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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9775 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025

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It seems to me that you have failed to understand the current state of discourse in Conservative Christian circles, and have instead proceeded with basing your reasoning off cached data from a quarter-century ago.

The fundamental difference that you appear to have missed is that Christians lost these arguments decisively around the turn of the century, and their opponents got their way. As a result, Conservative Christians no longer need to argue what might happen if the other side gets their way, but rather what has happened, and what results the other side is accountable for. Christians can now operate as a genuine counter-culture, offering a cogent critique of the conditions we are all living in every minute of every day. We can offer meaningful answers to the myriad discontents created by our present society, and through those answers coordinate the systematic withdrawal from and dismantling of that society. The powers of compulsion no longer rest within our hands, and so we can focus on persuasion instead. And the worse Progressivism makes things, the more persuasive our arguments get.

But by all means, if you believe Conservative Christianity is going to enshrine the rule of boomer-brained gen-x-er preachers and middle-aged church ladies, say so, and show some examples of how this happens. Meanwhile, I'm watching Atheist stalwarts openly reject liberalism and its works.

From "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out" by AntiDem:

Let’s face it – being on the right is tough these days. The left has completed its long march through the institutions – media, academia, technology, government bureaucracy – and stands dominant in all of them. Through these, they have come to utterly dominate not only much of public policy and the mainstream news media, but also to act as arbiters of the mainstream culture as well. As Mencius Moldbug noted, in the Modern state, culture is downstream from politics, and public morals are set by whoever’s army is guarding the television station. Through their machinery of cultural control, the establishment left (which is by no means antiwar or against police statism on principle) has manufactured consent on all manner of issues. Not only that, they’ve created and sustained a culture of leftism – the propagation, whether explicitly presented as such or not, of leftist memes, not the least important of which is leftism as hip and intellectual.

This leftist culture has become the absolutely dominant mainstream culture in not just the United States, but all of the West. And there’s no hope of changing it anytime soon – not with the mainstream academic and media cartels enjoying the legal protections (not to mention the favor of much of the political system) that they do. And where does that leave the right? It leaves it in a position that’s…

…well, that’s a hell of a lot of fun, actually. Because we are the counterculture now. For the left, in all of its dominance of establishment culture, has now run into what I call Bakunin’s Corollary to Flair’s Law.

Flair’s Law states: To be The Man, you’ve got to beat The Man.

Bakunin’s Corollary states: Once you do beat The Man, then you become The Man, whether you said you were going to or not.

And as it stands now, the left most definitely is The Man. Not only that, but they act the part, down to the smallest detail. A more moralizing, censorious, hectoring, endlessly instructive bunch of tut-tutting know-it-all pearl-clutchers you could not find anywhere. The left, long ago, when they were out of power, once understood the sheer joy of sticking a thumb in the eye of people like that. They understood both the necessity and the power of creating a counterculture. Now it is time for the right, and especially the alternative right – all manner of traditionalists, reactionaries, right-libertarians, separatists, monarchists, and elitists – to drop out of the establishment mass popular culture and work on creating a counterculture of our own. Not just because it is necessary in order to maintain and pass on our values in the face of the ceaseless onslaught of that leftist popular culture (Note that there is increasingly nothing – nothing – in popular culture that is permitted to be happily apolitical; to not incessantly parrot the left’s memes. Not television, not comedy, not music, not video games, not football or basketball, not web browsers or search engines, not even chicken sandwiches or hamburgers), but because it’s just plain fun.

You are the counterculture now. You get to flip the bird to The Man, to be anti-establishment, to get off the grid of pop-culture garbage and live the way you see fit. Those of the alternative right are not just in the positions of being the Marxes and Nietzsches and Gramscis opposed to bourgeois mass-culture morality, but we also get to be Kerouac in San Francisco, to be Wyatt and Billy on the open highway, to be Ken Kesey on his Magic Bus, to be Lenny Bruce making people faint from the stage.

Nearly everything necessary for this is already in place. In many ways, the alternative right community reminds me of my father’s descriptions of Greenwich Village circa 1964. It is filled with all manner of eccentrics and thinkers and radicals and rebels and misfits. Some speak deep truths, some seem half-crazy; some are charismatic and charming, others seem scary and dangerous. Sometimes it is the scary, dangerous, and half-crazy among them who speak the most deep truth. All throughout, there is a feeling of throwing off what the establishment gives us, of finding a better way. There is also a feeling that something big is inevitable, and coming sooner rather than later.

How exciting!

But the obvious corollary to that is that if the "new right-wing counterculture" wins, it will then become The Man and there will be a rebellion against it, too, at some point, no?

Yeah pretty much. The party that controls the zeitgeist favours conservation, because they want to preserve the zeitgeist. The people in charge are in charge in one sense because the culture favours their politics, if it stops favouring their politics they'll lose power.

Edit: Added the rest of the post I meant to write when I accidentally hit send. God damn it I am getting worse at posting every day.

Meanwhile, I'm watching Atheist stalwarts openly reject liberalism and its works.

Online Politics Brain. Look at Pew data on religious identity instead of anecdotes.

But by all means, if you believe Conservative Christianity is going to enshrine the rule of boomer-brained gen-x-er preachers and middle-aged church ladies, say so, and show some examples of how this happens.

They're the ones who will be running for office in 2028. They won't live forever, but 2028 is what we're talking about here.

Look at Pew data on religious identity instead of anecdotes.

Which has largely shown the decline bottoming out in recent years?

2010s "don't be a dick" secular humanism is now right wing. Left wing atheism is witchcraft and social justice identitarisnism, right wing atheism is hedonic self indulgence. Split the irreligious into those 2 broad factions, make a 1 second guess on who is more repelled by who, and 'religious identity' is no longer the savior of the left. Maybe they can make a hard pivot to Islam like the European left did, the USA has a lot more runway before critical mass for sharia becomes unmanageable.

The obvious GOP front-runners for 2028 and 2032 are Vance, Rubio, DeSantis, and Hegseth in roughly that order. All of them are currently under 55 and much closer culturally to what @FCfromSSC is describing than anything you have.

The obvious front runners are Vance, Rubio, Abbott, and Youngkin.

  • Vance is a ‘based Christian’ catholic convert

  • Rubio is a Hispanic cradle Catholic

  • Abbott runs ads on having become a Catholic to bond with his wife’s family. While she prefers to go to Latin mass governor Abbott definitely doesn’t. He has a good relationship with the Texas Catholic bishops(not the most based bishops around- the most based archbishops in the USA are, ironically, those of Portland, San Francisco, and Denver, in addition to military services and the ordinariate for former Anglicans).

  • Youngkin is a country club conservative picked, in part, specifically to be non offensive. The chances of muscular Christianity are low.

I’m counting one example of based muscular Christianity out of four.

Talking about GOP front runners at this point is more snail brained than usual: the odds that more than one of Rubio, Hegseth, and Vance are still in Trump/MAGA's good graces in 2028 are lower than the odds that none of them are.

Online Politics Brain. Look at Pew data on religious identity instead of anecdotes.

...It seems to me that your arguments would benefit greatly from expansion into more than single-sentence, contextless dismissal. You appear to be arguing that the population as a whole is still moving away from religiosity. But my argument was not that people are moving toward Religion, but rather that they are moving away from liberalism and its axioms, upon which the Progressive edifice is founded. My argument is not that Conservative Christians will secure power, it is that power will lean somewhat more in our direction and very hard away from our most dedicated opponents, because our critiques are valid and theirs are not.

They're the ones who will be running for office in 2028. They won't live forever, but 2028 is what we're talking about here.

I am highly confident that none of the 2028 contenders will be Boomer-brained Gen-x-er preachers or middle-aged church ladies, in either party. I'm highly confident that the Republican 2028 contenders will be much more sympathetic to Conservative Christian social critique than they will be to Progressive social critique, and will consider protection of religious freedom for Conservative Christians as a winning political cause.

I'm weakly confident that Republicans will win in 2028, and I am highly confident that taking advice from the Hananiah set would degrade those odds, not improve them. The sort of reductive mental caching you seem to be deploying in this thread is a fair bit of the reason why. Rather than engage with what is actually happening, you consistently substitute factual realities for an imagined set more conducive to your axioms. Here, you are trying to round "Conservative Christians have persuasive critiques of our current culture" to "The Religious Right is ascendent, will try to jail people for viewing porn."

The problem with your claim, as I understand it, is that this is not actually going to happen, and the reason it isn't going to happen is not that people with power will take your advice. You can box phantoms for the next three years as much as you like; the world will proceed without you.

I will at least observe that Red states have been, even in this era, pushing back on the prevalence of online porn. Pornhub, notably, has blocked a number of states that have passed relevant legislation to require age verification. It's Very Possible Nowadays to circumvent such things or find sites that don't care about (American) jurisdiction quite so much, but it is happening.

Notably, though, the argument is less "this content is sinful", and more "this content is demonstrably poisoning the relations and sexual health of our children".

Notably, though, the argument is less "this content is sinful", and more "this content is demonstrably poisoning the relations and sexual health of our children".

What's the actual harm? I'm just not seeing it.

the argument is less "this content is sinful", and more "this content is demonstrably poisoning the relations and sexual health of our children".

What did you think 'sinful' meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays?

Sin is definitionally injurious to individuals and societies.

All that's changed is that instead of warning people (and getting called crazy), we now get to say "I told you so" (and still mostly be ignored).

If "sinful" just means "harmful" then say harmful.

It doesn't 'just' mean harmful, but it's always harmful.

If it's always harmful then you can always explain how it's harmful, rather than relying on "the Bible explains what actions are sinful" and "sin is what God said is wrong" to do the work for you.

That doesn't follow whatsoever. It presupposes that we're always capable of evaluating deep consequences, which is plainly not the case. It also presupposes a ton of wisdom on the part of the person being persuaded.

Suppose the damage only becomes clear generations later? I'm thinking here of the sexual revolution e.g.

Inability to convince someone that an act is damaging has no bearing on whether it is.

Agreed, that is what Christians should have been doing. Shaming people indiscriminately and without explanation in the name of sin is not showing the love of Christ, imo.

What did you think 'sinful' meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays?

Yes, and trivially. The problem with 'sinful' is the same problem 'misogynistic' or 'hateful' has in that it's thought-terminating and usually invoked as "fuck you, stop doing what I don't like".

I am happy that the traditionalists have figured out they actually have to make the argument without the short-circuit. Which should be easy, because they're unimpeachably correct, which is why they were right to pick up the thought-terminating argument from aesthetics in the first place and it didn't take them 60 years to come up with a workable counterargument.

Yes, and trivially. The problem with 'sinful' is the same problem 'misogynistic' or 'hateful' has in that it's thought-terminating and usually invoked as "fuck you, stop doing what I don't like".

This reminds me of the guy I met who couldn't believe that I described something as heretical. "'Heresy' is, like, something fundamentalists scream while losing their minds!" His only experience with the concept was from media hostile to Christianity. Had no idea that within the tradition we use the word matter of factly; dispassionately.

Sin has only ever meant one thing and at least in my experience it's been used consistently. Via (hostile) media portrayals I have a vague caricature in my head of an ignorant Southern woman throwing the word around to suit her biases, but all such types I've met in real life have instead been progressives.

I am happy that the traditionalists have figured out they actually have to make the argument without the short-circuit. Which should be easy, because they're unimpeachably correct, which is why they were right to pick up the thought-terminating argument from aesthetics in the first place and it didn't take them 60 years to come up with a workable counterargument.

Where's that CS Lewis poaster when you need him?

There has never been a shortage of Christian intellectual tradition for those willing to engage with it. Except, I guess, in Protestant backwaters isolated from that tradition. But even they generally had access to Lewis.

@FlyingLionWithABook

Where's that CS Lewis guy when you need him?

never been a shortage of Christian intellectual tradition

You're making my point for me: there has been a serious lack of meaningful addition to Christian intellectual tradition over the last 60 years, and that tradition ran into a sort of... replication crisis of its social science (from the standpoint of those on the ground at that time).

I'm a bit confused as to your thesis. My intent here was to demonstrate that the argument was made over 60 years ago and hasn't required updating. And even Lewis was only riffing on much older material that also still stands to this day.

To be sure in that time period people have massively fallen away from God and lost fluency with the language in which the arguments are made. I think the disconnect you're talking about has more to do with ignorant moderns needing lots of extra hand holding to be able to understand what we're even talking about, after generations of educational bankruptcy and training by hostile media.

But re: the rest, your words do not match my experience. The Western tradition has been very active in that time (though mostly in the wrong direction imo) and the Eastern tradition has been exploding in both vigor and popularity. Surely Solzhenitsyn made a mark? And a lot else has been going on. Only, few are listening.

This sort of thing would seem to be cyclical for mankind. People honor God, prosper, become prideful, turn away, suffer terribly, and only once the same old lessons have been relearned the hard way do the survivors pick up the pieces and start the process again.

Usually, the word "sinful" is taken to mean an appeal to abstract, unfalsifiable moral commandments dependent on faith in some religious nonsense for even the slightest form of coherency, not "here is the solid statistical evidence that consumption of this media will make your life objectively worse by your own values."

It seems to me that the population is moving from seeing porn consumption less like saying "fuck" and more like smoking cigarettes, and that this is because porn consumption is in fact more like smoking cigarettes than it is like swearing. There are significant observable costs to consumption and the industry that supports it, even from within the Materialist frame.

It seems to me that the population is moving from seeing porn consumption less like saying "fuck" and more like smoking cigarettes, and that this is because porn consumption is in fact more like smoking cigarettes than it is like swearing.

Any polling data showing this?

Then bring those porn studies that are comparable to tobacco harm studies. Are you going to die early because of porn? Has science re-discovered that it does indeed make you blind?

The institutions of science are held by the other side, so you're not going to see that. The base knows this and thus doesn't require that.

Race and IQ is far more suppressed than anti-porn, and yet the studies keep getting published.

Maybe the anti-porn side can't find it because it isn't there.

Anti-porn feminists have been looking for evidence of harm from the inside for ages.

Conservatives have plenty of studies they use to support their other arguments, it just happens anti-porn is among the least empirically supported of all their positions.

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Usually, the word "sinful" is taken to mean an appeal to abstract, unfalsifiable moral commandments dependent on faith in some religious nonsense for even the slightest form of coherency

I think you have been well trained by enemies of Christianity.

not "here is the solid statistical evidence that consumption of this media will make your life objectively worse by your own values."

Solid statistical evidence is a pretty recent invention, and its accessibility to the public even more recent. The ability of the public to competently evaluate such evidence we can, heh, call a work in progress. In the meantime humans live human lives and require human guidance.

It seems to me that the population is moving from seeing porn consumption less like saying "fuck" and more like smoking cigarettes, and that this is because porn consumption is in fact more like smoking cigarettes than it is like swearing. There are significant observable costs to consumption and the industry that supports it, even from within the Materialist frame.

I was raised evangelical and converted to Orthodoxy and have never heard it suggested that swearing is somehow implicitly sinful. An argument sure can be made that it is in most particular instances, but that would be according to logic that would, as you'd have it, be coherent to materialists.

Apart from failing to cultivate a relationship with Christ I'm unable to think of any behavior typically described as sinful that doesn't have observable material costs. And even that one is arguable given mental health and life outcomes. The question is how aware one is of those costs, and how seriously one takes them, not whether they exist.

Hey another Motte Orthodox convert! There are a bunch of us here. We should start a club or something.

Solid statistical evidence is a pretty recent invention, and its accessibility to the public even more recent. In the meantime humans live human lives and require human guidance.

People have been asking about my political ideology and this pretty much sums it up: the first-world is better than the third-world. It's a good thing that we're not burning witches anymore. But you all are so concerned with "third-world immigrants" you can't see the third-worlding occurring right in front of your faces.

People have been asking about my political ideology and this pretty much sums it up: the first-world is better than the third-world. It's a good thing that we're not burning witches anymore. But you all are so concerned with "third-world immigrants" you can't see the third-worlding occurring right in front of your faces.

I never understood how you could be so good at caricaturing this obnoxious persona until I saw the page where you explicitly catalogue your history of trolling people on reddit.

This is tiresome and it'll be a nice day when the mods finally get around to banning you.

I was raised evangelical and converted to Orthodoxy and have never heard it suggested that swearing is somehow implicitly sinful.

Wikipedia cites Exodus 20:7 and Deuteronomy 5:11:

Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.

A much better set of citations is Colossians 3:8:

But now put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and foul talk from your mouth.

And Ephesians 4:29:

Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen.

Yeah, sorry, on my phone so I can't really give this the nuance it deserves.

We should distinguish between three different items here:

  • Taking God's name in vain
  • Swearing oaths
  • Using impolite language ('swear words')

The first and second require way more foundation than I can lay right now. The third I just answered elsewhere in this thread, probably pretty close to this post.

I was raised evangelical and converted to Orthodoxy and have never heard it suggested that swearing is somehow implicitly sinful. An argument sure can be made that it is in most particular instances, but that would be according to logic that would, as you'd have it, be coherent to materialists.

I was taught that swearing with words or phrases that invoke God are implicitly sinful (eg, all variants of "damn"), while others are merely signs of bad character (eg, "shit", "fuck").

Hm, I’m wondering if this is highly regional, or maybe generational. The Christians I know take offense at swear words and would be likely to describe them as minor sins. In my household, you got a stern talking to if you said “shit.”

I have also never met anyone who has said a racial slur of any kind unironically in my presence. I think I’m from the region and social class that is least likely to use profanity.

Since when is ('merely') signaling bad character harmless?

Propriety is a useful concept, as is reverence. Every minor decision we make, and word we use, directionally warps our character. It changes our own conception of ourselves. Offhand I can point to TracingWoodgrains as an atheist who recognizes the pattern and so refrains from foul language. (Though of course use-mention distinction applies to all of this.)

It is not good to regard ourselves as oppositional to order, propriety, or reverence. Instances where disruptiveness, impropriety, or irreverence are correct are exceptional and should always be engaged with deliberately. Never mind the value of cultivating verbal continence; of regarding oneself as holding to a standard other than the vulgar.

These arguments touch on Christian understanding but don't rely upon it. And they are only inward-facing. There's a whole additional side when it comes to the impressions we make upon others and how that can harm them and us.

One might draw a parallel to (broadly speaking) Democrats and smoking tobacco. In the 90s, there was a claim around the Republican side of things that the Democrats were going to ban tobacco. One could believe this, because it was very clear that the Democrats as a group were not fond of the tobacco industry, and because the people who really did want to ban tobacco seemed mostly to be deep-blue democrats, and also because the people making this comparison somehow didn't mention counterexamples. But in fact, Democrats did not ban tobacco, nor did they make any serious effort to try to. Instead, they took numerous steps to paint tobacco consumption and the tobacco industry as sleazy, dirty, and dangerous, relying on coordinated social power and messaging to try to push people to drop the habit of their own volition, thus carving away the industry's financial base and reducing its lobbying power. What laws were passed were either focused on forcing the tobacco companies themselves into cooperating with this push, or else targeted attacks on areas where tobacco was framed in the worst light and where public support was strongest, such as the lawsuits.

I think this is a pretty good model for what an actual Red-Tribe attack on porn and the porn industry would look like.

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