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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

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And I wonder how many Christian children killed by trans gunmen will be enough.

All of them.

Christianity doesn't really seem like the right toolkit for encouraging in-group bias and even defensive militancy. History may seem to contradict me here, but I'd posit that it's actually non-christian traditions that historically lent the means of protection to Christianity, that institutions of physical defence had to work in spite of Christianity, not thanks to it. And over the centuries, it looks to me like Christianity has worn down those alternate memeplexes until they became defunct, and is now, in the West, left without the memes to ensure its own survival and that of its adherents.

The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.

I think that Christianity has had a good run, but owed much of it to other forces that allied with it and carried it through the centuries. It survived those, and in their place has grown some post-christian replacement non-religion that picked and chose a few elements of Christianity to run with while rejecting the name of the faith and any coherence that came with it. But I think they picked and chose poorly - they took up the most flawed pieces, and left behind most of the good bits.

Christianity and western leftism both seem doomed in the long run. But so is everything, I suppose.

Good luck.

Modern Christianity probably not. Most modern Christians are basically ecumenical believers— they believe that Christianity is true enough for them, but they don’t see Christianity as the one true faith, nor see themselves as christian before other group identities they happen to hold. That’s true today of Westernized Christianity, but there are times and places in history where this wasn’t the case. Orthdox, Traditional Catholics, and fundamentalist Christians are more likely to think this way, and more likely to see themselves as Christian before things like nationality.