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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026

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That's what the texts Christians are supposed to believe in say, but the reality is pretty complex. Educated people in medieval Europe probably could claim Christian metaphysics as the correct theory of reality and not get pushback, but at some point pretty long ago this stopped being a thing. I'm pretty sure things had moved from thinking this was literally true to lip service by the late 1800s, and by now the Christians themselves know this too. There's a lot of twisting your brain to apologetics-pretzels to keep things going, and everyone openly knows that apologetics-pretzels-work can be necessary even for the people on the inside and there's no deep exchange of ideas with people on the outside because outsiders will just point-blank reject essential premises of the religious worldview. There's also very long tradition of co-existing with religions you don't share, which relies on things being explicitly labelled with "this is a religion", which is only a thing if you're living in a cosmopolitan society where you actually need to routinely deal with multiple religions.

Progressivism right now is a lot more like what religions might have been like in societies before things got to the point of a cosmopolitan Roman Empire. At that point people weren't saying "this is our religion", it was just the shared understanding how to act in the society and what the world was like. Once you need to interact regularly with people who have a different religion who you can't just conquer and subjugate, your own religion has a new authority problem and you start needing words like "religion". Once the world starts being much bigger and more advanced than when your religion was formulated, so your religious dogma both looks absurd at face value and your clerics start getting curbstomped in public debates because people don't share their load-bearing assumptions about how their worldview works anymore, you have more problems. Progressivism is still new enough that it hasn't really run into either of these problems, while they have been undeniable reality for religious people for centuries now. You can say Christianity is the literal truth, but with the sociological support not being around anymore it will look like performing to everyone, and people will assume even you treat it as performative more than literal.