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I'm going to sketch out a pretty broad and thin theory here, about Christianity and how the Protestant Reformation has had downstream effects on American politics for a while. Please feel free to poke holes in this, I'm really just spitballin'.
My basic idea is something like this: the Catholic church in Western Europe went way too hard enforcing the persecution of heresy, especially against mystics and those practicing contemplative-style prayer outside of monasteries, where they could be easily controlled. You see this especially in the persecution of the Cathars, which while their gnostic ideas were obviously wrong, I think the Catholic church made a huge mistake by not incorporating the obvious need for more direct mystical and experiential understanding of the faith amongst the laity, and disaffected factions.
Fastforward a few hundred years, and you have the Inquisition, the Protestant Reformation, and all the wars. Christendom in the West is basically fractured entirely, with the Protestants generally attracting folks that are more into mysticism, experiential acts of faith, and contemplation. Whereas the Catholic church tended to keep those focused on structured, ordered discipline and an explicit, rational understanding of the faith.
Ok, this is where the theory gets a bit out there. Personally I believe this split has continued into the modern day, with the modern progressive and conservative movements. I think that by and large the spirit of Protestantism has shifted away from explicit religion and into the more progressive, ideological wings of especially American, and increasingly world society. People on the left are by and large much more focused, in my experience, on experiential states, following the heart, and of course contemplative, mystical spiritual practice.
Because of the fact that the conservative branch of Christianity (even many Protestants, like the extreme Southern Baptists) continued to be staunchly against mysticism, ultimately they acted as a foil to the Protestants who wanted more of this mystical, experiential relationship with God. This is why the New Age/Buddhist/Eastern traditions are so appealing to folks on the left, because they are able to indulge freely in their mystical experience, without having any mean conservatives telling them they need to you know, get a job, and raise kids, and generally have structure in their lives.
Ultimately I think this is a major issue, and one at the core of the modern 'meta-crisis.' Taking a page out of Jordan Peterson's book, I think that much of especially human society can be seen as a dialectical tension between chaos and order. I think that the left I've broadly sketched here represents chaos, and the right represents order.
We desperately need both in various ways - we need order for structure, discipline, and to ensure the trains run on time, so to speak. We also need chaos for renewal, for fun and play and joy, and to make sure that authority doesn't get too corrupt, that people have a direct line to God, or if you're more secular, at least to a deep range of authentic human experience.
Overall I don't see the culture war rift being healed until we are able to conceptualize this breakage that has it's roots far in the past, and try to bring the two sides of the culture together. To help progressives understand that they need conservative structure, discipline and order, but also to convince conservatives that we need renewal, revitalization, and a check on corrupt authority.
As to how to do this, well, that's the million dollar question. I'm definitely curious if anyone has thoughts!
The word to use here is perhaps affective piety, and I agree. I think affective piety is essential and we kind of just forgot how to do it. I would distinguish this from mysticism, because mysticism usually means a novel and mysterious activity, but affective piety goes all the way back to the earliest Christian stuff we have. Indeed affective piety actually precedes all other kinds of devotion! When Ignatius in 140ad writes
He is engaging in affective piety. This is an almost romantic love being expressed for His Lord, the fallen Bridegroom. The only ones really doing this today are evangelicals but IMO not very tastefully as their feelings don’t sound authentic or deep (worst music in the world). Affective piety is closely related to the imaginal, as when Paul says
He is imagining Christ as a victorious general entering a city, with himself as a captive enemy (these were lead behind the triumphant general in bondage). He imagines his knowledge as an incense of sorts. Incredibly visceral image.
I would see it as a dialectic between the necessary and the fun, the ought and the awesome. Affective, imaginal, dramatic piety is fun. A Heavenly Father is fun. Praying importunately in everyday language is fun. Powerful angels are fun. Evading a prowling Satan is fun, which is why people play the game Alien. Rigid worship and boring readings are not fun. Christ came to make righteousness as engaging as possible, filled with rewards and intrigue and friends and etc. Some people say that, if God commands something, you have to do it, and fun doesn’t factor in. And I would accuse them of not understanding how fallen human nature is. We actually require rewards and engaging features in order to bring ourselves to do anything. Christ didn’t say “do this because I said so”, but promised reward and glory and fun and ease and etc. In those areas of life where people are forced or obligated to do everything, they often become malicious and evil. Like head chefs and surgeons. Not very pleasant to be a slave.
For modern Christianity to thrive and bring in the lost leftist sheep, they have to restore all the old fun features that have been deprecated over time. You can have both evangelical-ish singing and dancing (hopefully more tastefully), and solemn Catholic-ish masses with dread-inducing music, because these are both engaging. The one sin is if you don’t make it interesting enough. And Leftists especially would be drawn to the Pity-dimension and Affective-dimension for sure
Re: the historical claim, I don’t believe the Protestant Reformation was motivated by mysticism. Once Rome lost influence over Protestant nations, it was easier for new cults to develop unheeded, and many of these were mystical and traveled to America. But that is an accidental byproduct of the Reformation, because Rome was better at destroying these cults early. Per Wiki, the Reformers downplayed mysticism while the Counter-Reformers actually encouraged mysticism.
Well said! I often enjoy your takes on the faith. I agree that affective piety is fun and we desperately need more of it.
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I like the observation around spiritualism in politics, though I don't agree with the denominational framing. It seems to me that even in the 16th century, and continuously both then, both Protestant and Catholic traditions have included both strong intellectual and mystical currents. For every pietist movement, among the Protestants, there's a resurgence of interior practice among Catholics. For every Catholic intellectual spring, there's a flowering of Reformed theology. The identification of Catholicism as more systematic, analytic, or 'ordered', versus a more experiential, personalistic Protestantism strikes me as a bit too cute to be plausible.
I think it is true that within a left wing of politics that has largely abandoned traditional Christianity there are new outlets for spiritual or mystical practices, and interest in Buddhism and New Age practices are one sign of that. The rise of spiritual-but-not-religious people would also fit into that category. Across different political tribes there is a common need (not in literally all people, but in enough people) for some sort of spiritual engagement, and if traditional religion becomes unpalatable to one tribe, they will find some alternative way to express that need. The risk of this on the left, I suppose, is that doing this from step one again carries with it all the risks of individualist religion - solipsism, narcissism, or even just falling into common pitfalls that a mature tradition might be able to warn you against.
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I agree with the general thesis on the need for balance between chaos and order. I disagree with your framing of it stemming from Catholics and Protestants as its source. I think it's a fundamental variable of human psychology: some people have more affinity/preference for order, some people have more affinity/preference for chaos, and Christianity is just one of the many many ways this conflict has played out throughout history. The Catholics did not inspire order within humanity, but simply took the half of humans who wanted order and united them around itself, while the other half rejected it. The issue is not that a religious schism has propogated itself through our culture and caused the modern rift, the issue is that people are fundamentally different from each other and have different preferences. If we have to share a society, they're going to disagree about how to run that society. The only possible resolutions are
-Oppression: one group gets what they want, the other doesn't.
-Genocide: one group eliminates the other and then lives in peace (this isn't really possible here because chaos/order affinity is only slightly genetic, so conflict will pop up again every generation)
-Compromise: each group only gets part of what they want
In most types of conflicts there would be a fourth option: Segregation and local politics, where each group can go live among each other and do things their own way in their own spaces, having minimal interaction with the others. But that's not an option here because the Order people explicitly want to control everything in society, not keep to themselves, so localized politics IS compromising with chaos.
The culture war can't be healed unless both sides can regain enough respect and compassion for each other that they genuinely want compromise instead of always attempting Oppression. The only compromises we get are unintentional out of strategic necessity, not because anyone is genuinely trying to make both sides happy. Unless that changes we're going to keep getting conflicts.
I don't think the US culture war is Law vs Chaos - the "Red = Law, Blue = Chaos" and the "Red = Chaos, Blue = Law" narratives are roughly equally easy to write. "The real problem is that the Blues want total control of everything down to your kids' innermost thoughts while the Red just want to grill" seems to be the most common narrative on the Motte and is of the Red=Chaos variety.
The Blue tribe has room for the hippies and the HR ladies, with which of those groups is winning the intra-Blue conflict switching from decade to decade. Similarly the Reds have room for the Gadsden-flag waving hillbillies and the father-knows-best authoritarians. In both cases homo sapiens hypocritus leaves space for both in the same person depending on which is convenient.
In so far as there is a deep underlying conflict behind the US culture war (mostly, it is pure tribalism), it is elves vs dwarfs. Reds think that wealth comes out of the ground and that cities are parasitic on farmers and miners, Blues (and Greys, who are just dissident Blues) think that wealth comes from the application of human ingenuity and that rural areas are parasitic on productive cities.
As a centrist and a believer in horseshoe theory, I will admit that right-left doesn't cleanly split into chaos-order, because they're orthogonal. Right and left are more flavors of how the law should be applied. The typical rightist wants the law to control culture and behavior while keeping the economy free, while the typical leftist wants to use the law to control the economy while keeping culture and behavior free. The extremists on both ends want the law to control both absolutely everything, while only differing in what form they want it to take. The opposite extreme, the maximal libertarian, wants chaos and to just let everyone fend for themselves and hope it turns out okay."
From my perspective as a centrist, I think we need balance between all of these. And for the past 50 years or so there has been too much order and not enough chaos (on average, there are exceptions here and there). So the Order people on the left and right are the villains, trying to oppress their chosen hated group (whites or non-whites depending on which side), or just genuinely trying to do the right thing but failing miserably because their authoritarian policies cause bad outcomes when pushed too far. While the chaos people are trying to make us more free and marginally improving things when they manage to gain a little ground (even if they would cause problems if they took it too far).
I'm not fully satisfied with this breakdown. I think the elf/dwarf thing also makes sense to some extent, and probably does a better job of explaining the cultural differences between right and left. But I don't think it's the true driver of the conflict. Moderate right people and moderate left people are capable of getting along and compromising with each other. And if both were laissez-faire about letting each other live their own lives then they could live next to each other in harmony. The conflict is driven by the hatred between the authoritarian right and the moderate left, and the hatred between the authoritarian left and the moderate right. Because the authoritarians won't leave the moderates alone, so they are forced to participate in the culture war whether they want to or not. The broader left-right divide is then caused WW1-style via alliances: the ally of my enemy is my enemy.
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That's on the surface Blue=Law, Red=Neutral. Although when you combine it with "Blues want to allow trans-and-minority criminals to prey on people while Red wants them in the sex-(not-gender)-appropriate prison", you realize that no, it's not; Red sees it as being about Anarcho-Tyranny vs Ordered Liberty, and Blue does also. (Both are wrong, but IMO Blue is much wronger)
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Nitpick:
I am pretty sure that from their perspective, they were enforcing orthodoxy.
Also, I think the original protestant reformers like Luther and Calvin were not very much into woo. Were for the Catholic church perhaps (atheist speaking here) the most important part of Christianity was to be part of the Church, for the protestants the central part of Christianity was perhaps the bible. If Luther had had the opinion that the path to salvation went through experiencing things directly which could not be legibly communicated otherwise, I guess that he would have lead guided meditations instead of translating the bible into German. I know even less about Calvin, but my understanding is that he was likewise big on studying the gospels and living with strict rules, and light on directly gaining understanding which transcends reason.
I mean, neither of them was a deist, so they still believed in the supernatural, but my idea of a puritan service is that it is probably a bit of a dry affair, heavy on the preaching and light on hymns and songs.
By contrast, the Catholics tend to have a little bit for everyone, and that certainly includes people into spiritualism and woo. Few other branches are as much into miracles, which are at the end things you can not convince the atheists of but which you know (presumably) in your spiritual bones are true. Then you have flagellants, monks, fasting, hymns, grand cathedrals, pilgrimages and so forth, all of which are more about directly experiencing faith than through rational understanding.
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This analysis is missing the Charismatic churches. You know, the churches who are all about mystical and experiential relationships with God? Talking in tongues, prophesying, miracle healing, all that? They are pretty conservative! Pat Robertson was a Charismatic, and Charismatics seem pretty hooked into MAGA (Paula White-Caine, Trump's "Senior Advisor to the White House Faith Office" is a Charismatic, for instance).
Meanwhile the mainline churches, who are pretty progressive, have been very hard on people claiming to have had mystical visions, God inspired prophecies, and the whole talking in tongues things!
Ok yeah there are flaws in my theory!
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Not sure if this is the case. Conversions were political decisions by princes and nobles. That's why you have state churches and whole countries that became one kind of Protestant.
The principle of cuius regio, eius religio was established by the Peace of Augsburg (1555) and ended with the Peace of Westphalia (1648), so it really only lasted about 100 years. And many of those years were rather turbulent. It also only applied within the Holy Roman Empire.
Is the Peace of Westphalia (national sovereignty within the borders) not more like a generalization of the Peace of Augsburg? I mean, you are right that the Peace of Augsburg was technically over with the start of the 30 Year War (1618), but my laymen's gut feeling is that its concepts were somewhat recycled in the next peace.Per WP, you are correct. Subjects were free to follow any of three branches of Christianity.
Of course, the Peace of Augsburg only settled de jure what was already happening de facto since at least 1525 (when the first ruler flipped). So I would say you have a period of 120 years before religious tolerance for other Christians became the law within the Holy Roman Empire, e.g. proto-Germany. I seriously doubt that Sweden or Spain felt obliged to respect that principle in their own states, and the pope was very much not a fan.
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There's also Anglicanism. But those "only 100 years" are 100 years where Catholics and Protestants became separate groups, which seems relevant.
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I think the binary of sensing versus perceiving (and hard-headed versus soft-hearted, inductive versus deductive, realist versus idealist, pragmatism versus intuition, etc.) is just so capacious that a little bit of selective attention will align it in any way you want, with any ingroup/outgroup pairing you please.
Plenty of Protestants during the Reformation thought that they were the rigorous rationalists versus the emotive, superstitious Papists. Plenty of leftists with MPH and MSW degrees believe that they are simply numerate people who accept scientific fact, versus the right's clinging to sentimental cliches about country and family, "the laborer is worthy of his hire" or "an eye for an eye."
Are Communist movements driven by Hegelian mysticism about the arc of history, or by hard scientistic ambition to create a planned economy in a fully technologized society? Is Ayn Rand more about creating practical incentives to achieve practical things, or about mystical Nietzchean worship of the human potential in hot architects? I think the answer is obviously "yes, both," or more correctly, "whichever one aligns my enemies with my less-admired side of the binary."
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On what basis do you declare the Cathars "obviously wrong"?
I think any religion which claims the material world to be a fundamentally evil place we must escape from is wrong. I don't really care to litigate it to be honest, but perhaps the claim was too strong.
How is this different from mainstream Christianity? Isn't the whole point of the Garden of Eden story that we live in a fallen world with sin and death inherently ingrained in it and we need Jesus and God to escape from it?
Extremely different. Creation is inherently good, the Body is inherently good. Yes the world is fallen but Creation is not fallen. The body is tainted but still made in the Image of God. We will be resurrected in the body.
Your understanding is very at odds with the traditional Christian worldview.
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Well, if I were a medieval peasant living among plagues, wars, tremendous social inequality, high infant mortality, starvation et cetera, you would probably have a hard time (cultural evolution effects aside) of convincing me that the being in charge of the world was omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent. "This is actually the bad place" does a decent job explaining a world supposedly designed for humans in which tooth decay and kidney stones are a thing.
It is certainly not what I believe, I am a materialist and believe that technology can turn the world into a decent place for humans to live, but it is a neat answer to the problem of theodicy.
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It's a better solution to the problem of evil than most.
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But isn't it the exact opposite?
Ok, maybe not the exact opposite. But it's more complicated than any 2D schema would suggest.
Leftists are not anarchic chaos agents. In fact committed leftists are inordinately concerned with order, justice, fairness, morality, and so forth. "We must stop Trump at all costs to defend American democracy" is order, not chaos, even if you think it's an order that's based on faulty reasoning and ulterior motivations. "Yeah let's let the reality TV star become President and see what happens" is chaos. Ironically, self-identified anarchists often have a fetishistic preoccupation with structure, discipline, and power. The responsibility for actually enforcing this discipline is "distributed" (or so they claim) in order to avoid individual culpability, but the underlying structural dynamics are clear.
The dream of Marxism is a fully transparent social order grounded in pure reason. It's irrational that billionaires get to own multiple yachts while there are still people who can't afford medical care. We can use our brains to figure out a more fair way to distribute resources, instead of leaving it up to the irrationality of the market. There are no limits to what the unfettered human mind can accomplish. That's the basic impulse.
Of course, you might start to question how "rational" your opponents really are, if you think they're tenaciously holding onto premises that are incoherent or have been falsified. But, naturally, they would just turn that back at you and say that you're the one who's reasoning from incorrect premises. So we're back at square one.
Rejections of leftist utopian ideals are ultimately grounded in a rejection of the infinite power of reason: there are limits to how much reality can be rationally known and managed, there are things that can't be controlled or changed, etc.
(And while we're on the subject of Jordan Peterson: femininity is obviously order, and masculinity is obviously chaos. Wild how many people get this wrong.)
On a similar note, progressives accept the teachings of the Church (known colloquially as "academia" and "the media") at face value. Conservatives think the Church (academia and the media) are corrupt and self-serving, and instead favor more localized self-study of scripture and reports. The former helps with message discipline, keeping everyone aligned to Current Thing, and it saves a ton of mental effort if you can just read the headlines and trust that the contents prove the description - presuming the Church is trustworthy, as all good and decent people do. The latter is a much higher variance approach, producing shining spots of brilliance and insight in the midst of broad swathes of "How the fuck did you come to that conclusion?"
Obviously that is painting with an overly broad brush, but I do think there's a bit of a comparison to be made there. In this metaphor, Scott would be something like an autistic monk whose intra-Church, well-intentioned criticisms got picked up by the Protestants, to his considerable dismay.
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They think they are.
Anyone happily letting criminals go so they can prey on normal people is not actually concerned with order or justice.
I promise you, that’s not what committed leftists think they’re doing.
I don't know what the Soros-supported DAs think they are doing -- they certainly SAY that's not what they're doing. But it is often what they are doing.
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But… your history is wrong. Pre-Tridentine Catholicism was all about popular piety, thé early Protestants tended to disapprove of the forms it took(like rosaries, images, Eucharistic adoration, etc). Pre-Tridentine Catholicism also did not have the rigorous policing of spiritual practices that later became associated with it, that’s more a feature of the reformation. Contemporary Catholic mysticism and lay piety is mostly following devotions associated with st Dominic and st Francis, both creatures of the high Middle Ages. It’s also false to say that the counterreformation suppressed lay mystical devotion and contemplative prayer, when st ignatius and st Francis de sales were leading figures.
It’s also false to paint contemporary American Protestantism as not being robustly supernatural; there are some mega churches that are social clubs, or prosperity gospel, or otherwise not really oriented around spirituality, but there are others that are Pentecostal. I disagree with the latter, but it’s clearly spiritual in orientation. Early Protestantism tended to develop more spiritual/mystical branches within a few generations of the split, as well(Methodists and pietists being prominent examples)- often just after the memory of catholic popular piety was gone- which is evidence against your thesis that early Protestantism was more mystical as a big selling point.
This is wonderful! Yeah part of why I posted this is I wanted to be corrected. So why do you think contemplation and mysticism has become so de-emphasized in Western Christianity?
How are you using the word mysticism here? I don’t think that personal devotion has been deëmphasized in Western Christianity. But mysticism proper was never as central to the Western church as it is to Eastern Orthodoxy today.
I don’t think I fully understand how you are drawing up your categories, so I apologize if this is a crude way of putting it. But if you are asking, “When did you guys stop being Palamist?”, the answer is that we never were.
Edit: To explain from another angle for the sake of clarity: I am treating mystical and supernatural as overlapping categories, not as synonyms.
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Secular humanism.
Tracing Christianity from the reformation through the enlightenment, all the way to Vatican 2, you see a lot of theological "innovations" that reinterpret divine revelation as allegory instead of literal fact. Faith, including theological virtues, becomes more of an elaborate world-building around classic virtue ethics; be honest, be kind, don't lie, etc. etc.
This kind of thinking gets a lot of traction because it demands less of the faithful. It's a lot easier to feel like you're a good person (and also a good Christian) if life is more about trying your best to be a "good person" and isn't full of pesky zero-or-one rules for sin.
Layer on top of that that secular humanism explicitly rejects the supernatural which is inextricable from, at least from the Catholic tradition, the doctrine of faith:
To your original post, the only thing I have to add that others haven't done a better job of commenting on is in regards to this part:
Problems arise when people on the left, or, anyone, really, resists admitting that their experiential states, following of the heart etc. are subjective and not objective truths. "Living your truth" is a nonsense statement. Truth is one thing, it's objective. Your personal experience is absolutely your own, but there are objective facts embedded within it; you're a man or you're a woman, you are old or you are young and so forth.
I'm not an expert on the Catholic church's responses to mysticism around the reformation, but it would seem to me that's always going to be a sensitive subject. If anyone can just run around saying they had a vision of Christ or The Virgin Mary and we're all expected to take it at face value, then we've lost the plot, haven't we? This is exactly, literally, exactly! what's going on in the culture war at present.
Bothall sides are fighting over facts, which isn't necessarily new, but at least one major faction (wokes / progressives) is, while fighting over facts, also rejecting the premise of objective truth in the first place. Which means they're fighting for ..... ?More options
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General decline in religiosity. Religious Catholics(of any tribal affiliation) are just as into adoration and contemplation as they’ve ever been. There are just fewer.
Protestant churches have historically followed an oscillation where a decline in the spiritual content is resolved by a high-spiritualist branching off of it, leaving a far less supernatural original denomination which would have less interest in mysticism tautologically. The mainline->evangelical->pentecostal migrations are a visible example in our own lifetimes; in the past, when social trends were slower, Methodists and pietists, thé great awakening, and the Victorian revival movement were major waves happening in rapid succession. The whole thing is that Protestantism is not a religion that values tradition overmuch, so the new spiritual movement that branches off tends to be ‘new’ enough to drop old timey spiritual practices that were falling out of favor in the original denomination. Megachurchianity of the generic evangelical sort happens to be on the short end of the stick right now.
Vatican II threw traditional piety into a ditch at the time it could be least afforded; fortunately St John Paul II rescued most of the practices in danger of being forgotten, but the fragmentation and refugia remains; modern American commentators(like most of this forum) tend to forget how heavily Catholic American religiosity would have been in the 50’s, and the Catholic Church was not shy about using its cultural power to push basic Christianity, even in a generic way. In non-American locales Catholicism often had much smaller or fewer fragments but I don’t know as much about them. Nevertheless the sickness afflicting ‘the giant’(over 50% of global Christianity is Catholic- and for western Christianity specifically, it’s more like 75-80%) simply makes it harder to just have religious Christianity. WELS members have told me this, as well, so it isn’t 100% due to Catholic bias.
Christian moral beliefs are a bigger ask of a bigger percentage of the population than they once were; thé people who want mysticism without the guilt turn to non-Christian mysticism, partly due to relentless campaigning in favor of liberal values by the media. This in turn makes other things to fill the god shaped hole more common etc.
Yup. It definitely tripped me out when, several years ago, my Dad told me about Fulton Sheen's radio show and how you could find a national broadcast of the rosary at least once a week.
I have also heard anecdotes that some of the midwest catholic strongholds (Cincinnati in particular) had things like fish in public schools on Fridays in Lent. Imagine the blowup that would have today.
In the UK, fish in school (including explicitly C of E schools) and workplace canteens on Friday had been the default since well before I was born, and I am reasonably sure that it became the default back when anti-Catholicism was still part of the national identity. I grew up associating it with Christianity generally, not Catholicism.
Of course, the traditional English fish and chips is not exactly an abstemious meal - and indeed the English Catholic hierarchy has warned the faithful that eating a huge plateful of fish and chips defeats the purpose of the Friday fast. I remember playing bridge on Friday evening against a man who was some kind of Catholic lay minister, and as we stuffed ourselves with fish he explained that his parish was pushing the idea of "eat what you want on Friday, but only 2/3 as much as you normally would".
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Mayor Adams brought meatless Fridays to NYC schools, and the public response was making fun of his veganism.
It's actually interesting to note- most people think of 'Cafeteria Catholic' as a term originating as a metaphor for 'you say yes to this, I'll pass on that, like at a cafeteria serving line'. But that's a backronism(it is too a word, I just invented it); the original meaning was someone who would pick fish on Fridays at the cafeteria but not follow Catholic moral laws he found inconvenient.
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One thing that a lot of analyses leave out is that the inquisition and it’s excesses in both Europe and the New World were the result of Christendom being besieged by Islam for 500 years. So you have an already ingrained siege mentality that’s only further aggravated by the Protestant reformation: the enemies are always at the gates and now they are within the walls too. I didn’t come up with this theory, I got it from respected historical scholar/video game YouTuber DJ Peach Cobbler.
Regarding your second point, you would be surprised at how direct the genetic lineage is between the original New England Puritans and some of the wacky professors at Ivy League universities pumping out social justice theory.
I don't think this is true. The periods of peak inquisition activity were around the time of the Albigensian Crusade (which happened during a period of temporary respite for the Holy Land Crusaders because the Muslim states of the Middle East were being ravaged by Genghis Khan) and the Spanish Inquisition (which happens after the Reconquista is complete, in the country that was about as far as you could get from the Ottoman Empire). It is almost like the absence of an external enemy causes the search for an internal enemy.
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Interesting point about the muslims and the reconquista. Thanks for adding that.
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Interesting, but I think you're giving both sides too much credit.
Luther published Theologia Germanica in 1518 and never backed down from it. He loved German mysticism, hated Pseudo-Dionysius, but loved the experiential stuff. His complaint wasn't with mysticism, it was with Christless mysticism. Protestants had plenty of mystics: Johann Arndt, Jakob Böhme, the Quakers sitting in silence waiting for the Inner Light.
Catholic mysticism didn't die either. St. John of the Cross wrote Dark Night of the Soul in the 16th century, that's not "order," that's getting stripped of every concept and consolation until you're naked in divine darkness.
The real issue is the failure of religious education across the board.
People flock to New Age and Eastern practices because nobody told them The Cloud of Unknowing or the Philokalia existed.
They got either rational rules (conservatives) or emotional worship services (evangelicals/progressives), but not the deep contemplative center their souls actually want. Education is poor because apophatic prayer is really hard to scale.
It's easy to lead a congregation in a hymn or sermon, words, concepts, feelings. Much harder to lead corporate silence.
How do you teach content-less prayer?
It's not flashy, doesn't measure well, takes years of formation.
Monasteries used to solve this through total immersion. Protestants dissolved them. Modern culture marginalized them.
Now where does that formation happen? Nowhere.
Both sides need to learn their own traditions actually have what they're looking for. But that's multi-generational work rebuilding what took centuries to wreck.
Well yes exactly!!! I very much agree with this? So why did this happen? What do you mean it's 'hard to scale'?
But yes I very much agree that these traditions need to look back to history and realize what they're looking for is already within them.
Teaching what can't be taught, speaking what can't be said.
Direct experience over propositional doctrine.
Most of the texts that relate to these practices acknowledge this. They're not doctrinal manuals; they're initiatory devices that exist to destabilize you until you find the reality they're failing to describe.
I think this has to be done in a small group setting.
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My guess would be four hundred years of subconsciously incorporating more and more enlightenment materialist thinking. Then enlightenment materialist thinking itself starts to become more and more discredited post 1918, culminating with the looming secular apocalypse of nuclear conflict in the early 1960s. So you see people start scrambling around trying to find things to fill the void materialism left. By that time most of the mystical aspects of western religions had gotten filed down to a toothpick, meaning the only thing left on offer is eastern religions. And the burgeoning psychedelic drug culture of the 1960s, which people often forget had an intensely spiritual, almost religious dynamic back then. If you want more info on that last part, look at The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
Educated, enlightened white people were incredibly into straight woo in the 19th century, though. They may have been secular but they sûre weren’t materialists; they were way too into ghosts and psychics for that.
I could tolerate your accents on thé as a weird quirk, but now I have to ask: are all of these extra glyphs typos? do they have meaning to you? is it an experiment to see how long mottizens will go without mentioning it?
My phone's keyboard autocorrects to french for some reason and I don't find these glyphs worth fixing.
If it was an experiment, then, well, you're not the first person who noticed. It bizarrely got me accused of being kulakrevolt a few months back.
There was a person back on reddit-Motte who'd go back on their comments days later and edit some letters to be weird unicode variants and would then delete all their comments when asked about it, so people may be reading this as a crazy person tell now.
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Thanks for replying, and sorry if I sounded hostile. I enjoy your posts :)
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Seems like framing the "Big 5" liberals score higher on Openness to Experience, Cons to Conscientiousness through a Christian European historical perspective. As far as I remember those traits still predict political orientation even in cultures that don't have that specific history though. So it seems more likely its a conflict rooted more in human psychology and not specifically European history or Christianity. Vaguely remember reading some evo pysch theories out there about disgust response protecting against disease and risk and curiosity leading to resource / knowledge accumulation, but evo pysch always felt like a pretty non sciencey science to me.
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