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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 2, 2025

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I think that pretending that the seat of one of the branches of government is nothing special

I would argue that this is a very American sentiment actually. The only reason there's a building is that Congress kept getting hassled without one.

The building itself is not meant to hold any sacred character because government is the affair of the people for themselves, not that of their betters. Be them kings or Gods. Congress is just a bunch of Americans deciding for themselves what to do and explicitly not a holy ritual. Though I always thought it was a funny contradiction with the intense Rome aesthetics.

The Romans thought "a bunch of Romans deciding for themselves what to do" in the Senate or the assemblies was a holy ritual, or at least something where the special protection of the Gods was necessary and where certain ritual forms had to be followed in order to ensure that protection.

The analogous idea that the operation of American democracy has a special relationship with Divine Providence not shared with a group of pubgoers arguing over whose round it is was part of proto-Blue Tribe civil religion since the Colonial era, and remains so modulo changes in the Blue concept of divinity. It was generally accepted by proto-Red elites at the time of the Founding as well - both Washington and Jefferson talk like that a lot.

There's a way in which this is true and there's a way in which this is not true.

The form of "Divine Providence" invoked by the founding fathers, and famed deist Thomas Jefferson in particular is not at all that which requires ritual or at least not in the sense that would be relevant here to the holiness of a place.

The God which protects the American project is the God from whom rights are derived, it is Nature's God, impersonal, far removed, non interventionist, the God that set the world in motion according to the laws that were meant to govern in his absence. Not YHVH, not Jupiter, nor even really Jesus Christ.

Natural law in the American sense isn't something that can only be obtained through specific ritual or revelation, but a permeating tendency of reality that one ought to align with.

If the people who made the United States truly believed that demonstrating on government property was not permissible for a regress of grievances, the history of Boston makes them all hypocrites and liars.