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Notes -
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.
In this comment, you
Pretend to be ignorant of the monumental role Protestant Christianity had in the history of America
Express that you think religious wars are bad
Engage in a crazy drive-by about “church and state” in which you drop many implications that I suspect you know would get a lot of pushback if you actually bothered to articulate them.
Am I un-separating the church from the state when I simply engage in wholly secular governing mechanisms to reflect morals I hold? You know, the way literally every voter in a democracy does it? Am I agitating for theocracy when my morals are informed by the Bible, while yours are informed by NYT headlines? I can’t know, because I’ve already thought about this harder than your comment merits.
Why should Catholics suddenly be more interested in your personal, potentially ahistorical, interpretation of separation of church and state due to the Babylon Bee guy’s words? What do “based” seculars have to do with it? Do you think they might prefer religious hostilities to the race riots we’ve seen recently? If they hypothetically do, would you be able to understand why?
Again, I can’t know. Good job pasting three different links, though, and nice flair I guess. It’s excusable as long as it’s self-aware, right? Except this kind of humor is falling out of style in favor of sincerity, as the discussion about the Minecraft Movie notes.
Nice job rebutting that strawman argument I didn't make.
I really have to spell it out for you people, I guess. Encourage Protestants to use the power of the state to enforce their religious morality and they may well decide to come after Catholicism, which they have traditionally seen at best as a corrupt and degraded form of Christianity. Like communists, you guys are always assuring us that this time it will be different from all those previous times.
The good old days when whites were slaughtering each other over religion and burning witches, but at least everyone was white.
https://www.takimag.com/article/the-third-worlding-of-the-american-mind/
(You might get the witch burnings but won't get the whiteness. The populist coalition is growing increasingly non-white itself - which should hardly surprise anyone - who do you think conspiracism and superstition appeals to?)
There was nothing non-sincere in my comment.
I, for one, appreciate having this spelled out. I might have anticipated that objection during the George W. Bush administration, but I don’t anticipate it now.
I think you are writing in good faith, but I don’t think you understand how Protestant social dynamics have evolved. When Berry says “a Protestant nation,” he has a different idea what that means than a turn-of-the-twentieth-century counterpart might have had. While on a theological level Catholic vs. Protestant theological differences mean as much as they ever did, on a social level differences between theological liberalism and theological conservatism are much more salient. (This is strongly related to social progressivism vs. social conservatism and weakly related to economic leftism vs. economic rightism.)
If Berry got his dream, would he shutter Roman Catholic schools? No, I don’t think so. Would he shutter Jesuit schools? Maybe. But not because of Jesuits’ oaths of loyalty to the pope – because they are, in fact, liberal as heck.
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