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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 7, 2025

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Religious leaders did not adequately stand up against the mass movement. Although many conservatives see value in religious institutions as a cultural defense, ...

I think this depends on whether you are judging from the perspective of Christian conservatives or secular ones. If you are a secular conservative hoping to see the churches hold back the woke tide, you are going to be disappointed; we no longer have that kind of influence. Secular old-school liberals may see it as more of a mixed bag, but many of them seem to suffer from the same misunderstanding.

... mainstream Catholicism and Protestant denominations did not substantively address the social justice craze.

I can't speak to the experience of the last few years within Catholicism, as I am not a Roman Catholic. But I think that any proper understanding will have to start from the realization that the Roman Catholic church is in practice a very big tent and it is necessary to distinguish movements within it.

As an evangelical, though, I can say that evangelical churches did often address this internally. My pastor, whom I would describe as a moderate social conservative, talked about the dangers of the woke movement quite a lot. Evangelical groups produced a lot of woke defectors (or ideological refugees, to be more generous) during this period, demonstrating that wokeness was being vigorously rejected in the bodies they left. But external advocacy was indeed more selective, reflecting a need to pick our battles.

In some cases they placated or even promoted it.

The mainline went woke, yes. They've been progressive for a very long time. But what may not be visible from the media coverage is that they are also dying.

Anyway, I think it's too early to hold a postmortem of the woke movement. It's still very much alive and kicking.

The RCC, excepting perhaps the most liberal fringes, was generally very anti-trans consistently throughout the period; beyond that the Francis pontificate was basically a cold civil war(which came very very close to going hot, more than once) that kept the guns pointed at each other and sucked the oxygen out of the room.