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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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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.