scandinavia, although individually I'm a born and raised American. Maybe that’s why I’ve always intensely loved the cold weather, even before I could speak. I still have relatives over there who my extended family maintains ties with and when I see what's been going on with Muslim migration, I can feel my adrenaline pumping. I've got a few grenades of my own I'd like to let off if harm comes to their doorstep. You're living in our home. The men need to put their Viking helmets back on and reintroduce the Blood Eagle to a few people.
In the Catholic corner as a counterpart to what's going on in Dearborn, St. Mary's in Kansas has become something of the Mecca for traditional Catholics (SSPX), in an interesting way almost similar to what the Jews also have with places like Kiryas Joel. Novus Ordo Catholics are continuing to decline as one should expect, but the traditional corners of our faith are booming with huge families that I hope in the future will come to dominate and overturn the crisis of what's been happening in the church. A restoration of a real commitment to Mere Christianity in the US would be a wonderful thing to have as it would rebuild communities and bring people together. I continue to hope and pray for better days in the future ahead.
I think that there is a huge equivocation when it comes to what the separation of church and state actually means. In my notion the separation means, that the state is sovereign in a sense that all the power comes from voters through legislature, executive and judiciary. In other words it is not possible for a Pope in Vatican to create some order which will be automatically valid law for people in such a sovereign state. But it is absolutely possible for such an order to be brought through standard political process and pass as a binding law.
What secularists and progressives achieved, is that they expanded this definition of separation over to untenable proposal, that no religious ideas can be part of the state. They somehow convinced Christians that their ideas have no place in political process and that they cannot influence the laws. This is obvious stupidity, as first it is impossible to judge. E.g. if a state adopts laws against murder because all the MPs are Christians and murder goes against sixth commandment - does it mean it is now somehow religion inside a state? Is it possible to pass such a law only if one has "neutral" stance such as adopting utilitarian moral reasoning for passing such a law? It does not make sense and it is incredible that supposed Christians like French are just going with this explanation as a reason why to just lie down and let everybody else - be it communists, progressives and atheists or even Muslims - to use political power to entrench their own version of non-Christian ethics and ideas into state structures. To me it seems insane.
Right. I agree with you here. I'd argue for religious requirements for political participation, much in the same way you can't be a member of the Communist Party in China without being an avowed atheist. There's actually not much disagreement I have with either the politics or theology of the twin paradigm that ruled the European continent back when it was the church/monarchy power duopoly that ran the show. The only real problem with it that I see is that it came at a bad point in history. You take a look at high tech feudal societies today like Saudi Arabia that are religiously very cohesive and absent the consanguinity in the population, what's your problem? Not that there aren't any of course but they're problems I'd gladly trade for the ones we have in the west. Or take an elective monarchy like Malaysia. Much the same thing can be said for a lot of the ways they benefit from their style of governance. Church and monarchy is better than democracy and capitalism IMO. (Come at me bros, I'm feeling bold today). You could perhaps argue industrialization wouldn't have happened under the former, but I see no reason to think that.
It is as you say the secularists have definitely succeeded in muddying the waters that don't even blur but rather draw up a distinction that religion has no place in politics. Laws against murder specifically can be morally justified without recourse to divine commandments. You can justify them by natural law. You can justify them by moral sentiment. You can justify them by social consensus. You can justify them almost any way you want to. I suppose if you tried to anchor that law through religious justification that's where you'd piss off the non-religious segment of the population. Then again our mere existence is enough to piss them off in the first place. I'm all for disregarding their opinion. If they want to argue in basis of facts and evidence then let us come to the table. Until then, "butthurt," is not a defense. I'm passing legislation whether they like it or not. They have no problem requiring me to tolerate degenerate influences, they in turn can tolerate the 'horror' of Christian hospitality and charity and the Stalinist demand that they observe common decency in the community.
The only "religious requirement" should be "the voters won't vote for you if they don't like your religion (or lack thereof)" and even that can be a big problem.
And anything you hope to accomplish by this requirement could be worked around by sufficiently dishonest politicians simply by choosing a Unitarian Universalist or some other mostly secular, politically liberal, religion.
This is happening all the time anyway. People vote for their identities not the abstract contents of the legislative policies of their representatives.
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Ukraine had over half the surviving churches, and 2/3 of convents by the the fall of the USSR. Sergius pledged total loyalty to the state and is goals, feeding believers to hungry quotas until only a few hundred priests remained (100k were executed). When Stalin (responsible for many of those deaths, and a former seminarian) rehabilitated the church during WWII, the NKVD staffed most of it. Today, the Russian Orthodox Church serves the state, not Christ; he current patriarch worked for the KGB from the 70s on. This is no more survival than if the literal anti-Christ headed it. I pray the church cease to exist, like the blessed martyrs of the Assyrian Church of the East in China and the wider East, than actively damn its followers like today.
I've heard of Patriarch Kirill's collusion with Russian state agencies before but wondered if that was just a western smear and accusation against him. But in a way, it just repeats the same pattern most Christian states have done throughout the centuries. There was always massive interplay between state and religion. The religious authorities were always seen as a keeper of public opinion and the psychological, spiritual and material welfare of the people. Any ruling political elite/class had to be seen as having the approval of the religious body. I don't really share your opinion on this but I do understand it.
Maybe Russia could reverse their demographic decline with what Ilia II did in Georgia by promising to baptize every third child. That seemed to stem and reverse the population drop off. Being godfather to millions of children across the country is quite a job for the clergy however. Good luck on the logistics with that.
As far as I know, Georgia is much much much more religious than Russia, in the actual religion sense. Religious authorities doing stuff like that matters in societies which care about religion for the sake of religion, not for the sake of larping.
Could be. But the fact that millions of Russians are spiritually apathetic has no impact on the observation that Orthodox Christianity matters enormously to them as a matter of their culture. Just because Russians aren't as committed as Jesus as the average Muslim should be with Osama doesn't mean they're faking it when it comes to the importance of their faith to them. Otherwise, try blowing up a Russian cathedral and not expecting a response. You'll quickly find out how much they're LARPing.
According to that logic America's reaction to 9/11 showed that their true God is the God of Capitalism.
"How would the country react if someone blew up a public place of theirs" is an atrocious measure of their dedication to that particular public place's importance in each citizen's lives, specifically. You don't have to be religious to dislike someone blowing up religious buildings in your country.
Now, if someone blew up a mosque, I can see many non-Muslim Russians being apathetic to that.
Believe it or not people ‘do’ make that argument, and it rings pretty true to most astute observers. It’s one of the things that sucks about this society.
It’s the one people use every single day. It’s the one that lets you know you live in a bad neighborhood when people dump trash on the road or shit on the sidewalk. If some gangbanger tags the back wall of a local supermarket, nobody here gives a shit. If someone were to do that to your historical church you’d better prepare for an enormous lynch mob to come after you.
Well, it doesn't ring true to me. I think blowing up a trade center is a big deal whether you worship money or not.
But people don't use it every single day. That's kind of my entire point. The reaction to a historical church's defacement proves its historical value, not spiritual.
And I really don't think there would be an enormous lynch mob. Cops, at best, if someone saw it. If Russian Christians are capable of organizing in mobs, lynch or otherwise, I had never seen it. Nothing like that one Muslim holiday that has them fill the streets facing the mosques.
When I hear of any activism from Russian Christians it is usually top-down state-adjacent bullshit like canceling permits for Halloween cons for vaguely-danced-around reasons. Another example of the reasons for my general disdain towards ROC.
And not everybody’s relationship to Christianity is devout or spiritual, which is my point. Mine is cultural and heavily intellectual. Prayer and attendance is something I’m clearly spiritually deficient in which I desire to greatly improve.
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I have to admit I don't quite see what the incentive would be here. Having "Godfather: Patriarch Kirill" on your kid's birth certificate? I don't think the demographics who need the incentive really hold the church in such a high regard.
Personally I'd hang it and put in above my fireplace.
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I don't know the specific demographic composition of Russia, bur Orthodox culture is still a very big part of their society. To assume social status doesn't matter to them in religious terms when it still retains a huge amount of cultural capital in the country is placing a large bet against common sense. It's possible I could be wrong here, but I 'highly' doubt it. And at the very least, it doesn't hurt their effort even if it doesn't help it.
According to the latest polls, while up to 70% of Russians consider themselves Orthodox, 6% of those have been to the church within the past month, and 10% commit to fasts. Polls are subject to selection factors, but we have a specific number of those who were in church for Orthodox Christmas in 2024 - 1.4m people, which is about 1% of Russians.
Anecdotally, I live here and while I know a few people who were part of the faith as children, I know no one who has ever mentioned adhering to any religious ritual as an adult, aside from the universally enjoyable ones like eating the Easter pastries or painting eggs. Weddings rarely involve the church, too.
I have got the impression that unless you are extremely urban and Blue in USA, your circle of acquaintances will include practicing Christians to the point where they will not stand out. In Russia, the bubbles of atheists and the Orthodox do not appear to mix as much.
My observations fit my theory that the Russian Orthodox Church is largely grift and a tentacle of generic pro-state ideology.
I actually thought you were going to cite Anne Applebaum who's pointed out similar statistics that I'm aware of. Most Russians as I understand it are cultural Christians in the same sense Americans are cultural Christians in that they celebrate Christmas as a consumer holiday, not as a way to celebrate the glory of Jesus. That doesn't mean Christianity doesn't have a significant sway in both countries. The major reason the US foreign policy establishment is in hock to Israel is because of the massive amount of financial and religious support given to them by the Evangelicals and Christian Zionists in our country, both of which are heretical. That testifies to the institutional power an even secularized Christian society has in advancing their religious causes on the international stage.
You may be surprised to know that I've never formally attended Mass or a church before (in a devout ceremonial sense). Culturally, Christianity was a 'huge' influence in my local community as is Catholicism specifically in the case of my family. It is so huge in fact, that the secular community borrows heavily from the norms and habits largely introduced by Christians as part of their daily lives, without even recognizing it. You may say that that's not unique to Christianity, but Christianity has been the standard bearer for most of our practices from the day this country was founded. I'd argue that's probably historically the case in your country as well.
As I've gotten older, I've become even more attracted to the religion in the sense of a semi-devout or at least lay practitioner. That is to say someone that does more than just profess the faith and pays lip service to it but partakes in the demands and activity of it's more serious adherents. To call your tradition a "grift" I think is an insult to your history. That it's an ideology in league with functioning of the state system isn't a surprise because that hasn't been a historical anathema anywhere in the world and to any religion that's ever coevolved with state institutions.
I did not call "my tradition" a grift, and certainly not the broader kind of traditions that stem from Christianity without being explicitly recognized as religious. I called the church, as in the government-adjacent institution, a grift.
Regarding Christmas as a consumer holiday, it might provide some perspective that while in the Catholic West, as I understand, Christmas is synonymous with the winter holidays and New Year's Eve is an afterthought, in Russia New Year's Eve is synonymous with the winter holidays and Christmas is an afterthought. It is not nearly popular enough to be a consumer holiday.
I don’t know how you can speak meaningfully of Orthodox Christianity without the church. That’s like speaking about governance without the state. By this logic most of Christian history the world over should be discarded and throw on the scrap heap as a grift.
The US in particular is still dominated by non-denominational Protestantism. Calling yourself Catholic in certain areas some of my relatives live in will leave people scratching their heads or looking at you with a raised eyebrow. In both Protestant and Catholic cases, a true sense of bound up spirituality in the religion exists only in pockets across the country, the same as I’d wager it does in Russia. The average American shares much more in common with the average Russian in that neither is anywhere near as religious as the average Jew in Israel or Muslim in the Middle East. If you asked me to say the Our Father in ecclesiastical Latin I couldn’t do it unlike a Muslim who could give Salat in Arabic (which was already given by Muhammad in his native Arabic, save the classical-modern distinction).
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