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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   27039 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

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You don’t think Islam is riven with a ton of internal ethnic division? Huh that was my impression.

Of course it is. And with competing nationalisms and versions of the religion. Point is, they all happen within Islam. When Europe was "Christendom", they had thousands of heretical sects, competing secular governments, nobles, clerics, etc. They still had some more powerful ideology serving as the tent under which all that was "united". Neither Islam nor globohomo is any different. We're all in globohomo, whether we like it or not in the same way Iran is part of Islam, even though they are hated heretics by the rest of Islam.

I appreciate your framing, sincerely.

What's your take on the other abrahamic "hard" religious groups; Rad Trad catholics / Orthodox "ortho-Bros", and actual zionist and/or messianic Jews?

Pointless ideologically, potentially important demographically. Hard patriarchy is what gets birthrates up.

I also agree with JTarrou - a superordinate political identity like "Christendom" or "Western Civilisation" doesn't need near-universal adherence to matter, just broad popular or broad elite support in the nations it seeks to unite. And political Islam is a functioning superordinate identity group, and the factional splits within it are the main drivers of political violence globally. (Contra Huntington in Clash of Civilisations, the borders of the Islamic world are a lot less bloody than the interior). "Western Civilisation"/"The Free World" remains an important superordinate identity, with globohomo a faction within it. So far we handle our factional conflicts at the ballot box, and everyone except the nuttier fringes of MAGA want to keep it that way.

None of the various religious groups you mention have any desire to be a superordinate identity in this sense. Orthodoxy is in practice a bunch of ethnic churches that hate each other more than they hate outsiders, with the Orthobros being irrelevant. Rad Trads are happy being themselves, and religious Jews explicitly see themselves as a nation state that isn't part of a superordinate group.

These are not Christendom. Christendom is an earthly kingdom(or group of kingdoms/republics) dedicated to expanding Christianity in a generally aligned way. It's possible, but a bit of a stretch, to point to some fringey parts(Francoist Spain, South Vietnam under the Ngo family) of the general US sphere in the cold war as the last vestiges of Christendom. But Christendom today is either dead or limited to Liechtenstein. It is, specifically, a state, operating like a normal state.

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