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I'm really curious what is your impression of the differences? Are the majority of pro-Zionist posts made by Americans? I don't visit this forum much anymore, so I don't know about the situation here. But I feel like Europeans are generally more critical of the genocide in Gaza and the current attack on Iran.
This community is a spinoff of a spinoff of a rationalist community, there are is no question there are a lot of Zionist Jews here.
The MAGA types that would be here are more likely to be of the variety highly skeptical of the war (the low-IQ MAGA rank-and-file that supports the war at like 90%+ are not represented here much as far as I can tell). High-IQ Iran War supporters here, very likely to be Jews. Not to say there also aren't skeptical Jews as well.
But I don't get why people would want a location marker to correlate people's opinions on this question. If you really wanted signal you would want a different kind of profile badge that would not be appropriate for this forum.
It's interesting to see the parts of the American conservative coalition that are represented even after we account for tastes in intellectualism(like duh, megachurch Evangelicals do not want to engage in philosophical political discussion. That's not to say they're stupid, but they simply have different tastes). We have tradcaths but no orthodox Jews and I've never seen a confessional Lutheran. We have libertarian techbros and NrX types but few of the deep red RFK fan lifestyle skeptics- you know, the real life Ron Swanson types. Really very few crunchycons at all. None of the black dissidents you see hanging around conservative intellectual circles but lots of white nationalists. We've had conservative housewives in the past, but I think all of our women are working right now.
What does that mean, in this context?
A Lutheran belonging to a body which split from the main Lutheran body in his country over the belief that that body doesn’t embrace the Augsburg confession anymore. In the USA the main such body would be the Missouri synod, very common in intellectual conservative circles and big enough to be locally dominant in some areas- but all the self proclaimed confessional Protestants here seem to be reformed.
Missouri Synod Lutheran here. I do think I'm the only one on here, and I never post so it barely counts. Still, there's at least one.
Awareness of the confessional/mainline distinction is basically zero among non-churchgoing people that I've met in real life. Unfortunately, laypeople I meet sometimes hear "Lutheran" and think "ELCA."
I will say LCMS Twitter is surprisingly lively.
This is WELS erasure 😁
I only became aware of the various denominational splits years back when observing the Anglican Wars as they played out in TEC. As a Roman Catholic European outsider, it was fascinating to get any kind of look at American mainline Protestantism and how it tended to split along various lines.
How fascinating that you've even heard of WELS over there! I respect WELS. If it had more presence in my area, I might have ended up going there.
It is crazy how every flavor of Protestantism now has a mainline vs. confessional or evangelical division here. PCA/PCUSA, ELCA/LCMS (and WELS), UMC/GMC (which goes far beyond America); hours of Wikipedia article reading are available to the interested.
Lutherans talk casually about how in America, the big split was ultimately between "German Lutherans" who went to the LCMS, and "Scandi Lutherans" who eventually formed the ELCA; and about how each group's cultural personality informed the direction of their theology. Of course it's much more complicated than that, but there's an element of truth in it.
Ah, interesting. When I was writing my post about the meaning of the term "Evangelical" in Lutheran circles, I actually hypothesized that the split between the ELCA and the confessional churches had something to do with the German vs Scandinavian split, but it's interesting that I was actually on to something.
My great-great grandmother had a copy of Walther's hymnal, in the German of course, which is now in my possession. My mother often tells me the family story about her praying in German. The other family story about her German ancestry consists of her fastidiously sweeping the floor while her husband, a full-blood Scots-Irish good old boy, spat tobacco on the porch. But Lutheranism in my family was wiped out a few generations ago in favor of generic American evangelicalism, or Holiness Pentecostalism.
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