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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   27319 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 3, 2025

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I consider “insular community formation” to be the only way forward for Christianity. Christianity was engaged in this even before Constantine, with Tertullian forbidding Christians from enjoying pretty much any Pagan leisure activity. The rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire coincided with the religion becoming more insular and exclusionist than before, which is important to recognize: the disciplina arcani meant that little about Christ was told to outsiders and only gradually taught to catechumens over an elaborate three-year initiation process. Catechumens had no knowledge of the Eucharist except late in this process and only learned the Lord’s Prayer days before their baptism. It was in this period of secrecy and insularity that the church grew from 1% to 50% of the empire. This was the period of the agape feasts: the most important weekly leisure activity of the Christian with meal and wine and prayer was totally forbidden from mention to outsiders. I imagine if we went back in time and saw the early Christian community of 150ad we would be shocked at how insular they were; so much of what they do would have been explicitly Christian.

This is optimal for a number of practical and psychological reasons. If you have your own schools, you can disseminate your culture and values more readily to your own children while increasing their retention to the faith, and you can ensure they aren’t reading things that are bad for them. If you have your own town, you can invest in it longterm because you know no one will take it from you, and you’ll actually love the inhabitants; this means a return to traditional architecture and beautiful design. If you have your own feasts and rituals, then you can stave off the demons malevolent spirits socially-infectious vibes that lead the youth down bad paths, eg binge-drinking and gambling and nihilism, while promoting the good path [cf “you cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons”]. If you have your own dress code, you will be saving boys endless distraction and girls ~5 hours of thought on their appearance a week (at least!). It’s really in its social form that religion successfully improves people; today it is essentially antisocial.

If you have your own schools, you can disseminate your culture and values more readily to your own children while increasing their retention to the faith, and you can ensure they aren’t reading things that are bad for them. If you have your own town, you can invest in it longterm because you know no one will take it from you, and you’ll actually love the inhabitants; this means a return to traditional architecture and beautiful design. If you have your own feasts and rituals, then you can stave off the demons malevolent spirits socially-infectious vibes that lead the youth down bad paths, eg binge-drinking and gambling and nihilism, while promoting the good path [cf “you cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons”]. If you have your own dress code, you will be saving boys endless distraction and girls ~5 hours of thought on their appearance a week (at least!).

And if a hostile state forbids you your own schools, your own towns? If they pronounce your suppression of your youths' "freedom" to go down those bad paths "oppressive" and "abusive"? Or the same with your dress code (which also provides them a nice, visible identifier for targeting your group)?

But, you might say, Christianity survived as minorities under Roman persecution. I acknowledge that, and I first counter with Tokugawa Japan. Then I note (as people often argue whenever I, or other monarchists, compare the level of intrusiveness in daily life of modern democratic governments versus that of monarchies past) that technological and economic progress have been greatly expanding state capacity for centuries at least, that even the most "free" modern states intrude more into daily life of the average citizen than Rome ever could, and thus, any modern state has tools of repression at their disposal that the Romans could only dream of. And the trends in things like drone technology and LLM processing of omnipresent surveillance data make it look to become even worse in the near future.

Great post.

so much of what they do would have been explicitly Christian.

I don't follow. Perhaps this was a typo?

It’s really in its social form that religion successfully improves people; today it is essentially antisocial.

One of the non-theological differences I've noticed in Traditional circles vs "beige Catholicism" circles is how much the former genuinely enjoy hanging out with one another. When we have a social after Mass on Sundays, people will hang out for hours. At the Novus Ordo parish I grew up at, the "social" felt like a non-required extension to the Mass. You go and get a coffee and a donut, shake hands with Father Friendly, awkwardly make small talk with some randos for a few minutes, then give up and flee back home before NFL kickoff.

In my experience that's just a Catholic thing? Every non-Catholic church I've ever been to, even the woolly, beige, mainline, progressive/hippie types, has had a social gathering after church, tea and biscuits, the whole shebang, and if you're new they will invite you to join them with almost aggressive friendliness. As far as my life has gone it's pretty much only Catholics who go to mass, receive communion, and then get out without socialising.

This makes sense to me. Can't say I've been to many protestant services.

I see this, however, as potentially a theological failure mode. Is the service really about God, or is it a highly ritualized potluck? Again, this is a theological argument. Having a good, regular social interaction within the context of a moral values system is something I am highly in favor of.

I'd agree with that failure mode. I don't think there's any single form of liturgy that is guaranteed to never fail - there is no substitute for constant vigilance.

One failure mode is that worship is just receiving a service. You go in, you don't interact with anybody else, you mechanically recite the approved words, the priest dispenses the Eucharist, you consume it, you leave, and you never experience any form of fellowship or community. But as you say, another failure mode is that worship is just a tedious bit of ritual you have to get through before you get the morning tea potluck. You're really just going to meet up with friends in the community and worship is just an excuse.

My sense, theologically, is that both the liturgy, which is fundamentally oriented towards God, and the community, oriented towards each other, are essential. Christian gathering is for and about God, but it is also gathering as community. It's a core Christian claim that God himself is a relational community, as the Trinity, so by having that fellowship with each other we are mirroring his own being. We come to worship to know God and to know each other and the two cannot be isolated from each other - the same way that, when asked the greatest commandment, Jesus weaves together our duties to God and our duties to each other. "On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."

I imagine if we went back in time and saw the early Christian community of 150ad we would be shocked at how insular they were; so much of what they do would have been explicitly Christian.

Nobody can seriously doubt this. Catholicism and the unbroken link back to the first Apostles is all predicated on the idea that the Christians of today are living exactly the way the Christians of the first century did if you were to go back in time. The two groups would be indistinguishable.

People intuitively know this is absurd and that the church has changed enormously over the centuries. The earliest liturgies weren’t even given Latin, they were given in Greek. And the changes tally in the hundreds if not thousands with the passage of time.

If you have your own feasts and rituals, then you can stave off the demons malevolent spirits socially-infectious vibes that lead the youth down bad paths, eg binge-drinking and gambling and nihilism, while promoting the good path [cf “you cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons”]. If you have your own dress code, you will be saving boys endless distraction and girls ~5 hours of thought on their appearance a week (at least!). It’s really in its social form that religion successfully improves people; today it is essentially antisocial.

One of the major advantages Christianity had in its formal development was it gave people a comprehensive life script and path to follow. Today’s contemporary and modern western ethic can’t tolerate anyone that comes along and tries to pin someone down along a predefined path that tells them what to do and what they should find important. Until there’s a major restoration of paternalistic authority, I don’t really see these negative trends becoming reversed for the better. Things that were done to us as kids would get us jailed today if we did them to our own. And some of them justified. Yes. Abuse was a thing. Spanking? Apparently that’s a questionable thing now. Not to mention a host of other things.

Catholicism and the unbroken link back to the first Apostles is all predicated on the idea that the Christians of today are living exactly the way the Christians of the first century did if you were to go back in time. The two groups would be indistinguishable.

That isn't true. The unbroken link held by the Catholic and Orthodox churches is predicated on the idea that the first Apostles appointed successors, who appointed their successors in turn, and so on all the way to today. It has nothing to do with the liturgy remaining the same, or the people's lives remaining the same, or anything like that.

For what it's worth there are absolutely Catholic apologists who will argue that the modern day Catholic Church resembles the early church in form and structure. For instance, from Surprised by Truth, a book of testimonies by former-evangelical converts to Catholicism:

[Paul Thigpen:] Second, when I studied the history of Jewish and Christian liturgy, I found that even if we could return to the “primitive” Christian experience, that experience would not resemble most of the Protestant, especially the charismatic, churches of today. The congregations I’d been part of were for the most part assuming that they had recovered a “New Testament” model of strictly spontaneous worship, local government, and “Bible-only” teaching. But the early Church, I found, was, in reality, liturgical in worship; translocal and hierarchical in government; and dependent on a body of sacred tradition that included the scripture, yet stretched far beyond it as well.

[Steve Wood:] During my Calvary Chapel days, I had a very low view of the sacraments; I was almost antisacramental. But when I discovered the true role of baptism and the Lord’s Supper in Christian worship and living, a corresponding appreciation for the role of the Church began to blossom. That’s when I did something really dangerous. I started reading the early Church Fathers firsthand. I had studied some early Church history, but too much of it was from perspectives limited by Protestant history textbooks. I was shocked to discover in the writings of the first-, second-, and third-century Christians a very high view of the Church and liturgy, very much unlike the views of the typical Evangelical Protestant. The worship and government of the early Church didn’t look anything like the things I saw at Calvary Chapel or in my own congregation. It looked a lot more, well, Catholic.

[Bob Sungenis:] Many Protestants claim that the Church of the first three centuries was a “pure” church, and only after the legalization of the Christian faith by the Roman emperor Constantine (in AD 312) did the church become “Catholic” and corrupt. But upon studying this issue, I found that the doctrines of post-Constantine Catholicism are the same doctrines, some in more primitive form, that were held by Christians for the preceding three centuries.

My study of the writings of the Church Fathers revealed that the early Church believed in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, confession of sins to a priest, baptismal regeneration, salvation by faith and good works done through grace, that one could reject God’s grace and forfeit salvation, that the bishop of Rome is the head of the Church, that Mary is the Mother of God and was perpetually a virgin, that intercessory prayer can be made to the saints in heaven, that purgatory is a state of temporary purification which some Christians undergo before entering heaven. Except for the perpetual virginity and divine motherhood of Mary, all of these doctrines were repudiated by the Protestant Reformers. If the Catholic Church is in error to hold these beliefs, then it was in error long before Constantine legalized Christianity. This would mean that the Church apostatized before the end of the first century, when the apostles were still alive! An absurd theory which even the most anti-Catholic of Protestants can’t quite bring themselves to accept.

[Julie Swenson:] John Henry Newman, the famous Evangelical Protestant convert to Catholicism, once said, “Knowledge of Church history is the death of Protestantism.” He was right. My study of the early Church showed clearly that it was Catholic in its beliefs and practices—in fact, it had begun calling itself “Catholic” at least as early as the end of the first century.

Now, most of this is cherry-picking similarities and ignoring differences, or misrepresenting an early church that is a lot messier than this text admits - but nonetheless "the early church looked like the Catholic Church" is a claim that apologists make.

(And who the heck thinks that John Henry Newman was ever an evangelical Protestant?)

Realistically, I'd bet that if you had a time machine, the very early church would not easily slot into any of these confessional disputes. The early church was a scattered, often incoherent mess, and Catholic attempts to, for instance, project an episcopacy (much less a papacy!) back into the early church are extremely implausible. Probably partisans of every tradition would find elements of the early church that feel uncomfortable to them. Unfortunately much of the early church is poorly-known, leaving it something of a blank canvas for later traditions to project their presuppositions back on to.

When you say "worship" do you mean "offer sacrifice to God" or do you mean "say ritual prayers?"

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