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As a general retort, directed against no one in particular concerning the gatekeeping rhetoric I usually see around this topic:
There's a historically consistent delusion of Christians believing they are always at the center of Christianity, which always happens to be right here, right now, exactly where they are, leaning towards exactly what they happen to think. Which lends them the power to feel justified to gatekeep many matters of moral and philosophical significance, including Christianity and the church, from outgroup outsiders.
In reality the modal church of 100-200 years ago is so far removed from the modern modal church that there is no real reason to comparatively consider anyone Christian today. Which speaks to the fact that the church is not Christianity, it's the people. Insofar as there will be an influx of church going young men, they will change the church. Insofar as there are groups of people claiming to represent Christianity in the defense of their church and the inevitable change that is coming, they have no firm ground in proclaiming they are doing so as a Christian.
To that extent I'd wish for church leaders and gatekeepers to recognize that this has nothing to do with Christianity. Church politics are people politics. And the people are in a proxy ethnic culture war. There's nothing a pastor can say to a young man that will faze or enlighten him. They've been hooked up to technology far superior to an echo-y sermon. The church is a platform for organization. The church is at war for its life because of a culture war. Take these people and facilitate them and their beliefs towards something useful. It's a conflict the church needs to fight, and it's a fight these people want to join.
On a sidenote, how far removed are the groypers in opinion from Father Coughlin? Will anyone claim to be more Christian than him? Well, you have a few like those coming in. Less intelligent and erudite, but their heart seems to find the same place. To that extent it's hard to gatekeep those who are more similar in spirit to those who came before you than you are. Lamenting that they are not like the Christian church goers of today is hypocritical to say the least.
I honestly don't understand what you mean by this. There are creeds from more than a thousand years ago that Christians today still hold to - those are what have traditionally been used to gatekeep Christianity, and churches today still hold to them.
Obviously a lot of cultural things have changed (for instance, we speak English now and dress funny) but (to pick a random culture war issue) one of the earliest Christian texts (the Didache) specifies that Christians are not to commit abortion: this is a stance the largest church in the world (the Catholic church) still agrees with, and the largest Protestant denomination, at least in the United States, also agrees with it!
To maybe bring it home just a bit: [as per Wikipedia, I don't think this is controversial] the big fight between the fundamentalists and the modernists in American Protestantism started in the mid-1800s when higher criticism crossed over from Europe and really blew up in the 1920s (so: 100 years ago). By the way, whenever you see people talk about mainstream Protestantism versus evangelical or fundamentalist Protestantism, this is essentially what they are nodding at: the mainstream Protestant denominations (that are currently in decline) were the ones were the modernists won - a fight so important that 100 years later it is still referenced in e.g. Pew's polling. This clash of worldviews prompted a guy named Bob Jones to found a university (Bob Jones University); established in 1927. A guy named Billy Graham (b. 1918; d. 2018) attended Bob Jones (before transferring). And as it happens, so did the pastor of the church I went to last Sunday.
At least in the United States, then, not only would Christian time-travelers moving backwards and forwards in time 100 - 200 years be able to understand each other and have theological conversations from shared texts such as the creeds and Scripture, and not only would they largely find that people in their denominations agreed with them on important matters such as what constituted a Christian, what was necessary for salvation, what was and was not sin, etc., but the time-travelers from 100 years ago would find that people today are studying the writings of their contemporaries and they would find that the institutions that they had created were absolutely instrumental in shaping the landscape of 21st century America. They would find that the pastors and preachers went to the institutions that they created because they shared their theological convictions. And if they went to those institutions, they would probably find people they knew teaching there, or if not, people who had learned from those they had taught.
I don't recall if you're American; maybe you aren't and your experience is different. But where I am, the church politics of 100 - 200 years ago are still very much alive, and the doctrines and creeds that are taught go back much further.
It is not hard to understand. "Modal Christians" of pre modern trad age were not theologians, but illiterate peasants who never heard about any "creeds" and practiced their faith mixed with various village traditions and superstitions (often extremely unchristian).
Unless you are descended from unbroken line of scholars (it there ever was such thing in the West), your ancestors were not studying works of Saint Thomas, your ancestors were doing rituals to protect themselves from elves, goblins and leprechauns and were venerating saintly dog to help their sick children.
This is how real trad life looked like, and it is irretrievably lost.
(it was more tenacious you would expect. Cult of Saint Guinefort outlived French kingdom, two empires and three republics, all efforts of church and school failed to uproot it, and succumbed only to electric power, radio and television).
See also this old twitter thread with rather downer description of East European trad village (seen then as most Christian part of the world).
Even if this is true (and I suspect it's greatly overstated: the Christian of the past you describe, far from never hearing about any creeds, could probably recite the Nicene creed from heart because he learned it during Mass, albeit in Latin), this has no bearing on the post I was responding to. In my country even 200 years ago the majority of citizens could read.
Furthermore, there's a category error in measuring modal by time rather than population. Thanks to population growth, the modal Christian by population - which is the correct way of measuring a the most frequent number - is actually much closer to the megachurch than to the medieval mass than one would think. Exactly how close is an interesting exercise, and probably worth much more time and attention than the minimal effort I've put into it, but:
The entire population of Europe in 1600 was around 80 million, smaller than the population of Germany today. Or, to look at it another way, the world population only crossed the 1 billion mark in 1800; the Catholic Church alone reports over a billion practicing members today. It looks like (napkin math based on guestimates of population growth over time so this could be wildly off) only about 50 billion people ever lived worldwide between the time of Christ and 1950 (Novus Ordo, the current Catholic mass in the local tongue, came into effect around 1970) and the vast majority of them I think we can safely assume were not Christians, with Christianity really only taking off outside of Europe and the Middle East during the Age of Discovery (say 400 years ago).
So if you actually measure by the number of Christians then you'll find that the modal Christian is actually skewed surprisingly close to the present - with around 2 billion Christians alive today, Protestants and Eastern Orthodox holding service in the local tongue, and the Catholic Novus Ordo kicking in around fifty years ago, it's possible the majority of Christians who have ever lived received their teaching in the native tongue, and the majority of those likely read or heard (at a minimum) the Nicene Creed, which is looked up to by Catholics, Protestants, and Eastern Orthodox.
Obviously you could litigate to what degree those numbers represent committed Christians. But obviously the clergy and committed Christians are going to be the ones doing the gatekeeping, and they will be more familiar with the creeds than the average layperson, not less.
I think this sort of life is alive and well, just not where you live.
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If your ancestors belonged to a church with creeds, they almost certainly knew it- they might not have understood it, but the illiterate villagers in rural France would hear 'Credo in Deum...' every Sunday morning. The ability to recite large portions of the mass from memory was very widespread and before very recent times, liturgical churches usually translated basic prayers into the common vernacular(which often wasn't the same as the prestige dialect formal liturgies might have a translation into) before the bible and had the peasants memorize them.
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Saint Guinefort is a legend. Don't you dare besmirch his holy name!
But yes very much agree that folk religion was different. I do wish we could go back, sometimes, just without all the disease.
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While there is some truth to your claims, some of those creeds were recited at mass every week, so I would certainly think even Mediaeval peasants would have at least heard about them.
The context of this thread also seems to be more about the institutional level, rather than what individual church members believe or practise, which indeed can often be in tension with official teachings both in modern and premodern times. And looking at the institutional level, the Nicene Creed or opposition to abortion or whatever have been shared close to universally among all Christian churches for more than a thousand years.
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I wonder how disconnected these really are. Stirner claims the death in belief of ghosts (but goblins/leprechauns/etc will do well enough) caused the mortal wound to the foundation of religion as a whole.
When you don't have this, the primary way normal pre-moderns interacted with the supernatural is lost, and intellectual religious writings have nothing to rest on.
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Not only is it the stance of the largest church in the world, it's also the stance of the next largest(Eastern Orthodox), and the fourth largest(oriental Orthodox), and a big chunk of the third largest(Anglican communion).
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IMO the modern modal church isn't too Christian, nor does it have any real political effect in so far as it's Christian. Christianity in the West seems mostly to be another thing that progressives have eaten.
If we look around, we see lots that's against Christian dogma. Over a billion abortions since 1980, more abortions than all those who died in every war in human history. Marriage is not really 'till death do us part' anymore, marriage has been annexed by the state. Cohabitation before marriage - very common. It's judges and lawyers who control marriage (straight or gay) and divorce, the church only provides a venue and music. Pornography is in full bloom. Pride parades are in full bloom. Greed and materialism, superabundant. Self-promotion and narcissism on social media. Sabbath breaking. Blasphemy. Gluttony and excess. Sloth. Need I go on?
My main experience with church was Catholic Jesuits, not anyone terribly based or trad. But the trad don't seem to have done much. What have they accomplished? Poland, Russia, Africa... maybe Christianity really is influencing policy and values there. In the West it seems to be old people, ritual, progressivism and a pale shadow of its former power.
I agree, and I find it galling that most Western Christians are just fine with the complete surrender of society to hedonism and licentiousness...and often partaking in it. The early Christians would be torn apart by wild beasts rather than bow to a statue of Caesar. Modern Christians pay homage to the gods of this age without even thinking twice.
What are the gods of our age?
Conceptually the same gods as in any age: anything we place above God or are more key to our identity than God.
I think some specific gods of this age are "comfort", "tolerance", political affiliation, sexual orientation, "reason", educational achievement, careers. Not all these are bad in and of themselves, but they become gods when we place our faith or find our identity in them.
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If this isn't a straight line begging for a Kipling Reference, then I don't know what is.
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Yeah very much agree, sadly. I wish we were better.
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I recall a line from a Jonathan Edwards sermon to the effect that one of the greatest pleasures saved souls enjoy in Heaven is watching the sufferings of the damned in Hell.
This was the same era when a popular middle-class pastime was going to the insane asylum to laugh at the antics of the lunatics.
What?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bethlem_Royal_Hospital#Public_visiting
It was a big thing during the early- and mid-eighteenth century.
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Asylum Tourism. The degree to which this was a "popular middle-class pastime" has been a little exaggerated, but it was certainly a thing.
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It seems to me the mainline Protestant churches are currently dying out exactly because what is taught there bears little resemblance to what churches taught a century or two ago, whereas the churches that stuck with traditional Christian theology seem to be doing a lot better. I am fully expecting churches that will now start pandering to the dissident right or whatever will achieve similar results as to those who pandered to progressive sensibilities. The way forward for the Church always has been to stick to its own message rather than to pander to cultural fads.
I feel like the story of progressivism emptying the pews is a little bit too convenient and self serving to be true. Not saying it is entirely incorrect. But I'd also wager that the churches that were first to fall to 'progress' were also in a weak state to begin with, and therefor felt the need to do something. Couple that with the idea that more devout believers are more likely to congregate around a more traditional message, I'm more inclined to think traditional churches are herding devout believers rather than recruiting new ones. And that they persist by dint of the temperament of the radical that seeks them out. But there are only so many of those to go around.
I could be sympathetic to this point of view but from my experience observing Christian theology politics, 'every denomination that is not mine is a fad' seems like a common viewpoint when discussing the topic of what the church's message actually is or should be.
I can only plead ignorance and ask if there is some average form or consensus on what the general message of a Church is and whether or not it has changed over time. In my local Protestant Scandinavian church it is generally vague humanist platitudes. Or maybe the humanists just got to me first... In either case I saw no relevant distinction between the two. What is the churches correct message in America?
In terms of what I think the correct message ought to be (although I am also not American, so I am not speaking for that context specifically), I think people elsewhere in this thread have pointed out there are plenty of historical creeds that Christians of various denomination have adhered to for more than a thousand years. Even on some issues that are currently contentious in the culture war, like a lot of issues pertaining to medical ethical stuff or sexual ethics there are clear Christian positions adhered to by official Roman-Catholic, Eastern Orthodox teachings and also by conservative Protestants. I don't want to overstate the case here, of course there are also plenty of meaningful differences and all of these groups have changed in various ways throughout the centuries and have in some ways been influenced by the surrounding culture, but things like the Nicean creed, or general pro-life medical ethical positions, or the idea that sex should be within marriage, are believed by the vast majority of Christians always and everywhere. I really am convinced that there is a consistent core of historical Christian teachings which a lot of Christians around the world have preserved.
Now the Lutheran churches in Scandinavia which I presume you are referring to have indeed in the past 150 years or so abandoned a lot of these beliefs. But that is my point, if Christian churches want to have anything relevant to say, they should retain core Christian beliefs. Otherwise, what is the point? What reason to exist do Christian churches have, if they don't even believe in stuff that pretty much all Christians have believed historically? What even is Christianity then?
I come from a Protestant background in the Netherlands myself. In the past years I've lived in a few different towns and been a member of the local mainline Protestant Church of the Netherlands. The majority of this denomination is pretty liberal theologically and ethically, just like the mainline churches in the USA or other European countries. It does however have a pretty significant conservative wing. In all of those towns I can see the same pattern reoccurring; the various congregations in the different boroughs of the towns which have become liberal are dwindling in numbers, they have to merge with each other to keep going and are mostly visited by elderly people. But all of those towns have one or two congregations of the conservative wing of this denomination, which explicitly affirm historical creeds and have conservative views of things like abortion and sexual ethics, and every time those congregations don't have issues with dwindling attendance and you can find plenty people of all ages on Sunday mornings. In all those conservative churches I've even come across a few converts who were brought up without any religious background whatsoever and anecdotally the number of converts have been going up in recent years (although we're still talking about small numbers to be sure, I'm not claiming some sort of revival is going on the Netherlands just yet).
So from my perspective, churches that stick with historical Christian teachings, seem to be doing relatively fine and I'm always put off a little bit by the "ohh we have to change x, otherwise the kids will never go to church" rhetoric, because in the past 150 years or so, the churches that have tried very hard to stay in touch with currently societal trends are exactly the ones that have become irrelevant are closing their doors or are only being visited by a handful of elderly people.
Wait, you live in the Dutch bible belt?
Nope. I have never lived in the bible belt myself. The church I go to is of a type that's pretty common in the bible belt, although in a proper bible belt village it might be one of the less conservative ones. There is a bunch of stereotypical stuff associated with the Dutch bible belt that you won't really find in the type of church I go to, like avoiding vaccinations and insurance, experiencing a lot of existential dread over whether you are part of the elect or not, not being allowed to drive a car on Sunday, etc. But we do adhere to historical creeds, only men can be ordained, conservative views on medical ethical issues, etc. so definitely still on the conservative side of the spectrum.
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So, the usual main example is the Episcopal church, which has always been the least devout denomination- although ACNA and the Catholic ordinariates indicate that progressivism is an explanatory factor for it doing unusually poorly. Likewise the ELCA's decline mostly tracks declining religiosity among German-Americans. But Methodists were actually a very healthy denomination before they went progressive, and the ELCA contrasts with America's other two Lutheran denominations(which are both healthy confessional churches). The Presbyterians are another example that isn't just explained by 'yeah, this church was always full of people that didn't really believe'.
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