site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

20
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

The only "Catholic countries" left are in Eastern Europe and have cultural attitudes of "eh, we get bad leaders from time to time religiously as well as secularly". Latin America becoming more and more protestant is a widespread phenomenon partly tied to non-religious social dynamics in those countries and partly tied to the way in which the Catholic church politicized itself.

Could you elaborate on the Latin America factors? I don't know the social dynamics, and I'm curious how Roman Catholic politicization has gone there.

This is a very broad overview, but the TDLR is that Latin American gender roles and social dysfunction are pretty bad in much of it, and evangelicalism offers a socially acceptable reason to do things the way the church crowd tells everyone to do things- without the burden of convincing people you take catholicism seriously(most Latin American Catholics are more or less secularized and the church is often seen as discredited). For political factors, Latin America’s history in the latter 20th century was, well, I think you know the gist, and clerics who weren’t interested in cooperating with right wing authoritarian regimes sided with socialism, conveniently discrediting both sides. Add to that pope Francis like leadership(that is, erratic, corrupt, ineffectual, given to fringe ideas, nepotistic, and steadily worsening) in general and the effects of the sex abuse crisis, and you’ve got both the religious people mad at the church for being almost literally either communists or fascists and going too far with post-Vatican II experimentation and poor leadership and everyone else mad at it for being a train wreck that made astonishingly poor political choices.