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Congratulations United States, you are Pope!
Edit: Sorry if that is too short but I am currently watching the livestream from Europe and am totally baffled.
Joel Berry, the managing editor of the Babylon Bee, wants you to know that "America has always been a protestant nation, and it must stay that way."
https://x.com/JoelWBerry/status/1920537379170877885
(Back in reality, America is down to 39% Protestant, not counting Mormons as Protestant: https://www.pewresearch.org/religious-landscape-study/)
He also "jokes" that "We know the world is healing when Catholics and Protestants are fighting again." Ah, let's go back to the good old days when 1/3rd of the German population were killed in a horrific religiously-motivated war.
https://x.com/JoelWBerry/status/1920658687347089517
Berry isn't a marginal figure, certainly more influential at this point than, say, Jonah Goldberg.
Maybe conservative Catholics should start asking themselves whether "separation of church and state" might be a good idea after all. But I can't get my hopes up - even many "based" seculars would rather die in the mud than admit that the "libs" might have been right about something.
This seems like a reasonable statement.
Why? I get your general thrust here: Reasonably-influential Protestant reminds us all of the conflict between Protestants and Catholics. You appear to be basing this on the idea that inter-tribal conflict is a problem that is or should be taken seriously, and appear to be suggesting that the Catholic/Protestant split is one that deserves attention, and particularly that this fault and its consequences are significant enough that based whoevers should admit that the "libs" might have been right about something. Your framing of his statement about protestant and catholic conflict in terms of the worst possible example of that conflict seems notably disingenuous to me, but let's leave it be.
What sort of response are you hoping for here? As someone who disagrees with most of this, would you be interested my presenting some examples of what actual serious tribal splits with serious real-world consequences look like in our present context? If not that, then what's the proper way to continue this conversation, in your view?
Don't think it would have been seen as disingenuous had I illustrated communism by its worst possible example. But I can give a less terrible one. In the Based Protestant Netherlands, Catholics, after initial persecution, were grudgingly tolerated. They were allowed churches, so long as they were built to look like ordinary apartment buildings, anything more was an unbearable provocation. And of course it was unthinkable that anyone from the Catholic community, 35% of the Dutch population, could serve in high levels of the Dutch government, the way the Catholic ~20% does in America today.
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