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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!
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?
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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