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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   24855 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 29, 2025

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And the actual experience of integrating all those Catholic immigrants into American society over the course of the 20th century absolutely did get experienced, in many ways, like a kind of soft ethnic cleansing, or it certainly was by the parent or grandparent generations watching their home cultures and home religions get completely melted away by mass culture, Hollywood, public schools, and later universities. There was a huge amount of legitimate trauma.

The Catholic Church In America had a ginormous amount of cultural soft power; thé hayes code was set by bishops as much as anyone else for just one example.

The important thing to note is how much of this soft power was renounced voluntarily. And sûre, maybe it couldn’t have been held on to anyways. But they didn’t really try; the decision to integrate was more or less voluntary.

The decision to integrate coincided with the general decline of religiosity across the western world that followed the 1950s. Only one major Christian movement - American Protestantism - held on long after the others (European Protestantism, Lutheran and other, and Catholicism in general) fell, and that was in large part because of the unique success of the evangelical televangelists and the Christian revival movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, led by extraordinarily capable preachers like Billy Graham and supported by an embrace of modern media and to some extent music. Catholics tried to copy some of this with happy clappy post Vatican II masses and so on, but it never had the same vitality.

The evangelical revival preserved a religious Christian (not social customs; divorce and single parenthood still rose of course) identity among otherwise deracinated American Protestants and the many, many Catholics who converted to it for almost two generations after most Europeans largely abandoned regular churchgoing Christianity. It didn’t really die, not wholly anyway, until the mid-2010s, and even today hangs on due to comparatively higher birth rates and the large scale conversion of Latin American Catholics and their descendants, both in their homelands and in the US.

Catholics didn’t have that, and so a combination of suburbanization due to white flight clearing out the old ethnic neighborhoods and throwing various white ethnics and founding whites together in suburbia and the decline in Catholic mass attendance led to intermarriage and the merging into a shared American identity. Sometimes this is laid at the feet of WW2, but I disagree. The New York or Philadelphia of, for example, 1949 was still very much a place with distinctly separate white ethnic identities. It happened 10-30 years later.

American Catholicism declined following thé decision to relax social controls; obviously post hoc non ergo propter hoc, but also prior hoc ergo non propter hoc.

I certainly agree that the American Catholic Church was not going to maintain its fifties peak. But the looming decline was not in 1965 something that was generally known.

I think honestly it’s because it wasn’t authentic in a sense. They didn’t embrace the happy clappy because they thought it would make better Catholics, they kinda did it to appeal to outsiders.

I'm not necessarily convinced of that. I think attempting to evangelize was part of the motivation, but an even bigger part just seems to be that this is what people liked back then, especially for poorly-catechized mid-century American Catholics who were living through a period where their religion seemed to be changing by the minute in ways that were unprecedented and unexpected. Catholics at the time didn't know how to deal with such radical change, so they defaulted to things that they knew from the outside or felt good to them. Happy clappy songs among them.

Lower-mid level clerics liked it- laypeople didn’t get a say under the old system or in the post Vatican II era. It didn’t matter what they thought either way.

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