site banner
PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   31278 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

7
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

How do you think religion in the West will interact with the Culture War in the next few elections, and in the future? Up until recently, the religious right seemed to be a mainstay of at least American politics. In Europe of course, Christianity is mostly an irrelevant force (though theoretically Catholics should have some weight?).

However, the evangelical right has been losing quite a bit of power and cultural cachet, and we're seeing the rise of more traditional versions of Christianity such as Catholicism and to a lesser extent, Orthodoxy. Buddhism has also made inroads in a more serious way, as well as Islam mostly via immigration of Muslim peoples.

In the future, how will these religions impact politics? Personally I see a fusion of Buddhism x Christianity already happening, and expect a sort of Christian orthodoxy mixing in Buddhism mental techniques as the most successful religion of the 21st century. That being said, I feel it could shake out in many different areas on the political spectrum - ironically, many of the Orthodox priests I know personally are surprisingly liberal.

One area we could see a resurgence is in monasteries, and the potential downstream impact in local communities. Within the Catholic community (and Orthodoxy in the U.S.) there has been a groundswell lately of pushes for more monasteries, and revitalizing the monastic order in general. We'll see how it shakes out.

Tell me, what do you think religion will do to the modern political landscape?

How do you think religion in the West will interact with the Culture War in the next few elections, and in the future?

I think what will happen in the West is some mix of lebanonization, balkanization and brazilianization. The situation is similar to that of Yugoslavia or Lebanon or many other countries, where you have intersection of various ethnic, religious, tribal or even national interest in constant conflict resulting in confusing mess. There will be foreign shocks, I think it is almost inevitable to have mass immigration from Africa when the continent will inevitably be drawn into one or more huge conflicts of countries with hundreds of million of people. For religion, you can insert progressivism, christianity, islam and classical liberalism as actors in this religious conflict.

Culture War can lead to civil war, but I think that people in the West have a very skewed view of what it looks like. People like Tim Pool are too much married toward scenario of US Civil War or Spanish Civil War, which while confusing was more or less fought as a standard war. What will more likely happen is more akin to Lebanon or Yugoslavia, where decades old status quo of deliberately constructed balance of internal tensions slowly deteriorated, only to combust quickly, suddenly and violently. Or you can look into other conflicts such as what we now see in Ethiopia or South Sudan or even Syria, where you have incredibly confusing web of loyalties and where belligerents are unclear and alliances constantly shifting.

As other people point out, it's unlikely that an african war will cause a truly large migration surge to the US. Afrigan wars are bloody, but relatively small scale. For them to become larger-scale would require african states to experience chinese-warring-states-esque darwinian evolution in state capacity, that would ironically make them better at retaining and mobilizing their populations.

No, african famine is likely to cause migration surges... but given the global climatic conditions that will be causing it, it's unlikely that anyone will be particularly sympathetic since the entire planet would end up being worse off.

As other people point out, it's unlikely that an african war will cause a truly large migration surge to the US

This is just variation of "everything will be as it was so far". Syrian war caused mass immigration, despite other wars such as Iraq-Iran war or any number of other wars not causing the same. When the first Congo War happened, the country had around 40 million people mostly in incredible poverty of $1 per day. There were no cell phones, these people could not afford to pay $10k to get into US or Europe. This changed rapidly in 21st century.

No, african famine is likely to cause migration surges

This has it backwards. What truly caused WW1 in Europe was a population boom. German population increased by 50% between 1860s and 1910s. Russian population increased from 70 million to 170 million in the same timeframe. France had almost no increase from 37 to 39 million. Of course it caused pressure on resources, including multilateral Thucydides traps.

What most people do not realize is that up until colonization, Africa was malaria ridden hellhole of death and despair. In 1900 the whole population of Africa was 140 million, which was less than Russia alone. By 2050 the population of Africa is projected to grow from 1.5 billion currently to 2.5 billion - an order of magnitude larger than EU or US population. Of course this growth will cause tensions - as it did in every place and every historical period. The West does not know what will hit them if a continent of 2.5 billion people gets caught in a war unleashing other horses of apocalypse in conjunction. And in my estimation it is not if, but when. And that when is measured in years or decades, within our lifetimes.

I think it is almost inevitable to have mass immigration from Africa when the continent will inevitably be drawn into one or more huge conflicts of countries with hundreds of million of people.

The second Congo war(aka African world war) would have done this if it was going to happen.

And currently the newest Sudanese civil war has displaced around 16 million people and created 4 million refugees, yet I don't see them coming here.

They were too poor to move. There is a sweetsoot for emigration when people have information from their cell phones and means to do it. Like in Syria and other countries.

I disagree quite strongly with this, I think it represents a failure of imagination on your part. Yes, that war was brutal, involved many players, and had a lot of civilian casualties (especially if you include deaths from famine and disease). But it was frankly not that large of a war. Over the entire conflict only a few hundred thousand combatants, at most, were involved across both sides (Wikipedia actually estimates it as less than 100,000 total). Most combat was in the form of skirmishes; daring but small-scale raids; guerilla actions; and cyclical series of atrocities against civilians, reprisals for the atrocities, reprisals for those reprisals, and so on. You have to consider the possibility of much more industrialized warfare between countries with much larger populations with the ability to raise much larger armies. Consider the possibility of a “water war” between not just Sudanese rebel groups and Ethiopia, but between the Ethiopian and Egyptian armies. Or a war involving the likes of Kenya, or Nigeria. These aren’t realistic possibilities in the short term, it’s true, but after another 10 or 20 or 30 years of population growth and industrialization, maybe throw in some unexpected coups or stronger dictatorships… the worst case scenario is much, much worse than the Second Congo War.

And, perhaps more importantly from a Western perspective, the modal “poor African civilian” has a lot more options for migration— and, crucially, awareness of those options— today than at the time of that war. Not to mention the sheer explosion of population. Even another war of the same scale as the Second Congo War would likely trigger a much larger wave of migration to the West today than it did at the time, never mind a war with armies (and often civilian populations) an order of magnitude larger.

Note that these newly massive populations are also youth-heavy, which means a lot of disaffected fighting-age men. Sure, a lot of the time this just leads to civil war, but all it takes is one charismatic dictator to direct that energy into outward aggression and you could have yourself a good old-fashioned war of conquest. Get two of these situations going at once and you could have a catastrophe. A lot has changed in Africa from 2000 to 2025, and a lot is going to change from 2025 to 2050.

A repeat of the second Congo war in Nigeria seems likely to send refugee waves towards Europe, this is true(although North African countries are very willing to just butcher transmigration from sub Saharan countries in the Sahara, if Europe tells them to just stop it in exchange for aid while being nonspecific about the how).

I think a flare up in central/Southern Africa would send refugees towards the much more stable and prosperous southern African countries they already migrate to illegally(SA, Botswana, etc). And an Egypt-Ethiopia water war is unlikely to send refugees fleeing through the conflict zone.

I think it is almost inevitable to have mass immigration from Africa when the continent will inevitably be drawn into one or more huge conflicts of countries with hundreds of million of people.

DRC (official population estimate: 100 million) has been in a state of chaos and civil war for decades, yet the amount of Congolese who have immigrated to the Western countries has remained comparatively small (120 000 formally in Western countries according to this link, even if you triple or quadruple this number to account for the illegal migration it would be less than a 1 % of that official estimate.

As soon as these countries reach some development/income threshold, the floodgates will open. Syrian Civil war caused huge exodus despite it being only country of 23 million in 2011. In hypothetical continuation of Africa's World War in 2050 let's say involving Nigeria with 400 million people living there, or complete collapse of Egypt if they will have huge war with Ethiopia with combined population of also 400 million, this will completely change the calculation.

And again, I do not think this necessarily needs to be some single source of issues. It is just one of possible outside pressures that will destabilize already fragile situation inside the West.

  1. Amish: >6.0 (Mennonites also appear high but I couldn't find recent data)
  2. TradCaths: 3.5/3.6 (3.6 anecdotal, "Kloster 2018" cited for 3.5)
  3. Mormons: 3.4 -- According to this link from @Crowstep below, 57% of Gen X Mormons have 0/1/2 children
  4. Muslims:3.0/3.1
  5. Evangelicals: 2.3 (All following numbers use this citation)
  6. Catholics: 2.2
  7. Jews: 2.0
  8. Mainline Protestants: 1.9
  9. Atheists: 1.5
  10. Agnostics: 1.4

Religion will interact with the US culture war effectually, as the nonreligious population largely selects itself out of existence. This will swiftly accelerate with the wifebot and the half-right to reproduction, where it's mostly religious families buying the half-rights of mostly nonreligious sellers. Especially Mormons, when it becomes socially viable for them to pick polygamy back up (Smith and Young, laughing). Catholicism and Mormonism, there's your Western future.

Sure, those are the birth rates, but what are the retention rates? How many of those children stay with the religion of their parents? For example, I remember reading somewhere not long ago that the above-replacement birth rate for the Mormons goes pretty much into producing ex-Mormons, and that once you add in that exit rate, they're at or below replacement. And, AIUI, the retention numbers for Evangelicals are even worse — they're pretty much having the liberal kids current liberals aren't.

Pretty much the only groups I know of with above replacement birth rates plus retention rates are the Amish and Haredi Jews (which you didn't separate out from other Jews — when you do, the numbers for non-Orthodox Jews are pretty bleak, IIRC).

Evangelicals are even worse — they're pretty much having the liberal kids current liberals aren't.

US Evangelicals are picking up a lot of younger Catholics and young people from the blander Protestant denominations. There are no young Methodists, Presbyterians or Episcopalians: they are all atheists or evangelicals now.

On a global level, evangelical denominations are getting huge inflows from former pagans in Africa and former Catholics in Latin America.

There are a lot of elections between now and when the childless 40-somethings die and the 3.5 tradcath kids are 18.

There is no way the Mormon TFR is still that high.

Noted, updated the list.

Query: do you think current atheists were born of atheist ancestors?

I think if you have two largely identical groups, where Group A reproduces below replacement and Group B reproduces in excess of replacement, Group A, from a purely materialist and natural reading, is a biological phenomenon whose function is as a genetic terminus, i.e.; here, the humans of western civ are in the process of selecting for genetic predisposition to specific rather than generalized religiosity. ("What kinds of things you believe but can't prove.")

So you believe that the differential in reproduction is entirely attributable to genetics, rather than to cultural programming?

That seems unlikely, given that all those gay atheists came from long lines of heterosexual religious parents. Pew in 2019 found that among Evangelicals, only 65% of kids raised evangelical continued to identify as evangelical as adults. The cultural pull of secular society is still going to keep those numbers down.

Now you can assume that over time the forces of selection will optimize those genetics, until those numbers are pushed up further. But I'm not sure that's going to be the case. Particularly, it's likely that young people will be getting a better deal from the "worldly" once they are rare enough to be worth bribing. This can balance out the genetic drift over time.

Actually no.

My very earnest belief is that homosexuality is significantly hereditary and hence gay children have at least a few people in their family history that were predisposed to homosexuality but who were never gay because that wasn't actually a noun.

Consider being a man with homosexual tendencies in any of the time between 1200-1900 (roughly, not trying to litigate the specific endpoint here). You might perhaps become a priest or a sailor, but odds are reasonable (to the extent that anything pre-industrial revolution is) that you end up with a wife who you successfully impregnate (perhaps while closing your eyes and imagining the pastor). That gene continues on.

It's even more stark as a woman. Sure some end up as nuns or spinsters, but a sizable fraction end up married and no one cares about their level of arousal at all. Again, the gene continues on.

The experiment we're running in the West since 1965 now is not even half done. And perhaps I'm wrong. But it will be a fascinating thing if the acceptance of LGB leads to a significant decrease in their population come 2065. This will be especially poignant if there's far more gay folks outside the tolerant west -- a world with gay Muslims but no gay Swedes.

The experiment we're running in the West since 1965 now is not even half done. And perhaps I'm wrong. But it will be a fascinating thing if the acceptance of LGB leads to a significant decrease in their population come 2065. This will be especially poignant if there's far more gay folks outside the tolerant west -- a world with gay Muslims but no gay Swedes.

I had a very similar thought myself the other week when past the local Pride parade.

All these people, and everyone who tolerates these people, are refusing to breed. This is all a flash in the pan. Unless AI flips the table and changes all the rules, the Europe of the future will not have Pride marches.

All these people, and everyone who tolerates these people, are refusing to breed.

But they're recruiting like mad.

I've wondered about this. I'm not sure if I'll live long enough to see the whole effects. Even post 1965 homosexuality only became fully normalized like 15 years ago.

I think the "religious, but not spiritual" communities of the US will continue to evaporate: "church as community" becomes less useful of a concept when religious diversity increases.

"Religious and spiritual" communities of active believers will multiply, but will remain generally irrelevant as voting blocks, with the exception of the biggest Evangelical denominations.

Metropolitan Americans will overwhelmingly become either "spiritual, but not religious" or outright nonbelievers.

I don't think that Buddhism as such will become that important, but Buddhist stuff will continue to percolate to what could be called "Western folk religion" (compare to Chinese folk religion), ie the mix of vague Christian remnant beliefs, New Age / occult influences, Eastern influences, (often imagined) Western pagan stuff, superstitions, pseudoscience, modern cults like UFO/UAP enthusiasts and QAnon etc ec. that really characterizes what many "secular" people (and some ostensible trad religion believers) actually believe in, at least at some level. Perhaps at some point something new will come out of this mix.

Great comment. Yeah I do think that the Western folk religion is quite dominant sadly, especially given how uhhh.... poor it seems to be at actually improving people's lives or leading to useful social organization.

I had to laugh at the (often imagined.) All too true.

I think America particularly will become more and more secular. I think that the TradCath community will grow but will end up like the Amish or Hasidics. I think the majority will be secularish. Axial age religions are not they only religious framework and Science can replace a lot of what pre-axial religions are very mechanistic and less concerned with morality. Sumerian religion barely had an afterlife and in that sense was rather athiestic. China was morally guided by philosophy more than religion for thousands of years. I don't think a retvrn to societies centered on moralistic religions promising eternal bliss is a given. The intense religiosity of the Middle Ages and Early Modern period seem to be something of an outlier.

I could see a kind of Progressivism as a unifying philosophy combined with many different faiths ala Confucianism. We can see this a little bit with woke people today they don't care what religion you are as long as your beliefs are subservient to woke tenants.

I think that the TradCath community will grow but will end up like the Amish or Hasidics.

We are nothing like the Amish or Hasidic. We speak the majority language of our surrounding communities, our homeschooled kids work normal jobs when they grow up and often enough play sports on normal teams, we don’t have a separate court system internally, etc, etc.

Mormonism is much closer sociologically. Not identical but closer.

Yes you aren't now, but if current trends hold (always a big if) TradCaths are going to be so wildy out of step with society morally and socially that I expect the gap to widen. In 200 years I don't see the West being more sexually conservative given that we've been liberalizing since the enlightenment. There's a lot of stuff grandfathered in but when todays Zoomers are grandparents I think it will be a lot harder for practicing Catholics to mesh into society.

I'm not actually sure we are seeing a rise in more traditional, or 'high' forms of Christianity. There are some links here, but as far as I'm aware Orthodoxy is not growing in America in any particularly significant way, and the supposed trend of people converting to Catholicism is mostly a few high-profile examples, rather than a larger statistical trend. If you take away migration, the Catholic Church in America looks like a mainline Protestant church, like Episcopalians. Their retention is quite dismal, and to the extent that they've managed to hide that decline and retain political or social force, it's on the back of Catholic migrants. Evangelical Christianity remains the 'stickiest' form of Christianity in the US.

Now that said, raw numbers don't tell the whole story - the church that most successfully cultivates elites is not necessarily the one that will have the most social or political influence. The most visible example of this is probably the Supreme Court. Catholics utterly dominate the Supreme Court. At the moment it's six Catholics, two Protestants, and a Jew, and notably it has zero evangelicals. Congress also has slight Catholic overrepresentation, but it's much more marginal - 28% versus 20%. At any rate, it is possible that Catholics will become the de facto representatives of Christianity in the halls of elite power in America - the mainlines are collapsing, evangelicals are too plain and uncultured to ever get in there, and Orthodox are, with apologies, a rounding error.

There is potentially a discussion to be had about how Catholics got into that position, and I'd guess it has to do with the quite large and influential Catholic education system. (I also have a pet theory that religions that place a strong emphasis on the interpretation of law are naturally going to do better in terms of producing lawyers and judges; hence Catholic and Jewish overrepresentation on the Supreme Court, and I'd hazard a guess that Muslims will do pretty well too.) But that's something of a different subject.

Anyway, predictions...

I think Catholicism will not take over America or even necessarily grow that much from its current position, but I think it will get more politically influential, as it seizes ground that used to be held by mainlines.

Mainlines will continue to collapse. Some outward adherence to mainline churches will survive in places, among politicians, but the era of mainline dominance is over. In America more broadly I don't think mainlines will all die out, but they will need to reinvent themselves; I foresee conflicts like the like in the Methodist church, between theological progressives who see the church as handmaiden to preferred cultural causes, and cranky traditionalists, which will probably end with the former withering away and fading into culture, and the latter declining in numbers and turning into a small but devout rump.

Evangelicals will not advance much in terms of political power, but they are disorganised and in constant ferment and will remain a powerful voting base for politicians canny enough to appeal to them. That said, what appeals to them is somewhat unpredictable, as they are a fickle demographic that is highly responsive to charismatic leaders. Right now they are more-or-less solidly behind Trump, but they didn't come to support him for theological or doctrinal reasons, and I think Trump's successors may not necessarily inherit evangelical support. I'm really not sure which way they will go.

Orthodox are irrelevant. Again, apologies for being so blunt, but there are just far too few of them and I don't see any signs that will change.

Mormons are one that I predict will grow and increase in power. I think they have the most gravely mistaken theology of any of these groups, but even so, they are demographically healthy, expanding, and confident. They are currently adjacent to the big evangelical coalition and can sometimes be counted with it, but not consistently, and when you look under the surface there's a lot of submerged evangelical dislike of Mormons, so that may not be stable. I think they will grow in influence unless there is some kind of concerted effort to declare Mormons 'uncool', the same way that evangelicals are uncool, and keep them out of power that way.

As for other religions...

There aren't enough Muslims to be a very significant electoral demographic nationally, but there are towns and potentially states where the Muslim vote matters, so I expect to see local gains in influence for them without making a huge impact nationally. The big question I have with Muslims is whether American Muslims as a community hold on to traditional doctrines or become secularised; there are plenty of people for whom 'Muslim' is an ethnocultural identity but doesn't make moral demands or shape their moral or political thought. (Think e.g. Zohran Mamdani.) I expect a significant number to hold on and continue to practice. As mentioned above, I expect Muslims to do reasonably well in terms of elite roles, especially those to do with law.

Jews are, well, an invitation for certain people to come out of the woodwork and declare them the secret puppet masters of the US. I don't know the future of Jews in America. Until recently I would have said that America has been a very good home for Jews, and I expect American Jews to continue to prosper, but we have yet to see how much Israel/Gaza causes a realignment. This is definitely one to keep an eye on.

Hindus mostly can't be disentangled from Indian ethnic politics. (Sorry, ISKCON, you tried but there aren't enough of you.) I'll skip over that because it's much more to do with ethnicity and multiculturalism than it is about Hinduism as religious belief. Sikhs are in roughly the same camp.

Buddhists are a group that I expect to continue to grow, partly from immigration and partly from conversions, but to have practically zero political impact. Buddhist organisations, at least in the US, rarely mobilise for politics, and most converts practice on their own or in small groups without necessarily applying Buddhism to politics more widely. There aren't many of them anyway; Buddhists as a constituency is not worth pandering to. Maybe in some local contexts where there are heavily Buddhist migrant groups, but I doubt you'll get much more than politicians visiting a temple or dharma centre and saying they appreciate this group.

That's probably most of what matters. Scientologists are few and don't matter, Unitarian Universalists are few and don't matter...

There is potentially a discussion to be had about how Catholics got into that position

I think it's worth at least considering the possibility that we are backed directly by God :P

This is a secular space, so I try to reserve my belief in divine intervention to the side. ;)

More seriously, I know you were joking, but I think that in Christianity it's a grave mistake to assume that divine favour clearly correlates or anti-correlates with worldly power or success. God tests and tries his people, and uses them in unexpected ways. Sometimes the church may be powerful and accepted in society; sometimes it may be reviled and persecuted. We shouldn't read too much into either situation.

There is potentially a discussion to be had about how Catholics got into that position, and I'd guess it has to do with the quite large and influential Catholic education system.

I would also just add that "evangelical" continues to be much more of a signal for "right-wing" than "Catholic" and so I think Catholics are an easy place for righties to get people who agree with them on most everything without also having a religious affiliation that is listed under I AGREE WITH RIGHTIES ON MOST EVERYTHING in the dictionary. (Obviously evangelicals are more nuanced than that, but in terms of public optics I do think it matters a bit.)

As per your comment, I would not be surprised if this actually changes, and Catholicism becomes smaller but much more visibly right-wing as older generations of leaders die out (and as the left shifts to be more and more hostile to religion and away from old Catholic-friendly patronage networks). I foresee Catholic thought-leadership staffed with evangelical foot-soldiers as being a very potent coalition in the future, despite their cracks.

Yes, it's possible to be Catholic and in good standing among progressives on the understanding that one does not take Catholicism's moral teachings seriously. Catholicism is resolutely pro-life but nobody on the left even attempted to give Joe Biden any grief over being Catholic as far as abortion goes. It is accepted that you can be Catholic while just ignoring what it teaches. (Something like this may be happening with Islam as well.) It's only when a person signals a credible level of obedience to church teaching that Catholicism comes into the spotlight (e.g. Amy Coney Barrett). By contrast, if a person regularly attends an evangelical church, that in itself is probably going to be taken as more indicative of their moral beliefs. For better or for worse, evangelicalism is taken as a stronger signal of moral and political belief.

It's possible to be a left-wing evangelical, but it requires a bit of throat-clearing first. You need to deliberately distinguish yourself from other evangelicals, whereas I don't think Catholics need that. That said, I suspect this is mainly due to the much larger population of non-practicing Catholics? There are a lot of people who still identify as Catholic in a 'cultural' way without going to mass or taking Catholic doctrine seriously, whereas when someone raised evangelical ceases to go to church or take evangelical Christian doctrine seriously, they stop calling themselves evangelical at all. I'm sure it doesn't hurt either that Catholics are fairly split in terms of political affiliation, whereas evangelicals line up much more solidly behind the Republicans. Identifying as Catholic by itself just isn't a good signal of moral or political beliefs.

That said I would not be surprised if this changes - if younger people who leave Catholicism increasingly drop the label entirely, rather than continue to call themselves Catholic and just not do anything, then Catholicism will become more meaningful as a signal.

That said, I suspect this is mainly due to the much larger population of non-practicing Catholics?

Yes, I think this is right. I also think there are a lot of people in the Catholic church who are very left-wing (...even on positions like abortion) and who want to reform the church from within.

Whereas as you say evangelicals who are dissatisfied with, say, the evangelical teachings on abortion just leave.

That said I would not be surprised if this changes - if younger people who leave Catholicism increasingly drop the label entirely, rather than continue to call themselves Catholic and just not do anything, then Catholicism will become more meaningful as a signal.

I think this is likely. My guess is that in the US over the next 40 - 50 years, Catholic numbers drop considerably (or if they hold steady, it's due to immigration) but the remnants are more dedicated and more "conservative" as far as such things go.

Thanks for the blunt takes! Interesting views here, very realpolitik. I do agree with most of your take on the Protestant denominations in the U.S., seems as if their cultural moment is fading. Sometimes I wonder if a new religion will come in to pick up the slack, like the "western folk religion" @Stefferi mentioned above, but more formalized.

I hope it's clear that I don't consider political influence within the United States to be any reflection of the merits of a tradition. I'm in the devout rump of mainline Protestants - I am, on my typology here, definitely one of the losers. Meanwhile many of the churches that I think will be relatively strong in the future - Mormons, Baptists, and so on - are in my eyes either heretics, or borderline-heretics. There is, I think, probably an interesting book to be written on Christian heresy and its contours in America. (And not the Ross Douthat book. A different one.)

At any rate, that the Orthodox have no political influence is not a criticism of them. The position I suspect the Orthodox are in, and will continue to be in going forward, is the one from an aside in this old article:

However, [Rod Dreher's] situation is complicated. Given his own membership in the Orthodox Church, one would expect him to have quite high regard for civil society, or at least for the magistrate’s role in cultivating and preserving Christian society. That said, one astute friend remarked that because Orthodox Political Theology has such an expansive view of the power of the magistrate, perhaps Orthodox Christians default into a kind of Anabaptist separatism in nations where the magistrate is not Orthodox.

That is, the ideal Orthodox political order, historically, has been one in which the church is to some extent integrated with the state - as in the Byzantine empire, or the Russian empire. Spiritual and temporal authority are intertwined. However, when one practices Orthodoxy in a state where there is zero realistic chance of such integration occurring, Orthodox communities in practice engage in a kind of 'retreat', focusing on internal cultivation. If there is a visible surge of interest in Orthodoxy at the moment, my hope is that much of that interest relates to that question of spiritual cultivation or maturation, especially as a community, within a political order that grows increasingly impious.

I wonder if it might be interesting there to look at the experiences of Orthodox communities in the Ottoman empire. I know very little about that, but it springs to mind as a good case study for how to maintain Christian faith intergenerationally while living in a proudly non-Christian political order.

It is my hope, at least, that there is more of a turn towards the obligations of personal Christian moral formation. My tradition is Methodist and I have noticed, at least among more traditionalist Methodists, some interest in the counter-cultural disciplines of the early Methodists. Maybe we need more Holy Clubs. Whatever church context it occurs in, though, I think there is a desire for more rigorous moral formation among some younger Christians, epsecially the more intellectual types.

You mention the growth of a kind of 'Western folk religion'. I'm not sure how far I want to go with that. There's a sense in which there are already Western folk religions like that, especially in America, which has long had both a civic religion and an implicit set of American spiritual norms that cross multiple denominations and religious traditions. Those religions are evolving as the cultural terrain changes, but I don't think a new one is coming into being from nothing. There will be some sort of spirituality - nature abhors a vacuum, including a spiritual vacuum - but I suspect more of a modification of what is already present, rather than something brand new.

My understanding is that the situation with American Orthodoxy is that there's a fair amount of new fervent converts, at least compared to the previous baseline, but the general trend of secularization is also causing people from traditional immigrant communities (Greeks, Russians, Serbs) to drop out, and that they thus far balance each other out. However, if this continues, at some point the growth in new convert-run parishes could be expected to overtake the secularization process, especially if there are marriages and natural growth (though that might require appeal beyond the current category of young men...)

the supposed trend of people converting to Catholicism is mostly a few high-profile examples

Right, interestingly it mirrors a longstanding trend in England of edgier intellectuals (of both the right and left) who want something a little more esoteric and different converting to Catholicism, which has been a thing for a couple of hundred years.

I'm curious to see if organized Christianity adopts a more hardline position on immigration

Regarding america, I'm pretty sure the only organized christians worth talking about are the mormons and the catholics. Sure, there are plenty of random protestant churches, but they can hardly be called organized. Now, I can't speak for the mormons, but it will be really, really weird if the catholic church takes a more hardline position. The most consequential modern group of immigrants is latin americans, who the church loves because they're already disproportionately catholic. It might come around to some sort of de-facto restrictions on muslim and hindu immigrants-- like a christian-flavored acculturation in compromise with the protestants. But the international nature of the church causes it to trend away from strictly cultural or ethnic xenophobia.

It’s interesting to note that Kamala just kept offending Catholics(even the ones that don’t go to church very much) and this probably explains much of the red shift, even if Catholicism is generationally getting redder as the generation that remembers JFK dies off.

Personally I see a fusion of Buddhism x Christianity already happening, and expect a sort of Christian orthodoxy mixing in Buddhism mental techniques as the most successful religion of the 21st century.

What things do you think that Buddhism offers that Christianity does not?

The way out of delusion and suffering, of course.

So does Christianity.

I suspect what you mean is ‘I think Buddhism is true’.

Atheism offers that too, without all the window dressing.

How? How does atheism alone equip you to go through aging, illness and the dying process without mental suffering? Atheism and the dharma aren't opposed btw.

Death. With no immortality of any sort, athiesm promises an end to delusion and suffering.

So you just think the thought "there's no afterlife" and all your suffering in this life is gone? You'll have no death anxiety or hand wringing while riddled with cancer?

Not "in this life", but religion doesn't offer that either. Buddhism offers many lives filled with suffering before you can perhaps reach nirvana. Atheism offers just one before you reach oblivion.

Buddhism isn't really religion. It's psychology. The way out of the cycles of suffering can be reached in this lifetime with correct practice. The Buddha told us how. It was later that people added all sorts of mumbo jumbo around it. I'm well on the way to liberation myself. No other way of life offers a concrete and comprehensive framework for comprehending and working well with the mind. To say that sheer atheism can compete with the buddhadharma is a very silly statement born out of ignorance. No offense.

Mostly a set of techniques to help settle the mind from the vast distractions in the modern world. A more direct praxis for us to enter states where we can perceive the spiritual world of angels, demons, etc, and get in touch with God.

The ancient Christians recommended meditation or watchfulness before entering into any prayer whatsoever. In the modern world I believe that almost none of us truly are in that mental state due to our myriad distractions. I think Buddhist meditation and understandings could be quite useful for revitalizing direct, contemplative experience of the divine amongst Christians.

Are you familiar with the rosary? Or the Jesus prayer? Or prayer beads?

I am familiar, I the Jesus Prayer and occasionally prayer beads. I still think meditation in the Buddhist view is more flexible and able to look into different things, such as focusing attention on the body, or the breath, areas and objects of attention which are useful in the Christian path.

All of those things exist and are practiced within Catholicism.

There is a sortof eastern-mysticism/orientalism that is left over from the 70s where westerners seem to think that eastern versions of this are different, but they're not.

Luckily, that is fading quickly, perhaps largely because of social media/travel. People have been able to travel to the places where these things are popular, and the picture is...not pleasant.

Somatic meditation, breath meditation, and other forms of attentional work are practiced in Catholicism? Do you have sources? I'd be quite curious.

I'm Orthodox and while we do have hesychasm, more.... fluid forms of attentional practice are often frowned upon. I haven't done an exhaustive dive though.

I think you’re getting into some semantics here.

Repetitive prayer certainly exists in Catholicism (and its online offshoot: Eastern Orthodoxy), as does meditation.

The belief that Buddhists have discovered some mystical magical thing in meditation, or “mantras” or “breath work” is just orientalism.

https://www.usccb.org/prayer-and-worship/prayers-and-devotions/meditations

I'm not saying they have discovered anything. I'm saying the techniques are more salient in the Buddhist tradition and easier for the modern mind to understand. Prayer and meditative prayer is an extremely confusing concept comparatively, in my opinion. It's also not nearly as popular in Christian circles.

@Blueberry this is what I meant if you're curious.

Not being against the Gays is one of the more salient points. Christianity being seen as anti-Gay has significantly harmed it's worth as a moral philosophy to modern western people. Also why the texts of Christianity are very anti materialist it tends not to be seen that way in the US.

Not being against the Gays is one of the more salient points

No, this is not true at all from my perspective. Not only is it not one of the things Buddhism offers, Buddhism itself is strongly against gays, and also women. If you look into the roots of the Buddhist tradition there is far stronger sentiment and prohibitions against sexual perversion than in mainstream Christianity.

That being said, I do think the modern Church has a perhaps too myopic focus on sexual sin sometimes.

Not Western Buddhism as practiced in America no it isn't. Scripture will only get you so far, Paul discourages marriage in his letters yet to say American Christianity is against marriage and procreation would be foolish. Not all Christian denominations were against Gay marriage in the culture war either but the overwhelming perspective of secularish young people is that Christianity has a lot of nonsensical rules about sex and Buddhism doesn't. I don't think Buddhism is going to hugely boom up. But it's definitely an advantage as you get a lot less pushback being a Buddhist in certain circles than a Christian and it's easier to syncretize with modern progressive values.

Rather like the joke regarding the expanding acronym that no one has less in common than gays and asexuals, no one should think a tradition that opposes hedonism and considers all pleasure to be a distraction would approve of gays.

That said, I can easily see how one would conclude that American Buddhism, such as it is, has had very little to say about interpersonal pleasure and much more about, say, animal welfare.

Meditation and yoga sessions and cheap decorative Buddha statues you can put into your garden/house without making a strong religious statement.

https://www.etsy.com/market/garden_buddha_statue

Not especially vocal or belligerent people

Why Buddhism? Only 1.1% of Americans are Buddhist. Admittedly that is about the same as the number of Orthodox Christians in the country, but 40% of Americans are Protestants and 19% are Catholics. Do you really think it's likely that two religious groups that are each only 1% of the population are going to outcompete the 60% of Americans who are some other kind of Christian?

Buddhist meditation is certainly popular among the elite class (particularly the West Coast elites) but they take the meditation and leave the religion part, I can't see them pivoting to Orthodoxy.

I believe Thomas meant to emphasize the lower-case orthodoxy in his statement about what could be successful in the 21st century. It's admittedly hard to distinguish sometimes when people are talking about Eastern Orthodoxy or Oriental Orthodoxy or mainstream Nicene lowercase orthodoxy, but, well, all Christian groups claim to be a part of the "Church Catholic" (which means in parlance something different from the "Catholic Church", but try telling the LCMS that), and most Christians are big believers in the evangelion, and most believe in the charismata... so the ambiguity goes on.

Correct! Hence why I said "Christian orthodoxy" as opposed to "Orthodox." I admit that the language get a bit confusing ahaha, thanks for clarifying.

The religious right has always played second fiddle in the republican coalition; there were times it was more prominent, of course, but the moral majority in the eighties was not running the GOP theocratically.

During the Bush administration it was pretty close to at least being co-equal, but by that time it's foundations were crumbling at it could never last and indeed didn't.

I wonder if Q-anon causes difficulties for the Nicene Creed. The right wing spaces that I monitor, mostly patriots.win, mock posts trailing things that are "about to happen". News that prosecutions are coming gets mocked with a sarcastic chorus of "two more weeks" or "trust the plan".

Meanwhile the Nicene Creed tells us

He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead

I've four guesses

  1. That looks to my eyes like the kind of "trust the plan" pitch that currently excites contempt, and this will be an obstacle to Christian revival.
  2. Q-anon is profane. The Nicene Creed is sacred. The profane cannot contaminate the sacred. There is no obstacle to Christian revival.
  3. Going to Methodist church as a child (England, 1965‐1970) the second coming did register at all. Later, when I learned that some branches of American Christianity centered on the second coming, I initially thought: I know about that. It features in the book Father and Son; it is a weird, Plymouth Brethren thing. It has been quietly dropped, and doubts about it will not be an obstacle to Christian revival
  4. The second coming is an important part of traditional Christianity. If people in 2025 find "about to happen, trust the plan" gives them the ick, then that will be an obstacle to Christian revival.

My guesses contradict each other. I'm really confused :-(

Trust the plan snark is directed at human plans. God is on a different level. If it discredits the eschatalogical Christians that will probably impact the popularity of Christianity I agree - because threats are a good way to bully the ignorant into line - but it can only be good for Christianity on the whole - and the world, since it reduces the number of people doing things like trying to breed special cows to bring about the end times.

I need you to tell me that’s not a real thing

Yes it is.

The mainstream Christian view is that trying to predict the end times with more specificity than the Bible tells us is for nut jobs.

The Reader’s Digest condensed version: The Old Testament ritual for purifying Jewish priests to serve in the temple requires the ashes of a spotless red heifer. Rabbinical tradition adds a bunch of criteria to the biblical law (as rabbinical tradition is wont to do) such that qualifying cows are absurdly rare.

Some Jews who want to restore the temple would like to breed qualifying cattle. A few eccentric dispensationalist Christians, who believe that the rebuilding of the Jewish temple is part of the unfolding of biblical prophecy, want to help them. This isn’t a common thing, but it has geopolitical relevance, as rebuilding the Jewish temple would require tearing down the Al Aqsa mosque.

If the temple is going to be rebuilt, the site would need to be consecrated with the sacrifice of a red heifer. It has to be a heifer that has no other colored hairs at all. That is very rare. Ranchers in Texas are working with ultra-orthodox groups in Israel to breed a line of such cows to have it ready in case the Dome of the Rock suddenly....goes away.

Now I want to reread The Yiddish Policemen's Union.

>He doesn't know about the red heifer

Boy, do I have some ancient lore for you.

Very much the 2nd. My take as an Orthodox Christian is that fomenting fears and guesses about the apocalypse is strictly sinful, and mostly a Protestant thing. Christ Himself says:

“But of that day and hour knoweth no one, not even the angels of heaven, neither the Son, but the Father only.“

I’m not sure how sinful it is, but most of the people who talk about it seem a bit off. Like they don’t really seem to care about anything else.

I have a half-formed thought about this. There are certain simple ideas whose implications are so profound and perspective-shifting that they essentially colonize a person's entire mind. I stress that these are simple ideas -- Christianity and classical liberalism are profound sets of ideas, but they are too complex for the average person to immediately filter everything in their lives through them. Simpler ideas are different, though -- it's easy to filter everything you experience or hear about through simple ideas like "the invisible oppression of the white man/Jew/etc is keeping good people down" or "the end times are nigh" or "the NAP is all that matters" or "the scientific method is the only valid source of knowledge" or "all social problems is rooted in class struggle" whatever.

I think that fixation on a single idea like this is actually a very mild form of mental illness, even the generally "respectable" ideas I included above (harcore libertarianism, communism, scientism). People get stuck on an idea and it becomes their entire, 1-dimensional universe. G.K.Chesteron has a great passage on this:

The madman's explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory. Or, to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable; this may be observed specially in the two or three commonest kinds of madness. If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do. His explanation covers the facts as much as yours. Or if a man says that he is the rightful King of England, it is no complete answer to say that the existing authorities call him mad; for if he were King of England that might be the wisest thing for the existing authorities to do. Or if a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity; for the world denied Christ's.

The entire chapter is worth reading.

However, the evangelical right has been losing quite a bit of power and cultural cachet, and we're seeing the rise of more traditional versions of Christianity such as Catholicism and to a lesser extent, Orthodoxy. Buddhism has also made inroads in a more serious way, as well as Islam mostly via immigration of Muslim peoples.

That's not been what I've personally observed? I do recognize that Catholic churches have seen a very slight uptick in attendance over the past decade, though, after bottoming out during the Obama admin and the height of the scandals. If you're referencing the "TradCath" social media movement in some way, I've not been convinced that it's anything more than an aesthetic circlejerk of 1950s-1980s view on femininity and masculinity than an actual revival of Catholic belief systems.

My extended family is traditionally Catholic, in a way where we attend churches in America that still give services in our ancestors' language as well as English. There are portions of our family that have broken tradition and started attending "Evangelical" megachurches, and it's caused quite a rift that was only exacerbated by issues that aging elders bring to the table (think: kidnapping grandma while she's suffering from Alzheimer's). Notably, the Catholic portion of our extended family is relatively socially liberal (for Catholics), but the Evangelical portion has taken a hard right turn: lots of Facebook drama for the world to see. The family undoubtedly split votes for Harris / Trump according to religious views, based on my personal interactions and what they post on Facebook.

I see more of the same happening. The prosperity gospel is too enticing for many people, and I see megachurches as validation for the modern American vices that more traditional Christian religions would preach against. The guiding voice of the religious right in the US has never really been the Pope, but now it's undoubtedly the chorus of grifters and cheats who call themselves holy men while flying on private jets to their private islands. I will throw them a bone, in that they are succeeding in creating communities where communities have been hollowed out: some of the healthiest white, rural communities (in terms of networks) are organized around these Evangelical churches. But my praise stops abruptly there.

My (naive?) theory is that Trump owes his victory as much to the Evangelical community more than any other - they very much represent his spirit. The GOP would do well to embrace that community, and I think they are doing so especially in the House led by Mike Johnson.

My (naive?) theory is that Trump owes his victory as much to the Evangelical community more than any other - they very much represent his spirit.

I think it's not his spirit, but rather where else could they go? The Democrats certainly have no signs of welcoming traditional believers aboard, unless they drop all that stuff about abortion/LGBT+ (and male headship for the harder core). What I was mildly surprised by was Kamala Harris failing to reach out on grounds of "I'm Christian too" (yeah, I know: citation needed). She did the usual campaigning in black churches, but no broader appeal to the religious conservatives with stories about "I sang in the church choir as a girl, I attend this church when I'm at home":

Harris, on the other hand, is a rare political figure who may have downplayed her spiritual life in public, given anti-religious sentiments in her native San Francisco Bay Area and a complicated personal religious journey.

Harris is a Baptist who was raised by a Black Anglican father and an Indian Hindu mother, and she is married to a Reform Jewish husband.

She’s a longtime member of San Francisco’s historic Third Baptist Church and has a deep relationship with its pastor, the Rev. Amos Brown. As vice president, she has attended services at Baptist churches in the Washington, D.C., area and in 2022 spoke at the National Baptist Convention.

...In her 2019 memoir, Harris wrote about her mother’s making sure she was exposed to both Hindu and African American Christian religious traditions, adding that she and her sister, Maya, sang in the choir at 23rd Avenue Church of God in Oakland.

It's probably also complicated by the fact that that is an American Baptist-affiliated church, not a Southern Baptist one, but nevertheless she soft-pedalled on religion, as did Walz (quick, anybody have any idea, without looking it up, what denomination if any he belongs to?)

Whoops, looks like Walz is a souper!

"Tim, who was raised Catholic, became a Lutheran after marrying Gwen. He has called himself a "Minnesota Lutheran" and identified Pilgrim Lutheran Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, a congregation in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, as his family's parish."

Prosperity-gospel televangelists exist, but evangelicals broadly regard them as heretics and scammers. For example, Mike Winger has a whole playlist condemning Benny Hinn.

Evangelicals didn’t support Trump in the 2016 primary but did support him in the 2016 general election. Appointing Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe bought him some political loyalty among us, though.

My (naive?) theory is that Trump owes his victory as much to the Evangelical community more than any other - they very much represent his spirit. The GOP would do well to embrace that community, and I think they are doing so especially in the House led by Mike Johnson.

Trump owes his victory to winning over not-particularly-religious white working-class voters in the Midwest. A preaching-to-the-choir electoral strategy designed to increase margins in rural Arkansas from 80% to 85% would be an electoral disaster for the party.

If you're referencing the "TradCath" social media movement in some way

No, we really are growing. There’s a real ‘there’ there.

A lot of the social media movement posters are at best loosely affiliated but normie rad trads are a thing with enough growth to be notable. As the boomers die and traditional forms continue to grow(both through natural increase and conversion) it will become a bigger and bigger part of the American Catholic experience. It’s already- even per secular pollsters- at a notable single digit percentage of Catholics in America.

Thanks, I'll adjust my priors. Hard to get a good sense of what may be happening "behind the scenes" when what's happening "on the surface" (mainly TikTok, indirectly) is so much more visible.

Well, if anything I think we’ll see a lot more “orthodox” religious expression than anything else. The thing that seems to be happening is that people join churches with stronger dogmas and less ecumenical practices and a sort of “purity culture”. For example there are a fair number of converts to orthodoxy that seem to push for rebapism as if they’re joining a new religion. On the Protestant end, the number of things that are “demonic” are growing really fast. There are influencers who are convinced that fast food is demonic, or that relatively common symbols are demonic. Fast food is unhealthy, but I think most people would have laughed at the idea of McDonald’s being satanic (the teen spitting in your food might have been a “satanist” in the goth bug your parents sense when I was in high school, but nobody thought that McDonald’s itself was demonic. Catholics have always had sedavacantists and traditionalists.

I expect that these groups will basically push to create places where they can live in religious communities perhaps something on the order of the Mennonite or Amish communities where those religious values and interpretations are at least social expectations if not codified in local laws. Convinced that these groups want religion to play a very large role in how life is lived. They want to have I.e. orthodoxy and those rules inform every aspect of their lives.

For example there are a fair number of converts to orthodoxy that seem to push for rebapism as if they’re joining a new religion.

This isn’t an orthodox convert-generated phenomenon; there’s a longstanding (as in centuries) dispute in Orthodox praxis over whether converts from other Christian traditions should be baptized. The general trend is to say ‘no’, but this is supported by a theological view that generally argues baptism is not grace-filled unless the baptizer is an Orthodox individual, preferably a priest or deacon. Most converts to Orthodoxy are received by chrismation, the term for what is called confirmation in Catholic parlance, which is given great significance as a means of completing baptism in Orthodox theology. The view is that chrismation back-fills grace into a baptism that was performed outside the Orthodox Church. But the view of Orthodoxy generally is that non-Orthodox baptisms aren’t really baptisms, in the strict mystical sense they believe is significant.

The reason converts sometimes push for a rebaptism is because there are some Orthodox rigorists — most notably Mount Athos, one of the holiest monasteries in Orthodox culture — that will interrogate converts and refuse communion to those who were not baptized Orthodox and instead received by chrismation. The converts are trying to deal with an unfortunate situation by aiming for what’s universally accepted, so that no one will have grounds to reject their reception into the Orthodox Church. It’s the rigorists’ fault, not the converts’.

The best comparison point would be Baptists — who, of course, believe that someone baptized as an infant should be baptized instead as an adult, and that infant baptisms aren’t ‘real’. They couple that with a less mystical and more symbolic interpretation of baptism, but nevertheless they believe that other Christian groups are doing baptism wrong in certain cases and that those who were incorrectly baptized ought to be baptized in the proper way, even if that means repeating it. While Catholics and magisterial Protestants have long agreed on baptismal validity, Baptists and Orthodox stand outside that consensus for different reasons.

So it’s not really about the converts hating the old forms of Christianity they grew up in — though that certainly can be a part of an individual’s psychology — and more a serious theological dispute within Orthodoxy about proper baptismal practice that they’re trying to navigate based on conscience. As with everything, the Official Orthodox Answer is “be received however your priest says you should.”

I would be considered a conservative Catholic, probably a borderline or "light" tradcath. I'm personally quite against the closed religious communities you describe. My plan is to move to a conservative area to live around people who share my religion and philosophy and to influence my surrounding community to make it increasingly hospitable to those who share my beliefs. For institutions that are simply too rotten, I will support setting up parallel institutions, but whenever possible I will for example vote for a hardcore tradcath public school board (and contribute to Catholic after school programs) instead of working to found new Catholic schools from scratch. As has been pointed out many times here and elsewhere, closed-off religious communities are able to exist only due to the benign neglect of the Eye of Sauron's. Concentrating your people in a single place and in unsanctioned institutions leaves them vulnerable to dispersal and reeducation by carpetbaggers. But if your religion is simply woven into the background culture of the area and infused into its public institutions, it's a lot harder to suppress. The religious should emulate Dearborn or the Free State Project, not the Mennonites. Entryism is the way.

Entryism can be undone by a second group of entryists doing what you did. To keep an open society traditionally catholic, you’d have to limit the number of nonbelievers allowed in, and certainly keep sharp eyes on those who enter “cathedrals” in your community. Harvard was started as a Christian university. It no longer is, and is oftentimes hostile towards the ideology of its founding.

On the Protestant end, the number of things that are “demonic” are growing really fast.

This is in contrast to the Catholic view, in which everything is presumed demonic until exorcised (why do you think they bless things so much?)

Because blessings give grace and strength to the faithful.

Calling your belief system a religion makes you vulnerable to certain laws and regulations that apply only to religions. For example, you can't teach it in schools. Indoctrinating other people's children is one of the main reasons to have a religion in the first place, so it's no surprise that the religions with this disadvantage are dying.

Nowadays, if you have a metaphysical theory about the intangible nature of human essence with strong dictates about how humans should behave, you call it a new field of science and loudly insist that your priests are scientists. Since your "field of science" does not interact with any previously-existing field of science and all scientists within that field will be your priests, no one can prove your "science" wrong.

See: gender science.

I expect to see religions gradually replaced by a variety of woo-woo superstitions and mystery cults that loudly insist that they aren't religious in nature.

Calling your belief system a religion makes you vulnerable to certain laws and regulations that apply only to religions.

There are also benefits to calling your system a religion: "I want to smoke peyote" makes the DEA show up, but "I want to smoke peyote because of my religion", despite losing in court in Employment Division v. Smith spurned the passing of lots of RFRA laws, not to mention other religious carveouts like the Amish with Social Security, beards in the military, and such.

Being exempt from taxes is small beans compared to having the right to divert tax revenue to yourself, which is the real prize.

Yes, but when compared to the opportunity to compel the nation to submit to your worldview, those benefits are small potatoes. Tax exemptions may be enough to motivate a medium-time con-man to declare his pyramid scheme a church, but those with higher aspirations might be willing to forgo them.

it's no surprise that the religions with this disadvantage are dying.

Source for this? It seems to me that Christianity is growing again as the more 'scientific' ideologies are on the decline.

Even if the overall population of Christians is going up due to population growth, there's a clear trend towards secularism in the countries at the end of their development cycles (high education, wealthy, etc). If current trends continue then all the currently-developing countries will eventually become developed countries and go through the same secularization process. If current trends don't continue then all bets are off anyway.

Also, it's pretty clear that political power has largely gone out of religion in the world's great powers. The Church of England used to spend its time trying to stamp out Catholicism in Ireland, now it's a nearly-atheistic social club. The medieval Vatican waged wars against kings and emperors, now the Pope is just a celebrity ruling over a country the size of a park. If you're at all familiar with the power religion used to have, it should be self-evident that it doesn't have that anymore.

If religion is transmissible and religious individuals are more fertile than the irreligious then it seems inevitable that the secular will be simply outbred, no?

Winning “converts” to secularism is a small tactical victory if they go on to have fewer than two children.

Only if they can hold enough of those kids. Mainstream religion is collapsing in America. On a long enough timeline that might lead to a society of tradcaths and Hasidics. But at the moment those are niche communities. The "mainstream" religious don't appear to be sustainable.

I don't think that this is true – non-denominational churches (which I would think are often but not always right-wing evangelical coded) are actually growing. And attending evangelical types typically have a positive tfr, IIRC.

Some groups (like the Southern Baptists, IIRC) are undergoing narrowing (perhaps temporary as Baby Boomers and the Silent Gen decline?) and of course retention rates are not perfect (so a high tfr does not guarantee continued adherence.) But I think that modeling a mild downturn in attendance to infinity is as naive as modeling a mild upswing to infinity.

Regardless, just going by current trendlines, I think we can expect evangelicals to continue to be a "live player" group. They're often overlooked in favor of the Amish or tradcaths because the Amish are basically a far-group to most internet users and tradcaths have a lot of momentum, so they are more fun to talk about, while evangelicals' day in the sun ended with Bush 2, but evangelicals never actually went anywhere.

I wouldn't necessarily predict it but I think there is actually a very good chance that evangelicalism (defined broadly, and perhaps throwing in a few Protestant denominations that wouldn't consider themselves evangelical but nevertheless have many of the same characteristics) is actually the Religion of the Future in America. Very plausible to see them cannibalizing the mainstream denominations as they enter tailspins, pick up tradpilled younger Gen Zs, and make massive inroads into traditional Catholic territories.

Yes Evangelical churches are growing in a large part because they are scooping up converts from the collapsing mainline denominations. Religion as whole in the US is still declining, but the Evangelicals do present an interesting data point as the rest of US mirrors the secularization of Europe and Evangelicals don't It's possible that the Evangelicals stop the tide or even reverse it. My guess is they'll hold steady they have a high fertility rate but a high defection rate of the youth and secular culture has a strong pull. They are also massively less influential than they were in the 80s and 00s and they'd have to work pretty hard to get that power back.

Religion as whole in the US is still declining

There have been some signs that the decline is tapering off. I would not be shocked if it continued to slide, but I also would not be shocked if it didn't go lower.

Of course part of this is the question of "what counts as religious"? The rise of the nones, for instance, hasn't really corresponded with the rise of secular atheist types (and many nones indulge in religious practices) - so has the decline of religion been essentially false, and it's just been that organized religion is on the decline? Or do we really need to look at practice and church attendance? That seems like a more serious and better measurement in many ways (as I understand it it actually is a better predictor for many religious benefits) but does that unfairly discount religious practices that are by their very nature disorganized? There's some methodological questions there. I'd simply confine myself to observing that the "decline of religion" mostly doesn't mean "the rise of secular liberal atheism" or anything like that. It means people aren't going to church, not that they have become transhumanist Star Trek liberals or something.

They are also massively less influential than they were in the 80s and 00s and they'd have to work pretty hard to get that power back.

One notable difference since the 00s, I think, is that evangelicals will be more comfortable being in a political coalition with Catholics, and even Mormons and Muslims. They're still going to have serious reservations, but Obama-era liberalism made the misstep of putting "conservative religious people" broadly on the same team in some areas. I think this is tremendously important - all the little parts of these coalitions have their own organizations and patronage networks. Exercising political power is not just about counting heads, you need networking and institutions, and "all religious groups in the US that are relatively conservative" is much more powerful a coalition than "evangelicals."

More comments

That sounds like regular selective pressure. The communities that can maintain fertility will be the ones that dominate in the long run.

You can model the sexual revolution as a heritable fertility disease for which a small segment of the population was immune or had attenuated effects, even if the source of their resistance was cultural rather than biological.

If current trends continue then the world will be less secular in the future, not more secular.

According to Pew Research (and they're arguably the best at this sort of thing) in 2050 Christianity will stay at a little of 30% of global population, same as it was in 2010, while the religiously unaffiliated will fall from 16.4% of global population to 13.2%. And in the United States the decline of Christianity seems to have leveled off.

If you observe a person's number of teeth over time, you will find that they start with 0, rise to a certain peak, wobble a bit as baby teeth are lost and replaced, and then stay mostly stable at a certain number for a long time (possibly losing a few to accidents). Then, at the end of their life, they gradually lose teeth their one at a time until they have none.

If you were to look at a snapshot of a community, you would find that some children are gaining teeth quite quickly, the adults have a stable number of teeth, and the elders are gradually losing teeth. In a community that is 50% children (not rare historically) you might take an average and find that the number of teeth in the community is rising rapidly. However, if you were to extrapolate that to assume that the community's children are mutating into shark-like creatures who constantly grow more teeth, you would be making a mistake. In the long run, everyone ends up with exactly 0 teeth.

The mature civilizations of this planet are becoming less religious. It would be a mistake to assume the immature civilizations will continue their current trend lines exactly. It is better to assume they will follow the same course of evolution the more-developed civilizations took. The more-developed civilizations are becoming less religious over time, and unlike with children there are no new undeveloped civilizations rising up. It is reasonable to assume that, if things continue on as they have for another 100 years, secularism will continue to rise.

The mature civilizations of this planet are becoming less religious. It would be a mistake to assume the immature civilizations will continue their current trend lines exactly.

It would be a mistake to assume that there is such a thing as a "mature" civilization that all "immature" civilizations will develop into, with the same certainty that children develop into adults. The fact that the USA is far more religious (and has stabilized at a far higher level of religiosity) than Western Europe despite being much richer and more technologically advanced should be enough to demonstrate that civilizations do not all end up in the same place. If sub-Saharan Africa does "mature" and become rich we shouldn't be that confident that they will become much more secular. They may take a different route altogether.

Not to mention a significant percentage of global population is in China, which is extremely secular yet shows signs of growing more religious over time. Now you might (correctly) say that China has its own unique political and cultural circumstances, including the fact that atheism is the state doctrine and religions are legally restricted. That's true! But it is another example of how different countries may take very different paths than from Western Europe.

Is the United States not a ‘mature society’?

It is reasonable to assume that, if things continue on as they have for another 100 years, secularism will continue to rise.

If things continue on as they have for another 100 years (appropriate to your analogy) the "mature" civilizations will, like the elders of a community, only be a shell of their former selves, if anything is left of them at all.

I had thought that most skulls had some teeth, often most teeth?

OK, fair enough, I guess a lot of people die before losing their teeth. Although I would argue that death means losing your whole body, including your teeth.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats