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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!
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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