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Notes -
A godless liberal goes to church
I knew in advance that my frustration with the godless progressive milieu that did everything but (ok, not but) cheer a horrifying political assassination, would be unlikely to be assuaged by attending my local Unitarian church's sunday service, but since I had read it described as the most intellectual church, and because of its sensibility towards Christ's (obvious lack of) resurrection, I felt like it would be the most likely out of the various sects to be a spiritual home for me.
I had no idea how bad it is in there.
The introductory speaker began the service reading very slowly and deliberately through various housekeeping items in a kind of "this is why boys in school have ADD" teacher voice. It was revealed that this was a special "all ages" day that they do every month. Could this be why she was reading to us in a voice like we were all babies, or is she always like this, I wondered. The last thing she did before passing the mic was asking us all to stand up and get the wiggles out.
The choir then got up and sang "Liberty and Justice for all" by Brandon Williams. Could this be an old Whiggish protestant church song, I wondered. But as it started "We are frightened... we are angry... we are rising..." which came across as a bit modern to me.
Then they sit down and they are followed by some ceremony to induct new people to serve as some kind of counselor role, which involves some vow reading that takes a while. Then they sit down and the choir gets up again, to sing "One Foot/Lead With Love" by Melanie DeMore which again contains words about being "scared," but it's a bit catchier than the first song.
Then they go sit down and now the two apparent church leaders say they are going to tell us a "story." Very slowly and deliberately they read out a baby story about two brothers trying to find God. They go up to the mountains, but they don't see God there...
I have to leave. The whole experience has felt like being Dracula confronted with a crucifix. Every cell in my brain screaming to get out of this holy place. Exiting the door I'm confronted with pouring down rain on a street with cars going by and I'm struck by the beauty and calm. THIS is where God is, is the thought that occurs to me.
So now my thought is, culturally, WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON!? How is THAT what church is? Jesus Christ! How fucking horrible was all that? I could not believe only 30 minutes had passed.
I looked up the two choir songs and they are both basically anti-Trump protest songs written in 2016/17. Why are we singing about how scared we are? Why don't we fucking man up?
Why in every aspect is this a church for babies? Where even the children are bored by their pandering to them?
I was raised as a godless liberal but I had an idea that if things felt really dire and miserable, or if I felt like I needed God for whatever reason, any one of these places would at least do a serviceable job of keeping me connected. Holy hell was I wrong, there are some fucking bad, miserable churches.
When I visited Harvard’s Unitarian church due to social obligation, they all snapped their fingers in agreement with the pastoress. The racial disparity of Harvard faculty was noted in the homily. It’s neat that American Christianity is totally modular and you can just attach whatever you want to it. It’s not a good thing, but it’s neat.
Woke progressivism wears many once venerable institutions like a skinsuit. It consumes all their social capital and then moves on to the next victim.
It's because Wokism is a Christian heresy.
That's an interesting claim, considering that it came significantly out of atheism. E.g.:
I'm pretty doubtful that if one examines the continental->critical philosophy pipeline that may have undergirded some of the trend, one would find a pool of Christian heretics, either. I guess if you say that all the atheism is just Christian heresy (would be quite a claim) and that Wokism is just atheist heresy, blink and imagine some form of transitive property, you might be able to think that Wokism is just Christian heresy.
Not that outlandish. In many cases, the God they didn't believe in was specifically the Christian God.
I mean that's just a vestige of the culture. By this logic Catholicism is a Greek Pagan heresy since the Catholic Church incorporated a lot of Greek philosophy in it's formation.
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This has been a pretty popular take I've seen floating around over the last few years actually. Tom Holland pushes it and repeats it on pretty much every religiously adjacent podcast he goes on. His view (at least expressed in his book 'Dominion') is that a) necessarily European modes of thought are themselves Christian, so that liberalism, enlightenment thought, rationality, and so on, are themselves essentially Christian, and b) specifically the concept of the secular is unique to Christianity, which ties in with atheistic modes of thought via some extra steps. For context, Holland is a pretty milquetoast liberal, albeit a (cultural?) Christian.
I've also seen versions of the view popular in NRx circles. Nick Land has been on a liberalism = anglo-being kick for a while now, and I think would agree that Dawkins style New Atheism is itself essentially Anglo (and therefore Protestant). I can't remember who else off the top of my head has made similar claims but the narrower "atheism is just protestantism taken to it's logical conclusion" view is also one of I've seen pushed by online Catholics.
I can't really buy this we had Atheist Greeks and Philosophical schools before Christianity. The Enlightment is pretty non Christian. And China was ruled by a secular philosophical school as base value rather than religion. It seems way to much a just so story. The concept of the secular is definitely not unique to Christianity.
Dominion is a good read and makes the argument much better than I could. I don't think I agree with you about China though. By secularism I mean both the concept of separation of church and state, but also the general conceptual rendering that comes with "render unto Caesar", that there is a realm of life which isn't governed by the religious. Worth noting of course this has often been ignored by Christian states themselves, but was picked up with more seriousness later down the line. But Chinese emperors and dynasties had the Mandate of Heaven, oracle bones, and neo-Confucianism.
It sounds like an interesting book and I'll definitely take a look at it but is the Mandate of Heaven really that different from the divine right of kings?
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I won't pretend to have read it all, but Moldbug wrote a whole book about this in 2007, https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/09/how-dawkins-got-pwned-part-1/
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