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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   35238 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 5, 2025

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So, there's a recurring criticism I see in many spaces regarding various right-wing projects in building parallel institutions, alternative ideological frames to that of the left, cultural resilience, and so on (ranging from critics of "Benedict Option" strategies, to Neema Parvini when talking about why "American nationalism" does not and cannot exist), which is that the thing in question is "a LARP," or "LARP-y," or something similar. Which is to say that it is "performative," that the actions aren't backed by some sort of deep-down "genuine" belief.

To which I say: so what?

First, whence this idea that the "deep-down" internal mindset of a person is more important than the actions themselves? Do a person's deeds carry so little weight, compared to their mental state when doing them?

But more importantly, isn't this how anyone gets started with something? I mean, a lot of the examples that come to my mind are things that I'm only familiar with second-hand, but I'll try to explain.

I'm old enough that back in the first few grades of elementary school, they made us stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance every day. I think back on us as first graders, doing that. Were we actually earnestly pledging our undying allegiance to the Republic and its flag? We didn't even understand all the words we were saying. We were just reciting what we were told to recite, the way we were taught to recite it, because we didn't want to get in trouble. It was all fake, all performative, all "a LARP."

Those of you who grew up religious, did you really understand every hymn you sang, every element of each ritual you participated in, from the very first time you did it? Or was there at least some "going through the motions" and mimicking your elders, with true understanding coming later?

In one of the replies to that Twitter post on the "homeschool prom" linked late last thread, someone described school dances as "a LARP" of the actual 'courtship' scene/process. Well, how else do people learn?

One common criticism of Pascal's Wager is that, even if you buy the argument, it only serves to persuade you that you should believe God exists, and there's a clear gap between thinking "I should believe God exists" and thinking "God exists." I mention it, because Pascal himself addressed this point shortly after introducing the Wager. And his answer is LARPing. Once you're convinced you should believe in God, then start acting as if He exists. "LARP" as a person who believes in God. If you do it thoroughly enough for long enough, Pascal argues, you'll start to actually believe it.

I've seen similar arguments in everything from job interview advice to dating advice — picture the person you want to be, and then act as they would, even if it's "all pretend."

It all comes down to the same classic piece of advice: "fake it till you make it." And what is the "fake it" stage, if not "LARP-y"? If not "performative" and, well, fake?

The reason given for this strategy is that it rarely stays fake forever. Maintaining a performative pretense, saying and doing one thing all while constantly going "this is silly, this is stupid, this is fake, this isn't me, I don't believe any of this" in your head is hard (at least for non-sociopaths). It's why governments have made citizens recite propaganda slogans over and over, why they made us say the Pledge of Allegiance over and over — because many times, it doesn't stay fake, doesn't stay merely performative. Again, it's fake it till you make it.

And even if an individual never "makes it," never achieves real belief no matter how long they perfectly maintain "the LARP"? Well, when we're talking about a long-term project involving a significant number of people, you have to consider future generations. Which gets to a concept mentioned here on the Motte before: generational loss of hypocrisy. Even if the first generation never get rid of their inner "this is so fake" thoughts… well, the next generations — whether that's new recruits, or their literal children — can't see those inner thoughts, only the outer "act." The LARP will not be multi-generational. To quote @WhiningCoil again:

I'm reminded of some joke about the difference between a cult and a religion. A cult is all made up by people. In a religion, all those people are dead.

So, to sum up, the accusation that a project of this sort is "LARP-y" is kind of irrelevant. Yes, it'll be LARP-y to start with; it kind of has to be. That's how things work. It's a phase — a necessary phase in the process of becoming something more, and if the people involved stay determined enough, and keep it up long enough, that phase will pass, and it will become something more.

Fake it till you make it.

(I'm hoping this isn't too incoherent, and isn't too low effort for a top-level post.)

I think for me when I level the accusations of LARPing, it's a synonym for accusing people of being unserious about the thing they are trying to practice/accomplish. It's not enough to pretend, you have to pretend effectively. You see this equally with rad-trad catholics or fundamentalists who conveniently forget that Jesus said that it's easier for a camel to thread the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven (how convenient that my new religion that is supposed to save me from the problems of modernity doesn't require me to give up the material trappings of that same system), and with leftists in favor of degrowth that don't seem to see that actually being serious about that ideology requires you to stop buying everything on amazon and doing gross things like composting your own poop. I would never accuse the Dominicans at my parish of larping, nor would I accuse the hippies who live off grid of doing so. It's the people that stridently profess a certain ideology without taking its tenets seriously that makes me think "LARP".

conveniently forget that Jesus said that it's easier for a camel to thread the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven (how convenient that my new religion that is supposed to save me from the problems of modernity doesn't require me to give up the material trappings of that same system)

Nitpick since it's irrelevant to your main point. As I understand it, the church threaded this needle by differentiating between the not-intrinsically-evil state of merely "possessing material wealth" and the intrinsically evil state of "being possessed by ones material wealth," i.e. not being "poor in spirit."

In a sort of "it isn't money that's the root of all evil, it's love of money" way?

Of you actually read the entire passage it’s from, that meaning seems like less of a stretch.

One common criticism of Pascal's Wager is that, even if you buy the argument, it only serves to persuade you that you should believe God exists, and there's a clear gap between thinking "I should believe God exists" and thinking "God exists." I mention it, because Pascal himself addressed this point shortly after introducing the Wager. And his answer is LARPing. Once you're convinced you should believe in God, then start acting as if He exists. "LARP" as a person who believes in God. If you do it thoroughly enough for long enough, Pascal argues, you'll start to actually believe it.

If there is a counter-pole to the rationality project, then this is it. Where rationalists talk endlessly about biases and how they distort our perceptions, and how we are shaped by evolution to lie to ourselves so that we can better lie to others, and how we can trick our faulty wetware into creating a half-way accurate map of the territory, on the other shoulder you have a little horned Pascal whispering: "or you could just embrace your nature and reject the notion of truth. Pretend to believe what is convenient for you to believe, and the mask will become the face soon enough."

so what?

Accusations of LARPing are accusations of insincerity. It depends on what you think the LARPer is really after.

In the original usage, the professed belief is "I can throw lightning bolts." There's no secret genuine belief that can make it look good.

In the Wager example, the professed belief is "I believe in God," but the genuine belief is "I should believe in God." These are pretty compatible, so calling it a LARP loses its sting. Your defense has worked.

Let's say I'm professing "I believe in God," except I'm running a con and my true belief is "You should give me your tithe money." If I'm called out, I can't exactly use "fake it 'til you make it!" as a defense. The fact that my project is LARP-y is very relevant.

I think your thesis is is worthless because it is both wrong and vapid. Any LARP that doesn't amount to anything? Well they just weren't determined enough to do it longer. It is completely unfalsifiable in the same way as a conspiracy theory normally is. And it doesn't matter how determined and for how long the cargo cults worship John Frum--the cargo is not coming back and it hasn't turned into something more.

Though I think if I take the essence of the idea it can still be applied in some cases. I'm thinking more of the transformations of the norms of communities though. Take for example both Something Awful's forums and 4chan (years ago). Both were places where being edgy and transgressive through things like being as offensive as possible was the norm as a form of counter-culture of contrarianism. Then on SA some people started being meta-contrarian (contrarian to the prevailing board culture), but were probably not being really sincere. Then other people that were not in on the joke followed along and eventually it turned into the neo-puritan society complete with witchhunts that was completely ideologically opposed to the site that the forum is based off of and the entire rest of the forums. Then this spread to /r/srs and snowballed further and further and now the modal progressive on Bluesky would be absolutely horrified that the origins of their ideology was incubated on a site that made fun of JeffK.

4chan had a similar culture and was initially made up of Something Awful diaspora. However, instead of the contraposition becoming the dominate culture the racism-as-shibboleth attracted enough honest racists that were not in on the joke. Eventually, it became enough of a problem that they were quarantined to /pol/, but this obviously did not contain them. And in a very similar way you can still see the echoes of this in various parts of the online right, but I don't think they are particularly ashamed of it.

So, to sum up, the accusation that a project of this sort is "LARP-y" is kind of irrelevant. Yes, it'll be LARP-y to start with; it kind of has to be. That's how things work. It's a phase — a necessary phase in the process of becoming something more, and if the people involved stay determined enough, and keep it up long enough, that phase will pass, and it will become something more.

It really depends on whether there's an actual conceptually sound plan to take it from the LARP stage to the actually done stage. Take the white nationalist mass-migration to Idaho thing. There's an actual plan to do it, see:

https://www.gonorthwest.info/

Contrast that with the "repeal the 19th" people on Twitter. I've never heard any of them outline how the 19th is to be repealed. It's just empty venting.

I'm reminded of the Free State Project here, which I think can be roundly called a success overall. And precisely because it had a plan and smart enough people running the stratagem.

Do you have any tips on where one might read about the outcomes of the free state project? I thought it was an interesting idea, but I never really knew what became of it.

NBC Boston had a docuseries on it: https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/life-liberty-and-the-pursuit-of-new-hampshire-an-nbc10-boston-original/2920007/ There's also a documentary called Libertopia: https://youtube.com/watch?v=PXSw0nYKiU8

But most of my insight comes from talking to Freestaters directly. And since it is still going strong, you can just go to their events and talk to them: https://www.fsp.org/

You may also find books criticizing the project, like A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear but I find most criticism of the endeavor from a left wing point of view to be uninteresting since it just devolves into a political argument about the value of the State rather than an analysis of the tactics.

Thank you!

LARP, Cargo Cult, Skin Suit, The Purpose of a System is What it Does, The Cruelty is the Point, Master/Slave Morality are all terms that are just used as boo-lights when they're used as conclusions or insults without extensive structural arguments justifying why they are true. They're clever memes someone heard and want to apply all over the place wherever their opponents gather.

To whit, I've heard LARP applied to online groups, who clearly fail the LA; to actual violent terrorists who clearly fail the RP; and to everyone in between. It's mostly meaningless, just meant to associate your enemy with losers in capes.

Thanks for posting this and defending it for me because I was going to post pretty much the same thing. I'm not a fan of when someone takes a term with a vague but widely understood meaning and then creates a very specific definition and uses the term as if that's the real definition. Academics do this a lot, but I'm afraid you did this yourself a while back with your precise definition of tackiness. I realized that throughout the rest of that thread I was very careful to use alternate language whenever I was tempted to say tacky in a context that didn't fit your definition, which made me realize that, as fun as your definition was, it didn't really reflect how people talk in real life.

Anyway, I think the rule should be that if the people using the term can't tell you what they mean by it exactly, it means nothing. It may make people feel smart to come up with a hyper-specific definition of LARP but then they just find the general public using the expression the way they want. So it's pointless.

but I'm afraid you did this yourself a while back with your precise definition of tackiness. I realized that throughout the rest of that thread I was very careful to use alternate language whenever I was tempted to say tacky in a context that didn't fit your definition, which made me realize that, as fun as your definition was, it didn't really reflect how people talk in real life.

On the one hand I'm flattered anyone remembers my writing.

On the other, this comment really makes me step back, in that I had a lot of fun writing out an elaborate definition of tacky, and thought I was doing so in good fun towards an enlightening descriptive view of reality; when apparently an intelligent reader would interpret the comment as a proscriptive definition.

Raising the questions: Am I bad writer? Or are the people I think are using too elaborate definitions also just having fun and hanging out?

LARP, Cargo Cult, Skin Suit, The Purpose of a System is What it Does, The Cruelty is the Point, Master/Slave Morality are all terms that are just used as boo-lights when they're used as conclusions or insults without extensive structural arguments justifying why they are true.

I'd strongly disagree. All of these have utility in describing human individual and group behavior. I say this even though I strongly disagree with even proper applications. The concepts are coherent, and even if heavily misused, their proper applications are still relevant.

"The cruelty is the point" is a critique of the endpoint that starts with "be nice, at least until you can coordinate meanness". Meanness, cruelty in other words, is the core of many social enforcement mechanisms. Pointing out that some action is "cruel" will often not get people to abandon that action, because to at least some degree they believe that "cruelty" is necessary. I certainly do.

The concepts are coherent, and even if heavily misused, their proper applications are still relevant.

Notice how my sentence ends:

when they're used as conclusions or insults without extensive structural arguments justifying why they are true.

The cruelty is the point can be justified in numerous ways as a phrase used to describe some policy or behavior.

It can also be used as a lazy insult to imply that one advocates a policy out of a sadism or hatred without showing one's work.

Sitting around running extra processor cycles justifying why what you're doing isn't a LARP or maybe it's a LARP but that's good actually is fine, but it's a waste of time when LARP is just being thrown out as a lazy generic insult by your interlocutor.

A good point, and my bad for not reading more closely.

Cheers.

"The cruelty is the point" isn't typically used to describe people who believe cruelty is necessary to serve a greater good (eg as a deterrent) - nine times out of ten, the implication is that the target believes cruelty is desirable in itself. Ends vs means. Some people think we need to punish criminals "cruelly" to deter others, even if, in a perfect world, no one ought to suffer; other people think justice involves making criminals suffer as punishment, even on a desert island. "The cruelty is the point" is typically used to accuse the first kind of people of secretly being the second kind of people, but hiding behind more socially acceptable utilitarian justifications.

I think there's a conceptual muddle (everywhere, not just here) between LARPing (silly, low-grade imitation, connoting unseriousness or outright insincerity) and Cargo Cult behavior (imitating superficial elements of something while not understanding what actual produces the results).

When someone talks about the homeschool prom being a LARP, what I think they're really getting at is that the organizers are trying to copy the structure of an adolescent courtship ritual without having all of the actual machinery that powers it. You try to set up a dance, but it doesn't work because not only do these teenagers not have pre-existing romantic relationships, they don't even know each other.

The reason given for this strategy is that it rarely stays fake forever. Maintaining a performative pretense, saying and doing one thing all while constantly going "this is silly, this is stupid, this is fake, this isn't me, I don't believe any of this" in your head is hard

Many of my peers can cite concrete negative experiences as their reason for leaving the church, but for myself and quite a few others in my cohort, the reason 14 years of private religious education failed to stick was precisely that it was abundantly clear to me past the age of about ten how silly and fake the whole thing was. Being made to participate in the rituals negatively impacted my religious identification compared to if I'd done the truly traditional thing and gone to church for Christmas, Easter, weddings, and funerals.

And the thing is: my teachers were not LARPers. By and large they were true believers trying to share their genuine belief. If they had been faking it, it would have been even more ridiculous, though I do think their authentic belief actively blinded them to the absurdity of doing things like asking a bunch of upper middle class white 15 year olds to share their personal testimony of being born again.

Which is to say: it's not that hard to think something is stupid and fake while going through the motions, and that's when the people insisting are themselves fully committed to the idea. I struggle to imagine what it would have been like if the schools had been run by present day tradcon LARPers whose interest in evangelical Christianity was purely instrumental.

It's why governments have made citizens recite propaganda slogans over and over

Yes, because while many people are persuadable, the most important benefit is isolation. The point of making you participate in these rituals is not to convince you that the underlying ideas are correct (though that may be an added benefit), it's to create the impression that everyone thinks these ideas are correct. Many people are pretty milquetoast and will go along with whatever the prevailing opinion is. The Pledge of Allegiance doesn't make you love America; it encourages you to think everyone around you loves America and you'd best get with the program if you don't want to be ostracized. Likewise with widespread church attendance. It's not about faking it 'til you make it; it's about making your preferred belief system the path of least resistance.

Unless you can actually introduce a general preference cascade towards, e.g., religious fundamentalism or at least get your community to voluntarily segregate from broader society, performative piety isn't going to do much. Substantive indoctrination is going to require something more all encompassing and building parallel institutions requires actually building competitive parallel institutions (which is the real sticking point).

Yeah, I'll just endorse this. Reading the OP I kept being struck by a "huh? no, that's not what happens..." feeling - that the description of having difficulty believing the thing you're doing is stupid did not resonate at all with me personally nor many of the peers of my youth as I understood them. It seems to me that while maybe not the standard reaction of the majority, it's still quite common for performative pretense to have no effect or a negative effect.

I mean LARP as ‘authentic vs staged’ or maybe ‘organic vs AstroTurf’ is the wrong framing. The better framing is cargo cult as in ‘functional vs pointless’.

Take givesendgo. There’s no allegation that it’s anything but a copy of gofundme. But it also works at its goals. It accomplishes things. It’s clearly larping hut also not a cargo cult.

At the end of the day people are made to live in community and in an atomized society functioning communities are very attractive to people. That’s the end goal of a parallel society- is to build high-functioning communities which grow by being functional, either by attracting newcomers due to it or by retaining the young born there. And that’s the framing to use- criticize right wing communities for not working, yes, but not for being ‘inauthentic’.

People have no idea how real world change is actually effected. Freemasonry sprung out of a LARP novel about a fictitious Rosicrucian Brotherhood; freemasonry rituals involved LARPing; this organization had a huge effect on the modern West. If you are an atheist, it’s impossible to see Christianity as anything other than a Hellenic / Hellenized-Jewish LARP over the Old Testament — yet it’s the most important movement of religious history. The entirety of the Roman elite were engaged in various “mystery cult” LARP rituals, like the Mithraists who were LARPing their own version of a Persian cult. Hitler, of course, was motivated by Wagner’s Live Opera Role Playing work Rienzi, a LORP, and then joined a LARPing movement filled with LARPing occultists who inflated their numbers, and before all his speeches he neurotically LARPed the gestures to seem organic and impassioned. It was LARPing all the way down, and the last thing you can say about Hitler is that his influence on reality was small.

The thing about the LARP is that the more you do it, the more it becomes true. If I were to throw you into the Chinese military, to do their ritual allegiances, you would be faking it 100%. But when you fake it, there’s invisible peer pressure and then music and ambience which changes your memory of the event… The second time you do it, it’s only 95% fake. After enough times, you wouldn’t be LARPing anymore. Provided that the ritual is actually reinforcing the right things. Not too dissimilar to the techniques used by the Chinese in the Korean War to gradually change a person’s identity. Of course, it’s far easier when you yourself are interested in modifying your own identity.

It’s like if I just repeat an affirmation, that’s not going to do much. But if I repeat it while elaborating upon all the connections in my life, and all the benefits, and I imagine various rewards of the affirming identity, over time I will believe it. Our own identity is constructed by memories, and we can modify our memories and make new ones — ergo, we can construct our own identity. This is akin to sports hypnotism. It works.

LARPing isn’t fake, it’s pre-reality. What’s fake is people pretending that they are in reality, when they are doing nothing. This comprises a lot of posting online. Posting online does little; LARPing identity rituals can change the entire history of the world. I imagine that this is part of the reason why IRL organizations are routinely slandered as LARPs — it is a useful tool to prevent anything that has actual potency from disrupting current structures.

Also, “authentic belief” itself is kind of mysterious as a concept. If I’m some guy online, and I write all these logical reasons for why Jesus is definitely God, but my behavior in the world does not evidence this belief, then do I really believe it? I mean, Jesus says right there that giving away my wealth gives me 100fold in this life and the next. So, why am I not doing it? There would be no better investment or use of my time. The reason no one does it is because they don’t actually believe. Whatever they say they believe, it doesn’t matter, because their revealed preference belief is that they don’t believe. So their criticism of others’ lack of belief is Pharaiscal. They would be more faithful to a Mr Beast challenge prize. And well, of course, Jesus also assumes this, hence why he spends so much time talking about how we need just the faith/trust the size of a mustard seed. I think that, we don’t really believe as we think we believe; we believe we believe, because this feels good; in actual fact, in our soul, we do not believe. And we don’t believe because there is insufficient social reinforcement / identity-rituals regarding the belief. The “faith statements” are something of a stretch or exercise: you practice believing that this bread is real flesh, and that the man was born a virgin and revived from death, in a socially-reinforcing way; and though you will never fully believe, you will at least be convinced part of the way, that it’s a good idea to be kind and a little giving. The faith statement is not a belief statement (we don’t accurately know what we believe) it’s instead an exercise with a mechanical consequence in our behavior.

I remember a quote from one of the blogs I used to read.

"Everything is just a LARP until it succeeds" is a quote I'm probably incorrectly paraphrasing, but refers to a real phenomenon. Then referred to the radical headchoppers in Algeria, who started out as mostly a joke or so people though.

Most social movements start out small and ridiculous but because they're using or exploiting some real social dynamic they eventually succeed.

/images/17464966851483505.webp

If you are an atheist, it’s impossible to see Christianity as anything other than a Hellenic / Hellenized-Jewish LARP over the Old Testament

Hardly. I am perfectly willing to believe that a lot of Christians - and certainly a majority of early Christians - sincerely believe in the objective reality of their messiah and his miracles.

But it’s at least the case that Jesus larped, and then the Disciples larped when writing about specific miracles.

Not necessarily.

Jesus may have been earnestly delusional. We certainly get a lot of schizophrenic self-proclaimed messiahs nowadays; why would the original article need to be anything more or less than the most successful one in history? C.S. Lewis used to say the "Jesus was insane" hypothesis could be dismissed by looking at the overall coherence and sensibleness of his teachings whenever he wasn't declaring himself the Son of Man. But that doesn't track with my, or many others' experiences talking to the mentally-will but well-educated. (See Scott's "Professor T" story for anecdata that's at least adjacent.) Grant that crazy attracts crazy, and whoever originated the more fantastical miracle stories may have likewise just been psychotic at the time, or something.

Granted, it's likely that someone deliberately made something up at some point, but even then I'm not sure I'd call it LARPing if they were attempting to perpetrate actual fraud against would-be followers. A hoax isn't the same thing as LARPing.

We also have to take into account that none of the accounts of Jesus we have are even claimed to be first-hand accounts - even granting that the person in fact existed and the general story of Jesus-the-religious-leader is broadly accurate, the Gospels are the product of several iterations of sanewashing (by followers who did not need to believe anything more outlandish than the common sense of the era) and selection (as we now know of Christian writings that were nixed such as the fanfic-tier Infancy gospels).

In my own estimation, the likelihood that a historical Jesus actually existed seems pretty low, and the apparent scientific consensus for it fake - looking at the main arguments commonly cited (..."we don't have more evidence about other historical figures considered uncontroversial"? "Some Roman guy writing centuries later recounted Jesus's execution as a fact"?), they seem to be borne of desperation to latch onto anything that will allow the consensus-supporter to dissociate themselves from cringe (internet atheists and professional skeptics?) and potential professional repercussions (would a prominent "Jesus was fictional" proponent have an easy time, e.g., socialising at relevant research conferences or asking to access the Vatican archives?).

We also have to take into account that none of the accounts of Jesus we have are even claimed to be first-hand accounts

This definitely isn't true!

Even setting aside the authenticity of the Gospels for the sake of argument, (and while I am not familiar with all of the fanfic-tier works, my understanding are that it's generally pretty easy to separate the fanfic-tier stuff from the canonical works due to anachronisms and such) Paul claims to have had a firsthand encounter with Christ and from what I understand mainstream academia typically recognizes many of the Pauline letters as authentic and very early dated.

See for example 1st Corinthians, which as I understand is generally believed to be genuine and originally written about twenty – thirty years after Christ's death, and in which Paul specifically claims to have met Christ (1 Corinthians 15:9).

Some Roman guy writing centuries later recounted Jesus's execution as a fact

This also isn't a remotely accurate description of the historical evidence at play. Here's a short list of non-Christians who wrote about pretty unambiguously about Christ within a single century of His death:

  • Josephus (the exact original passage is disputed but it is generally agreed that he references Christ)
  • Pliny the Younger (referencing the worship of "Christ as a god" around 110 AD)
  • Tacitus references Christ's death at Pilate's hands in his history written around 116 AD

Before 200 AD Christians were a significant enough phenomenon that a Greek playwright wrote a parodic play featuring them. It's pretty clear that Christianity wasn't something that got dreamed up a few centuries after the fact – Romans and Greeks were writing letters and plays that display a clear familiarity with Christians and their doctrines well before that time, and we have some early Christian inscriptions as well that rule that out.

And of course this is all without reference to Christian primary sources, such as the Pauline letters (as I mentioned) or the Didache that are believed to be written relatively recently after Christ's death.

I actually think the thing about the selection is overstated. Most of the "apocryphal gospels" significantly postdate the four canonical ones; the process of eliminating them wasn't much more than "go back to the earliest available sources and discount the dodgy latter-day additions", without much consideration to their contents per se. (I'll grant you that John's Apocalypse being included, out of any number of visionary Gnostic-adjacent ravings, is a bit of a fluke.)

they seem to be borne of desperation to latch onto anything that will allow the consensus-supporter to dissociate themselves from cringe (internet atheists and professional skeptics?) and potential professional repercussions (would a prominent "Jesus was fictional" proponent have an easy time, e.g., socialising at relevant research conferences or asking to access the Vatican archives?).

Eh. Whether or not Jesus did exist, I think you're vastly overestimating how much scholars care what laymen think. There are some who make bank off laymen like Ehrman but he's atypical. For most, it's just not that interesting and yields little status or new research. Richard Carrier is actually a historian and even he gets little attention, nobody cares that much what Hitchensfan2909 is doing.

Scholars didn't reason backwards from the cringe. They already believed that Jesus was a historical figure long before the internet cringe started and simply don't want to deal with it.

Professional consequences also doesn't explain it all. Yes, the scholars in religious institutions often have to swear to faith statements and can be fired if they deviate from doctrine. But these people are obvious - Mike Licona lost his job for denying the literal raising of the saints in Matthew. Like...no one is under the impression that he or anyone in his position would deny Jesus' existence.

But critical scholars in more secular spaces have said some pretty offensive and lurid things from the perspective of traditional doctrine (Dominic Crossan iirc denies Jesus was given a tomb and claims that he was tossed into a mass grave and left to scavengers like any criminal) and they get away with it all the time.

If we're going to psychoanalyze, I think you actually accurately represent the general public's intuition that skepticism of Jesus' existence is more radical than the alternative and their suspicion that people are dodging it out of deference to religion (or their underestimation of just how hostile critical scholarship can be to traditional doctrine). And I think this impression is why mythicism is so attractive to atheists despite their usual deference to expertise.

Grant that crazy attracts crazy, and whoever originated the more fantastical miracle stories may have likewise just been psychotic at the time, or something.

Or you ignore the traditional narrative that the Disciples wrote the Gospels in which case you don't need a hoax, or delusion. It's just later believers believing what they're told or extrapolating from what the Hebrew Bible says the Messiah will do, an old tactic and not a sign of being insane or mendacious.

Except for the original resurrection claim of course. Strangely, the Disciples may be better candidates for delusion than Jesus. It's possible that Jesus really did think he'd bring about the end of Roman rule in some political sense with God's help like many other unfortunate Jews of the time. But at least some of the Disciples clearly believed that he was resurrected , which is noted by Paul to be very odd by the beliefs of the time, and were willing to be martyred despite having a front-row seat to the mother of all disconfirming events.

I've actually seen this used as a modern version of the Lewis argument by secular Christians who can't appeal to miracle claims: the Disciples had first-hand knowledge and were devout Jews. It's insane for them to go with the divinity of a crucified criminal. Unless...

Oh, I wasn't assuming the Gospels were the direct writings of the Disciples, but someone at some point needs to have originated the miracle claims; either they were later liars, or they were contemporary crazies.

Re: the Resurrection, I'm not convinced it was such a radical notion at the time, since the Gospels themselves allude to contemporary speculation that Jesus might have been a resurrected John the Baptist - and/or that John himself may have been a resurrected Isaiah.

And then there's the thing where Mark's account ends at the mourning-women finding his tomb empty and having a brief, ambiguous encounter with a man clad in white (who is, TMU, generally interpreted by believers as an angel, not even the actual risen Christ himself). There are many plausible non-supernatural reasons for Jesus's body to have been removed from Joseph of Arimathea's crypt a few days after he was placed there; it being found empty would have been plenty good enough to start hopeful speculation that he had returned, especially if Jesus himself had in fact alluded to a future resurrection prior to his death. From there, scattered eyewitness reports of risen-Jesus-sightings are no different from people claiming to have run into a middle-aged Elvis Presley.

Re: the Resurrection, I'm not convinced it was such a radical notion at the time

Paul says the crucified Messiah is the stumbling block and folly, because that bit requires a Messiah claimant to die without fulfilling the prophecies and be raised. If you're reading from a secular POV, you have strong reason to be skeptical of Jesus' prophecies of his own death and resurrection (just as everyone is skeptical of his prophecies about Jerusalem) so you have a yet another Messiah claimant being brutally disproved by being hung on a tree and then followed and seemingly deified by Jews (while every other such movement died out)

it being found empty would have been plenty good enough to start hopeful speculation that he had returned,

The problem is that Paul says that Jesus directly appeared to people like Peter who, unlike the Gospel writer, we believe are probably his contemporaries.

Between that and the reference to the appearance to the 500, it seems like someone had to have had some delusional/bereavement episode that then spread.

But the Christians who make the case - e.g. Habermas - often skip the tomb since it first appears in the Gospels (I think Crossan denies Jesus got a grave at all since criminals weren't supposed to, despite the story having a plausible explanation). They focus on a few "minimal facts" which even critical scholars allegedly agree on.

The half-dozen facts we usually use are these: 1) that Jesus died by crucifixion; 2) that very soon afterwards, his followers had real experiences that they thought were actual appearances of the risen Jesus; 3) that their lives were transformed as a result, even to the point of being willing to die specifically for their faith in the resurrection message; 4) that these things were taught very early, soon after the crucifixion; 5) that James, Jesus’ unbelieving brother, became a Christian due to his own experience that he thought was the resurrected Christ; and 6) that the Christian persecutor Paul (formerly Saul of Tarsus) also became a believer after a similar experience.

With those few facts, it is weird. How weird depends on how strong you think the borders between paganism and Christianity were. But it seems like at least someone, maybe Peter, had a delusion (or lied)

Fact 6 is slightly confusing here. The apostles claimed to have seen a physical Jesus in his actual, resurrected body. Paul's vision of Jesus happened long after Ascension Day and was understood as a vision of someone was not currently living in a physical body - I don't see why it is evidence for a resurrection at all.

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If you're not careful, you'll think that everything is LARPing. And there is an element of truth to that: "all the world's a stage" and such. Systems in practice are less rigid and formal than they look from the outside: for all the pomp and circumstance, your local sports team is just a bunch of dudes playing a game; most of the magic there is actually imparted by the audience watching it.

So, to sum up, the accusation that a project of this sort is "LARP-y" is kind of irrelevant. Yes, it'll be LARP-y to start with; it kind of has to be. That's how things work. It's a phase — a necessary phase in the process of becoming something more, and if the people involved stay determined enough, and keep it up long enough, that phase will pass, and it will become something more.

The word that's underlying the LARP accusation is "unserious". Maybe the participants don't have to be serious about it all the time, but certainly if one is trying to build an enduring organisation they have to be serious. It would be a tremendous insult to early christians to call their faith unserious considering the hardships they went through for it. Jesus' crucifixion is certainly serious. The pledge of allegiance being recited unseriously by kids is one thing, but the man who wrote it certainly thought it was a serious tool to build patriotic spirit.

I'm not making a judgement on whether new "right-wing" organisations are serious or not, but I think the idea that the people building them have to be serious to be successful has not been debunked here.

@2rafa has hurt my feelings a few times calling religious people LARPers. I was one of them for a while but this process has worked for me, and now I genuinely believe!

No offense to you Rafa hah.

Hmm, there are lot's of possible criticisms, some less valid than others, and if you are encounting folks calling it a LARP soley on some un-earnest enough mindreading, then your counter is fine. But I think the more germane LARP criticism is not about 'intention', but the fact that a LARP is by definition, not real, superficial, and thus unsustainable.

Like if someone 'LARPed' the middle ages by conquering and setting up an actual feudal state and ran it thus, but on their death bed they left a note saying 'tee hee, twas a LARP', it falls kind of flat. But this is quite different than actual LARPing, which involves temporary, superficial escapism, that's fundamentally facilitated by the non-LARP. Armor that looks cool, but can't stand up in real combat, forts and 'castles' that you couldn't actually maintain, all funded by an email job.

To this point, accusastions of LARPing, rather than mindset, should be accusations against rigor and of fragility, and serve as predictions about sustainability.

I think bringing up the Benedict Option is a bad counter-example, since the trope-maker, Rod Dreher is a pretty damning case study of all this. There's nobody who publically committed themselves harder to this idea, yet he failed to even superficially create even sustainable parts of this project in his own life. The book he wrote, was a cherry picked set of anecdotes, cobbled artificially into a picture he wanted to paint, not an examination of the concept in earnest.

I think bringing up the Benedict Option is a bad counter-example, since the trope-maker, Rod Dreher is a pretty damning case study of all this. There's nobody who publically committed themselves harder to this idea, yet he failed to even superficially create even sustainable parts of this project in his own life. The book he wrote, was a cherry picked set of anecdotes, cobbled artificially into a picture he wanted to paint, not an examination of the concept in earnest.

How do you mean regarding Rod?

are you familiar at all with Rods life trajectory and current state?

I have not. What's happened?

The short story is that his life since writing the Benedict Option has turned out exactly the way the BO is meant to avoid. I don't mean that he's turned away from his positions or been hypocritical or anything. (I'm not trying to calumny his character). Just that literally the trajectory of his circumstances, undermines the credibility of the book as an efficacious endeavor, rather than an intellectual LARP.

Rod is currently an expat divorcee, rootlessly gliding around Europe without any 'home' left in America, somewhat disconnected from his family. Whether begrudgingly or not, he's living an almost cartoonishly rootless cosmopolitan lifestyle, pretty much only possible in the world of liquid modernity, the BO has rejected.

Even if you want to argue that Rod didn't Ben-Op hard enough or something, it just strengthes the LARP point, when if the trope-namer himself couldn't implement it effectively.

And again, I don't know all the ins and outs of how Rod got here, or whatever, this is not a character-attack in the slightest. It is just an observation about the BO and the topic of whether it's serious or a LARP for a certain class of people.

Relatedly, I have general issue with Rod's 'research' approach, and question the kind of 'study' made up of carefully curated vignettes of the point you're pushing, rather than a more rigorous approach to forwarding such a social theory.

That's interesting. I read a lot of Rod probably eight years ago, though even then he was a bit inconsistent, and wrote way too much chaff, making it hard to find the wheat. I would go to his AC blog on my lunch break, and there would be a half dozen new posts, five of which were just blatant culture warring, but it wasn't instantly clear which ones. So I gave up reading him, especially when he moved to Substack, and I didn't care to subscribe. But I was still very much in the bubble that was interested in his work, and my church did a book study about The Benedict Option. I tried looking up what happened, but he's very vague about the whole thing, and seems to be almost entirely paywalled now.

Dreher has always struck me as the kind of guy who desperately needs to stop reading the news, but can't help himself. There's something very tragic about a guy who wrote a book about setting up islands of peace away from the mess of the world, but whose output is mostly hot takes on current events.

I haven't kept up with him too much lately, I last heard of him when he announced he was getting a divorce which has gotta be two years ago now.

In general I remember liking Rod when he was one of the first Hipster Orthodox right wing writers I knew in his TAC days, just before the Benedict Option came out.

I also heard he seems to have noped off to Hungary, but yeah, last time I checked in with him he said he was getting a divorce. I believe there was an argument about "whether the cross can be co-opted." But that's the last I heard of him.

While I really respect his struggles with Catholicism, and I know they were very personal for him (he said that a priest he was personally close with was credibly accused of sex abuse, which broke his trust in the whole institution), I also get the sense that they went full-steam-ahead into Orthodoxy as kind of a second option, the second-most attractive girl at the bar altar rail, and so there's a lot of trauma, conversion, and ideological flip-flopping involved in his personal journey, which reads to me more like desperation than divine ascent. I wonder if that just got to be too much for his wife, especially considering how famously repulsive Orthodoxy is to non-Orthodox women, something I've observed personally. He also just strikes me as quite a depressive, just a very moody and somber person whose view of life and the future is almost perfectly apocalyptic, and I can't imagine that makes a marriage easy to manage. When I think about Dreher, the overwhelming feeling is "sad." He doesn't feel like he's chasing the divine, he feels like he's running away from brokenness. Which is not a bad starting point, but far from anything that measures up to holy Benedict.

especially considering how famously repulsive Orthodoxy is to non-Orthodox women, something I've observed personally.

I have not observed this personally. Do you mind giving us some examples? I'm struggling to envision how orthodox christianity would be particularly repulsive to secular women, compared to any other conservative religious belief, such as islam.

Women like Byzantine Catholicism about as much as they do any other kind of Catholicism, so it isn’t the rite.

It’s probably the anti-westernism over the dumbest things, a Canadian antiAmericanism-like reflexive anticatholism that narcissizes small differences WRT pews and mariology instead of just going hur dur papists, and let’s not leave out beards. Not that women hate beards per se, but the giant beards that need a trim, and often enough also a combing, are not going to be popular. Add that it’s attached to conservative religion and there’s echoes of Islamic misogyny. It just comes off as a bunch of badly groomed autistic weirdos with mommy issues half the time.

Obviously not all orthodox but it’s enough to poison the well.

It's less about Eastern Orthodoxy as a set of beliefs, and more about the practices and people of Eastern Orthodoxy. And we're not talking about secular women here, I suppose they'd just go running in the opposite direction for reasons that you well understand, but conservative-to-moderate, vaguely religious women, in the United States. And it isn't an active hate, it's not that these ladies are obsessed with Orthodoxy and want to cast hexes at it or something, they just have no interest in it and find it a little odd that anyone would.

As I understand it, the median Orthodox convert in the United States is an intellectual, introverted, evangelical, college-educated man, who discovered Orthodoxy through the mysterious workings of the Holy Spirit, also known as Wikipedia. From what I've heard, and seen, the women in this man's life get dragged to the divine liturgy ("St. Nathaniel says 'come and see!'"), and most often do not hear the angels singing the way the man did the first time he witnessed the liturgy.

At my local Orthodox parish, there was a young guy who dragged his entire family to Orthodoxy, and while his parents and siblings were committed, it's obvious he was the one who orchestrated the whole thing. They'd never have stepped foot in an Orthodox church if he hadn't pushed them.

Frederica Mathewes-Green, who as I understand it is kind of the "influencer mom" of American Orthodoxy, said in one of her videos that she just didn't like the divine liturgy the first time she went to an Orthodox church. She grew to like it, but that initial revulsion, or indifference, is what I've generally seen and heard from women who've had experience with Orthodoxy.

Participating in the honored tradition, I dragged both my mother and my girlfriend to liturgy a few times -- neither liked it. Both of them liked going to mass, though. (Definitely not the latin mass -- they can't understand what anyone's saying.)

I think a lot of it has to do with the people. Your framing says a lot, actually -- the intellectual content of faith is the thing that brings our evangelical man to become interested in Orthodoxy, but the women he drags don't know or care about any of that. She's interested in what's actually going on around her: what songs are they singing? What is this strange artwork on the walls? What's the content of the sermon? What do the candles mean? What are the people like? Are they a bear normal, or strange? Are people happy here? Does this seem like a community where I fit in?

And if we're talking about somewhat conservative American women, the sort of women who might be interested in a conservative religious tradition, we're talking about women who are generally very interested in social convention, unobtrusiveness, familiarity. They're very socially-oriented, they want a community that feels familiar, friendly, and safe, not strange, alienating, and unpredictable.

As our female draggee looks around, she sees these weird Byzantine paintings on the walls where people look odd, with strange proportions and almost alien-like ridges and folds in the depictions of their skin (in some icons, St. Paul genuinely just looks like a space alien to me with his giant head). The church bells ring out, and instead of the sweet ding donging of Western church bells, she hears them clanging like a hailstorm. ("Was that an accident?") She hears odd music she's never heard before, no familiar hymns, no familiar cadence -- if the chant is Byzantine-style, it genuinely sounds, to Western ears, like something from the Muslim and not the Christian world -- and she smells weird smells of strange incense, as some guy in an elaborate robe starts swinging it at her. And the worst part? She's not supposed to sit down! "It's for the old ladies," our evangelical man helpfully told her. Well, she's not an old lady, but this just doesn't seem right. She feels like she's put on the spot and has to stand where everyone can watch her, in a situation where she already feels out of place. And now she can't even get comfortable by sitting down and just watching!

The service ends, and, though she's shy, evangelical man starts dragging her around to talk to people, and she can't help but feel like they're just... a little off. There's the man who's wearing a kilt as his Sunday best in the middle of Kansas. There's the guy who wears a bowtie. There's the dude who seems prone to leering, like he's been on a naval vessel for six months and hasn't seen the sight of a woman in that time. There's the guy she can overhear talking about the upcoming Holy Friday service, who's telling his friends, "I just can't wait to stick it to those Jews." (A real anecdote I heard from an Orthodox friend of mine about someone he knew.) And a bunch of the men, including the priest, have a thick, untrimmed beard -- can't they trim them?

Half the people in the church are speaking in foreign languages she can't understand, and are sticking to themselves, avoiding eye contact. She feels like a foreigner in her own country. People are talking about the lenten fast, and are speaking about cheese like they've been on the naval vessel with the leerer with only bread and water -- wait, these people can't eat cheese for months out of the year? The priest is friendly, but seems strange, overly intellectual, and his beard looks greasy. She strikes up a conversation with another convert's wife, and she tells her, "yeah, I didn't like the orthodox church either at first -- it grows on you."

And the overwhelming feeling our dragged-along woman feels to all this is an unadulterated, grade A:

ICK!

My mom told me once, after I'd stopped exploring Orthodoxy, that the Orthodox parishioners "seemed like hippies." My girlfriend was less expressive, but said she thought they "felt like strange people." Neither would have attended the divine liturgy if I hadn't dragged them, and neither had any interest in continuing to attend after I stopped being interested. They just found it overwhelmingly weird.

This obviously doesn't apply to cradle Orthodox -- it is their tradition and they're quite familiar with it. It's western Christianity that seems weird to them. And there are, of course, women who choose to convert to Orthodoxy on their own, but I've never talked to any of them so I can't offer a take.

Sometimes I share my views on Eastern Orthodoxy and people seem surprised by them -- I don't know, maybe I've just seen a tiny sliver of what Orthodoxy in America looks like and it's different elsewhere. I owe a lot to my time exploring Orthodoxy, including a strengthening of my love for the Mother of God, an appreciation for the iconographic tradition (looks over at my icon of Christ Pantokrator), a more reserved approach to the procession of the Holy Spirit, a grounding and softening of my Western 'hard edges' -- without abandoning the juridical lens on Christianity as some Orthodox seem to call for -- and even a belief in the essence-energies distinction, which, interestingly, resolved a struggle I'd had with Western Mariology. And I sincerely and deeply respect the Orthodox tradition as a pathway to communion with God.

But despite all that, my own feeling after sincerely exploring Orthodoxy is that, for all the missionary zeal it's developed in America through conversion, it still feels like it's someone else's church, and I'm just living in barbarian lands an ethnic diaspora of ethnicities I simply am not a part of. And where even the native converts are, respectfully, not always the most 'normal' or conventional people, even if I bear no ill will towards them.

I had a convert friend in the Orthodox church who was quite interesting, obviously very intelligent. But he also had a passion for Orthodoxy and Eastern Europe that bordered on obsessive; he would talk about and cook Russian cuisine for people, despite being as English-German as the rest of us American white people. He had a two-bedroom condo, and one entire bedroom had been converted into what can only be described as a chapel, with icons covering every wall and liturgical books overflowing bookcases. He wanted to be a priest, but had no interest in marriage (which would make him the perfect Catholic seminarian, but obviously led to some stern pastoral advice from his spiritual father). He honestly struck me as the kind of guy who just needed to get laid.

While I respect other cultures and I'm even open to trying their cuisine, I simply have no interest in becoming Greek or Bulgarian or Russian. At times, it felt to me like fitting in the Orthodox church required a cultural self-emptying, not merely a spiritual one. As though to become Orthodox I had to renounce the profound insights of the Western philosophical tradition or the honor due to my ancestors and embrace a worldview that sees them as something between "deeply mistaken" and "the Great Satan of the whole world." I get enough hatred of the West from the secular world, and I just don't care to receive it from my fellow Christians.

And I guess that's what I see in Dreher. He's a Western man, born in Louisiana, and restoring his relationship with his parents was important to him. But he has so self-emptied himself of his culture that he's literally fled the West to go to Hungary, despite writing a book about how Westerners can create pockets of grace within the West after the model of the great founder of Western monasticism.

If I mean anything by this long post, I mean to say that Orthodoxy feels foreign, alien, even converts often feel somewhat odd or unusual, and very often its prescription to Westerners is "reject your people, RETVRN to ours." And that this is picked up by non-Orthodox women more than non-Orthodox men, because of their strong attunement to social signals and preference for the conventional.

I’m another finding this from AAQC. I’ve always been intrigued by orthodoxy, at least the theological content. But im not entirely convinced for several reasons that aren’t necessarily “the ICK”.

First is that the converts seem to get this weird smug vibe where they decide that ONLY this one specific way of being a Christian is real, and ONLY these particular types of chants are valid. And of course if you don’t fast like a monk and keep a strict prayer rule and build an icon corner (the bigger the better of course). I find them specifically enamored with the trappings of this style of Christianity. What I don’t necessarily find is the faith behind it, concern for Christ Himself. It’s like someone who’s in love with a lifestyle, maybe not completely a LARP, but it’s also not a focus on faith itself.

Second, I do get the ick from some of the “if you don’t do it exactly like I do, you’re a heretic” thing. Like, I do prefer high church liturgy, but I find myself feeling put off when the Orthobros come along and absolutely mock contemporary worship music, “strip mall churches”, and — horror of horrors — having coffee and donuts outside the sanctuary. I’ve never understood the need to try to fit my style of doing church onto everyone else. I like tge British Common Book of Prayers. I’m also generally okay with you liking modern Christian worship if that’s your choice. We come from different cultures, and me trying to stuff you into my box is not good, as I’d rather you find Christ in the most rockabilly smoke machined evangelical church out there than go to a high church liturgy and mentally sleep through it. There’s just a Pharisaical vibe about the whole thing like they’re sort of above the rest of us because they’re the only ones who got it right and the rest aren’t really good Christians and might not even be Christian at all.

Finally, I think there’s a rather odd thing where a lot of the Orthobros seem to suddenly take on really reactionary political views that have nothing to do with what I understand Orthodox Christianity to be about. They suddenly are unironically believing that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion represents a real conspiracy. They suddenly believe that women need to become trad wives and so on. Like, you converted to orthodox Christianity and suddenly you’re a Byzantine Mencius Moldbug who talks like a groyper? I don’t think that’s the traditional Christian faith. It seems rather the culture of online Orthobros who either come from or are lead into far right politics and somehow see these ideas as the reason to choose orthodoxy.

Count me as another one who found this through the AAQC roundup.

As an inhabitant of the state with the highest population fraction Eastern Orthodox, I feel like I should say something here; but I don't exactly have much relevant first-hand knowledge, except to note that our Orthodox population is, as one might expect, disproportionately Native (what with many of their ancestors having been first evangelized by Russian Orthodox missionaries, back before Russia sold the place to the USA).

I owe a lot to my time exploring Orthodoxy, including a strengthening of my love for the Mother of God, an appreciation for the iconographic tradition (looks over at my icon of Christ Pantokrator), a more reserved approach to the procession of the Holy Spirit, a grounding and softening of my Western 'hard edges' -- without abandoning the juridical lens on Christianity as some Orthodox seem to call for -- and even a belief in the essence-energies distinction, which, interestingly, resolved a struggle I'd had with Western Mariology.

I can't believe I missed this post, and I'm really glad it got featured in the AAQC roundup. If I might ask, can you expand on these points some? I find your perspective on the Christian faith to be very enlightening, and I would enjoy hearing more about these topics from you.

You give an accurate and quite entertaining description of a certain type of Orthodox parish/parishioner. As a cradle Orthodox Christian who is the child of American converts, my central member of the class Eastern Orthodox is quite different, but I understand how off-putting the types you describe would be if they were one's first Orthodox experience (and they certainly exist).

I belong to the Orthodox Church in America, which was founded by Russian missionaries and has self governed since the rise of communism in Russia. Most churches in the OCA serve fully in English. Priests are required to have secular and seminary degrees and are generally well-groomed. The liturgical chant is the Russian-style four part harmony, so it is basically music sung by a Western-style choir. There are traditionally ethnic parishes, but in many areas (like the Southeast, where I live), the churches are culturally American.

The Greek Orthodox churches in North America might sometimes be less welcoming to non-Greeks (though this is quickly changing in many places as converts come in), but they are generally pretty Westernized and clean-cut (the Greeks Westernized their liturgical/clerical practices in America to give off a more "normal" Catholic/Episcopalian vibe - the GOA church in my city even has an organ).

The Antiochian Churches are also often full of American converts, or, if they are more ethnic, are similar to what TheLoser describes below regarding his/her experience in the Coptic Church.

The type of experience you had sounds stereotypical of ROCOR or maybe an insular Greek or otherwise ethnic parish. To the degree that Orthodoxy has a future in the West, it is probably not in parishes like that.

Honestly, your experience doesn't match mine at all. For context, I am a cradle Coptic Orthodox in Canada. From my experience, most converts are either converts through marriage or through outreach on the part of Orthodox parishioners. Maybe its because Canada is more catholic, but I do not think I have ever seen a, as you say, "intellectual, introverted, evangelical, college-educated man" convert.

You characterize Orthodox parishioners as "odd" or "hippies", and priests as "intellectuals". This does not match my experience at all. Are there one or two crackpots? Sure, but what organization doesn't? The vast majority of parishioners where I'm from are perfectly normal members of society. The young people in Orthodox churches are even more approachable; they go to the same universities, work the same jobs, go to the same parties, do the same things for fun. The priests are nice, welcoming, and secularly educated. I feel that you've approached orthodoxy from an intellectual paradigm, and that's coloured your perception of the orthodox community. From my perspective, most Orthodox are normal western people, who just happen to be Orthodox. The median introduction to Orthodoxy is from an average young adult introducing their partner/friends to the Church, who play up the history and "connectedness" of the church to society and history in general.

You've mentioned that Orthodox communities seem like social clubs. I'd like to point out that it seems like that because Orthodox churches in the homeland actually are social clubs. They basically operate as NGOs that offer social services, and act as community centers.

Also, you've mentioned that joining an Orthodox church often feels like you're giving up your own culture. Sadly, I agree. Preferably, an indigenous Orthodox Church of America would be established that represents the culture, history and ethos of America. Unfortunately, establishing such a church is a centuries endeavor.

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I wonder how much of it is literally just orthodox cassocks seeming like the wrong size half the time and the clergy tending to have beards that… don’t look well groomed.

The Latin mass has a lot of the same issues with being literally in a foreign language and attracting plenty of obsessives but manages to be much more female friendly because it looks good. Not just beauty and grandeur but neat and orderly. And I have heard comments from women that it struck them when they first went that seeing immaculate, well choreographed and behaved boys serving the priest made an impression. Aesthetics has two dimensions, after all- there’s a ‘clean and well maintained’ look to go with the classical beauty look and women are very sensitive to the former. It definitely seems like in nonreligious contexts women really care about that stuff- much more than men- too.

I haven’t observed it either, but it is rather difficult to raise small children Orthodox, everything s long and Sunday School is after Liturgy. It sounds like they have three kids and we’re homeschooling, I could see that being pretty rough if she wasn’t into it. Some Orthodox families I know seem to have the wife going along with homeschooling because the husband has strong opinions, but isn’t that into the actual teaching part.

Islam is a fargroup conservative belief, Orthodoxy is an outgroup one. If my country went full Handmaid's Tale, it would be the Orthodox putting the women back under the boot sooner than the Muslims, despite the sizeable Muslim subpopulation.

I have no idea what type of orthodoxy you guys are dealing with. The type I'm familiar with (immigrants and such) encourages women to get degrees and high-powered jobs.

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the second-most attractive girl at the bar altar rail

I know it's a metaphor but I feel the need to nitpick- the Byzantine rite doesn't have an altar rail. Communion is received from a cleric standing in front of the iconostasis and the service takes place mostly behind the iconostasis.

Yes, I’ve been to orthodox services.

And if we’re going to pedantically pick apart metaphors, most Latin churches these days don’t have an altar rail either.

I think this is very related to an observation that has been pointed out for some time now: In most modern places, especially cities, the liberal or even progressive worldview is nowadays the de-facto conservative option in the intuitive sense of the word. What would you call the worldview of your own parents, of the entrenched powers, of the commonly accepted older moral guardians? The default opinion of the church lady archetype around me (to some lesser degree even where I grew up, and certainly where I live now) is some mix of environmentalism (which in itself is intrinsically conservative to some degree) and anti-fascism that many of them have by now been holding since the 70s or so. "Too far left" is to them equivalent to "too pious"; Maybe foolish or impractical, but never really bad or evil. Even if they may technically be part of a religion, they clearly hold their leftie creds in higher regard, often explicitly assuring everyone that no, they actually don't care about the teaching of their actual official religion in particular, they are more on the generally spiritual side and just wanted to be active in some religion in some form. Hell, the literal evangelische Kirchentage (church days organized by mainline protestants) have some great workshops (translated, obviously): "Queer animals on the ark", "brave and strong. Empowerment for BiPoC-kids" or "name blessing for trans*, inter or non-binary people".

This necessarily means that any rival ideology claiming to be conservative is actually at best regressive or at worst wholly unrelated to conservatism, since the de-facto conservatives hate being called conservative. In that sense, the LARP-criticism is correct, since one of the selling points of conservatism is the proof-by-demonstration intrinsic to the ideology that has been dominant for the last decades or longer. It's obviously a general problem also often observed on the left on different topics, but right-wing projects like to have it both ways: On one hand, they recognize they're the rebels organizing a new system, and on the other, they want to leech off the prestige of some old conservative tradition that they were never part of, insufficiently understand, imperfectly copy and which thus may or may not actually work the way it used to. People notice that.

I don't completely disagree with you, however. In my view, most of these right-wing projects need to be more honest they are not really conservative anymore, and lean more into the rebel frame. Nevertheless, as you point out, to some degree unapologetic LARPing is always part of how you create a new system. But it also includes more flexibility and adaption based on what works and what doesn't than many of them want to really practice. Creating something new is hard work.

This necessarily means that any rival ideology claiming to be conservative is actually at best regressive or at worst wholly unrelated to conservatism, since the de-facto conservatives hate being called conservative.

To elaborate on this point: The accusation of LARPing is most pertinent when it's "LARPing as trad", which is a sort of performative contradiction. The original sense of "tradition" (from Latin traditio) is "that which has been handed down", and not (as in colloquial usage) "the way things were at some point in the past" - but this equivocation is significant. The value of tradition qua tradition is in the Lindy effect, but if that's what you care about, a "tradition" that must be "RETVRNed" to is really no tradition at all, but a LARP. If the tradition (as in, the organic chain of transmission) was broken, such that you have to learn about it from old books rather than from your elders, then in fact it did not stand the test of time, and so it can't claim the Lindy effect to its credit.

I mean im not sure LARP is always a problem. If a worthy tradition was lost due to force — for example, a culture was forced to give up its language after a conquest, it’s somewhat a LARP to go back to that. It’s also in many cases a worthy effort to do that even if at first it is a LARP. The revival of Hebrew was a LARP at tge time. Now it’s the native language of Israel, and there’s a living culture that grew up alongside it. Irish is taught in schools in Ireland, it is sort of a LARP even now, but it’s an attempt at reviving a piece of that culture.

As usual, it depends on your goals and the details of what is done. In our region, my parents' generation got the local language & culture beaten out of them by the greater german system, which resulted in me and my generation not being able to speak it (despite my parents still talking it among each other; I can understand it, though) and internalizing a more general "cosmopolitan" german culture instead, even if it still has some local flavors to it.

Now some of my old classmates are reviving the old language through "traditional theater" and similar events, but as far as I can see, they don't reject their actual internalized culture at all. I can't help but view it as pointless LARPing, even if they clearly are mostly sincere about wanting to reconnect with their heritage. Then again, I'm not really a traditionalist myself, so you could call my criticism dishonest itself.

I'm holding onto my dialect for dear life. It's a core element of my experience of "home". Somehow I internatlized early on that it was in fact the others, the dialect-rejectors, the ostentatiously high-german who were LARPing, who pretended not to understand and speak the actual natural language of this place and time. And I had the goood fortune to be among others who practiced their dialect shamelessly and naturallly.

But that was long ago.

It's obvious that young people are socialized not primarily with others from the same place, but above all else with rootless cosmopolitans and their media. The number of those who naturally speak the local dialect are dropping precipitously and, outside of a few isolated villages, are already unsustainably low. Maybe a comprehensive, widespread and sustained LARP might save it, but not nearly enough people have the desire, nevermind the ability, to do it. Things are looking dire.

I think you and @RenOS are using a much finer-grained and overly academic definition of “larp” than what most people are using when they accuse someone of being a “trad-larper”. When they say that they mean the accused larper is more interested in making a fashion statement and isn’t really that committed to the ideology in question. For example, nobody is looking at ISIS and saying “well technically those guys are all just larping because the original chain of tradition between themselves and 7th century Islam was broken by 400 years of Ottoman rule and nobody decided to RETVRN to Sunni traditionalist interpretations until the Wahabbists in the late 18th century”

Well yeah, nobody calls actually traditional institutions larping even when it technically fits.

Did you know the cardinals who elect the pope are technically appointed as the more minor clerics within the diocese of Rome who have the responsibility to elect its bishop? Of course canon law doesn't actually allow senior archbishops to actually run the parishes they're theoretically pastors of, and it doesn't allow cabinet-level Vatican officials to act as deacons(except, technically, in the Latin mass) either. But none of this is referred to as larping. The word 'cardinal' even comes from a figure of speech for holding clerical responsibilities in a purely notional manner(the bird was named after the cleric due to their red robes). But being a millennium old tradition that is a direct development from previous practices insulates them from such a charge.

The value of tradition qua tradition is in the Lindy effect, but if that's what you care about, a "tradition" that must be "RETVRNed" to is really no tradition at all, but a LARP.

My parents, and their parents, were part of a church. I was raised in this church. I decided in my twenties to leave this church despite my parents and siblings all remaining in it, and in my thirties I decided to, as you have it, RETVRN. Was the tradition broken, given that I left?

If I had stayed away, but instead my children decided to RETVRN, would the tradition be broken?

If there's a community of a hundred people forming a church, and 80% leave the church and 20% stay, and then we fastforward, say, three generations, would descendants of the 80% joining the church be LARPing? Would converts with no connection to the church at all be LARPing?

In short, can you join or adopt a tradition in any meaningful sense? If not, where do traditions even come from in the first place?

If not, where do traditions even come from in the first place?

Traditions start as innovations, then become traditions.

The problem here is the claim that one is not innovating when one RETVRNS.

This specific terminology smuggles its own view of the object. The conservative view, as opposed to the reactionary view.

An alternative understanding, from, say, Julius Evola, is that traditions are perennial truths embedded in the structure of reality, which eternally return. And the point is not being lindy because nothing ever lasts, but to claim the boons of alignment with some transcendental understanding of the universe.

In that sense, innovation can be traditional, and conservatism be anti-traditional, insofar as the behavior can or cannot be embedded in a larger mythic structure. 70 years of materialism did not make the Soviet Union into a traditional institution, however many dedushkas you can find that fondly remember it.

If not, where do traditions even come from in the first place?

Traditions start as innovations, then become traditions.

The problem here is the claim that one is not innovating when one RETVRNS.

One is not innovating when one adopts another's innovation either, though.

It's a distinction of Sense versus Reference. The California hippie who travels the world in search of spiritual wisdom and winds up adopting (say) Tibetan Buddhism is not doing the same thing as the Tibetan layman who practices Buddhism because that's just what their people do.

Which is all well and good, since Buddhism has a core that is (purportedly) true regardless of how one arrives at it. But the irony of "trad-LARPing" comes in when the ideology has no substance or justification other than its supposed traditional status, i.e. tradition-qua-tradition, something of the form: "This society has lost its way because there are too many individualists, people who think they know better than they did in the good old days. Therefore it falls to me, the lone heroic seeker, to forsake mainstream society and devote my life to poring through the ancient tomes (the more ancient the better) in search of the one true ideology." This is the same mindset as that of the wandering hippie, a mindset which (I claim) is more persistent and fundamental to one's character than any particular ideology which one may adopt.

"trad-LARPing" comes in when the ideology has no substance or justification other than its supposed traditional status, i.e. tradition-qua-tradition

I think this is uncharitable. I you look at the examples of tradlarping today, you see people who are specifically unsatisfied with some aspects of modernity (such as the destruction of marriage) and are trying to bring it back by manifesting living in a 50s magazine ad for vaccum cleaners.

It's cargo culting a lot more than it is blindly worshiping the dead.

It's true, accusations of LARPing always discount the fact that literally all revolutions and social movements were LARPs originally.

However, efficient politics requires efficient tactics. And there are many criticisms one can make of the Benedict option as ineffective to achieve one's goals. "It's a LARP" is the weakest argument, but it is not the only argument.

I think "you won't be allowed to exit" is much stronger. People like to employ striking examples like Waco or Ruby Ridge but in truth even milder examples are legion.

Consider the recent Men In Sheds shenanigans. As long as you're not allowed to exclude people out of your organizations in practice, you don't have freedom of association, so you don't have access to the Benedict option. You can't be an ineffectual and inoffensive separatist if the people who rule you want to force you to participate in their society.

Far from me to discourage people from trying to build ground game and organic institutions. I think that's a worthwhile effort and a necessary component of any political or social movement, but that alone is ineffectual on its own. Top down elite power is the much more radical requirement.

Can you summarize the Men in Sheds thing?

Not OP but I dug up a single article on MSN - seems like an initiative in the UK designed for men and then in this one local community (chapter?) they decided to admit women. The article is very short on detail about who pushed it through, how much pushback there was, etc. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/we-put-the-pressure-on-to-join-men-in-sheds/ar-AA1Dmt17?ocid=BingNewsVerp

There was a social program for seniors in the UK to get guys together and give them some free tools and a workshop. Something about combatting male loneliness, IIRC. It was originally conceived of as a male only space, so the wives of some of the attending chaps couldn't stand the thought that something might bot belong to them, and they nagged their husbands until they were allowed in.

The Amish and similar groups exist and are real, and they are arguably more radical than what the Benedict Option calls for. They don't have elite power, either, although they do have elite allies (and I do agree that you should get elite allies if you can).

The Amish are grandfathered in and you could not create a similarly isolated group from scratch. They don't even pay Social Security taxes--just try doing that with a new group.

The Amish are an interesting example to bring up because they were specifically targeted in the previous administration and organized politically to vote as a block and punish the incumbent inasmuch as they could.

Like others say, much like native tribes they are grandfathered in, but they too still require elite power to sustain that existence. You can't just go innawoods, you need to work the system to let you.

The Amish are grandfathered in and you could not create a similarly isolated group from scratch.

You can join the existing Amish. Pretty easily actually, if you are earnest about it, you can head to a Mennonite-adjacent community, buy a farm, and you'll be accepted within a few years or so in most cases. I suspect this is more common among the Trad community than its detractors think, but that such folk naturally are never heard from again in public.

I don’t think so? They’re all related to each other and AFAIK regard ‘the English’ with suspicion. Or is that a myth?

You're correct, but so am I.

You can, but effectively no one does.

There are levels to this. There are Mennonite churches that welcome outsiders for worship. If you join one, buy a farm, and earnestly pursue integration for years I'm saying they'll probably accept you. Going deeper into even more traditional communities will require years more of credibility, which is why I'd suggest starting with the "lighter" communities within the plain folk and working your way deeper: it's easier to imagine a tech bro becoming a Mennonite and it's easy to imagine a Mennonite joining an Amish community.

Don't get me wrong this is a ten to fifteen year family project.

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