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Notes -
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?
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.
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.
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