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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   10532 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 29, 2026

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The devils duo, Catholics and Jews. The KKK tried to warn us but we didn't listen. Now look at it.

The tradcaths on X do so much PR work by being miles to the right of their Church. And one has to believe they are sincere and genuine. Which leads one to ask why they present themselves as Catholic. My muslim coworker expressed a similar sentiment when he saw a normal family of four flying the rainbow flag. 'That is not for you. Why do you have it?'

The tradcaths on X do so much PR work by being miles to the right of their Church. And one has to believe they are sincere and genuine. Which leads one to ask why they present themselves as Catholic.

Because they believe that the teachings of the Catholic Church are true. What other reason would they need?

I mean, do they? Are the Twitter Tradcath Brigade staunch religious liberty advocates and fans of Dignitatis humanae?

Because they believe that the teachings of the Catholic Church are true. What other reason would they need?

While they simultaneously believe that the whole church, including the hierarchy and Pope, got these teachings wrong. Not an enviable position.

Can you name one dogma you think internet trad caths believe which the Catholic hierarchy does not teach?

Immigration is an area of prudential judgement and the Catholic Church has a nuanced view of it, more nuanced than you find here. The doctrines are to respect the host country's laws and customs, and for the host country to take in the needy as much as possible (acknowledging that there are goods such as social cohesion that can limit the host country's ability to take in the needy.) Trad Caths agree on these points, just disagree with the prudential judgement of whether or not the US has helped as much as it can and it's time to cool off on immigration.

This is quite the broad banded statement, though, or woolly as somebody else said below. If ‘taking in the needy’ includes opinions as diverse as ‘protect a white demographic supermajority, deport millions and ban all nonwhite immigration’ (the way Groyper Catholics like Nick Fuentes want) and ‘take in the entire world, legalize all illegal migrants, create legal routes for the global south’ (the way those on the radical left of the Church want) then it’s an essentially meaningless statement.

What we can actually observe from:

  • The central role the institution of the Catholic Church has played in resettling migrants into America and Western Europe under both liberals like Leo and conservatives like Benedict
  • The public messaging of church leaders including almost all senior Western European and American bishops and various Popes themselves
  • The significant lobbying the Church has engaged in to water down naturalization law, legalize illegal migrants and so on in countries like Spain, the US and elsewhere

…is that the Church’s policy here is actually very clear. And the Catholic Church is actually an organization. It’s not an ideological grouping. It’s an actual club, with a members list and an initiation ritual and regular meetings and a management structure and a leader and if you are a member of it, then to some extent it is reasonable to expect that you broadly agree with the organization. This is different from Lutheranism or Judaism or Islam, which have religious organizations but none that can lay claim to the institutional support of anywhere close to a majority of adherents.

~all institutional churches have done this.

then it’s an essentially meaningless statement.

It's a principle, which can be interpreted by different people in different ways. But that's not the part being interpreted. No one has a problem with setting up a temporary refugee camp for Canadians who are fleeing from the great Canada-Russo war of 2035 assuming the US still has enough oatmeal and blankets to keep them alive.

The part that people are interpreting differently is if the US already has all the people it can safely assimilate without massive social upheaval. The Catholic US Bishops are pretty clueless to the actual costs of mass immigration, the Catholic groypers have perhaps an oversized idea of the costs of mass immigration. The truth is that you can take a consistent set of principles and adjust what the recommendations are based on different facts available.

I'm not sure to whom you are referring by this. The tradcaths I've encountered don't believe that. They believe the previous form of the liturgy is better, but liturgy is not dogma and they are allowed to believe that. They don't believe that any actual dogma was put forth wrongly by the church.

I have had multiple tradcaths tell me that Muslims, Jews, and Protestants cannot be saved (“there is no salvation outside the Catholic Church”), let alone adherents of non-Abrahamic religions. Many also support the death penalty, don’t like government welfare, oppose immigration, oppose religious freedom, oppose separation of church and state, and hold several other positions that don’t fit comfortably with modern Roman Catholic teachings.

While CCC 847 does allow for the possibility of salvation for those ignorant of Christ:

Those who, through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or his Church, but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart, and, moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience - those too may achieve eternal salvation.

I think tradcaths could have an out for not believing that the vast majority of Muslims, Jews or Protestants will actually make it to heaven, since they could just assert that in the modern world, most such people are not ignorant of Christ and his Church, and if they are, it is their own fault.

I don’t think that gives them much of an out. Other sections of the CCC address these groups pretty unambiguously.

Protestants:

818 “... the Catholic Church accepts them with respect and affection as brothers.... All who have been justified by faith in Baptism are incorporated into Christ; they therefore have a right to be called Christians, and with good reason are accepted as brothers in the Lord by the children of the Catholic Church.”

819 “... Christ's Spirit uses these Churches and ecclesial communities as means of salvation, whose power derives from the fullness of grace and truth that Christ has entrusted to the Catholic Church. All these blessings come from Christ and lead to him, and are in themselves calls to “Catholic unity.”

Jews:

839 When she delves into her own mystery, the Church, the People of God in the New Covenant, discovers her link with the Jewish People, “to whom the Lord our God spoke first.” The Jewish faith, unlike other non-Christian religions, is already a response to God's revelation in the Old Covenant. To the Jews “belong the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises; to them belong the patriarchs, and of their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ”, “for the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable.”

Muslims:

841 “The plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator, in the first place amongst whom are the Muslims; these profess to hold the faith of Abraham, and together with us they adore the one, merciful God, mankind's judge on the last day.”

Now, I’m sympathetic to the tradcaths on this point (though they’re usually so loathsome, it makes it difficult to have sympathy for them at all), in that Rome didn’t always have such an inclusive attitude, so they have plenty of prior writings to point to that make the opposite claims. But those are just the sort of problems you have to put up with when your church changes its doctrine while pretending both that it hasn’t and that it can’t.

Not sure how they can square that with the need for baptism (even of infants).

That hasn't been a hard and fast rule ever.

In the fourth century, Roman Emperor Valentinian II was a catechumen who expressed desire to be baptized by St. Ambrose of Milan, but he was assassinated before the bishop could reach him. Ambrose consoled the mourning family by stating: "Did he not have the grace which he desired? Did he not have what he eagerly sought? Certainly, because he sought it, he received it."

Before then, St Justin Martyr developed the concept of the Logos Spermatikos ("seeds of the Word"). He argued that because Christ is the Divine Reason (Logos) that illuminates every human mind, anyone who lived righteously according to the truth they had was already participating invisibly in Christ:

"We have been taught that Christ is the first-born of God, and we have declared above that He is the Word of whom every race of men were partakers; and those who lived reasonably are Christians, even though they have been thought atheists." — First Apology, Chapter 46

St. Irenaeus defended the idea that God’s saving grace was not restricted to only those alive during or after Christ’s death. He argued that God has always been present to humanity, judging people based on the capacity and information they possessed in their own time.

"For Christ came not only for those who believed on Him in the time of Tiberius Caesar, nor did the Father provide only for those who are now living, but for all men altogether, who from the beginning... feared and loved God, and behaved justly and piously towards their neighbors, and longed to see Christ." — Against Heresies, Book IV, Chapter 22

The Church has held for as long as we have records that people who want to be baptized are baptized, people who would have wanted to be baptized had they known of baptism are baptized, and it's all a mystery but if you know of and want to get baptized you should.

According to the CCC, they're a little more wishy-washy on that these days:

1259 For catechumens who die before their Baptism, their explicit desire to receive it, together with repentance for their sins, and charity, assures them the salvation that they were not able to receive through the sacrament.

1260 "Since Christ died for all, and since all men are in fact called to one and the same destiny, which is divine, we must hold that the Holy Spirit offers to all the possibility of being made partakers, in a way known to God, of the Paschal mystery."62 Every man who is ignorant of the Gospel of Christ and of his Church, but seeks the truth and does the will of God in accordance with his understanding of it, can be saved. It may be supposed that such persons would have desired Baptism explicitly if they had known its necessity.

1261 As regards children who have died without Baptism, the Church can only entrust them to the mercy of God, as she does in her funeral rites for them. Indeed, the great mercy of God who desires that all men should be saved, and Jesus' tenderness toward children which caused him to say: "Let the children come to me, do not hinder them,"63 allow us to hope that there is a way of salvation for children who have died without Baptism. All the more urgent is the Church's call not to prevent little children coming to Christ through the gift of holy Baptism.

So basically, adult non-believers who served God to the best of their ability and who would have hypothetically desired baptism had they known of its necessity get to go to Heaven, and unbaptized children get a big question mark plus a "I really hope God has a way to save these guys."

The way out I see for tradcaths, is simply asserting that Muslims and Jews either did know of the necessity of baptism and rejected it, or that they didn't try to seek truth and do the will of God in accordance with their understanding of it, because if they had, they would have found the Roman Catholic Church and Jesus.

So basically, adult non-believers who served God to the best of their ability and who would have hypothetically desired baptism had they known of its necessity get to go to Heaven, and unbaptized children get a big question mark plus a "I really hope God has a way to save these guys."

Funnily enough that's basically the opposite of the Mormon view. We believe that babies that die are automatically saved, meanwhile we perform proxy baptisms for the dead, and those dead need to accept the baptism from the other side for it to be of any use. I.e. those who would have accepted the gospel and been baptized if they had been given the opportunity can still be saved, but it still requires an actual proxy baptism to be performed for them by the living.

I'm not sure to whom you are referring by this.

We are clearly talking about online Warhammer Catholics, who really want to believe that racism and bigotry are compatible with teachings of the church, while the modern church as a whole rather strongly disagrees.

Typical example.

Yes, Mr. Morlock is professing Catholic who for some reason was not listening to his well trained priest when he was explaining to him that racism is wrong.

And Morlock's not even a crusader-PFP-tradcatholicism-is-my-identity type, from what I can tell. N=vibes but I get the sense that some form of integralism is pretty popular in those corners despite being (at least in the more hardcore varieties) contrary to church teaching and potentially even doctrine in 2026.

Yeah, I think Catholics/Jews/Protestants all somewhat misunderstand each other, but they do have distinct and conflicting models of the world, and I think the US is substantially worse since letting Catholics and Jews into positions of influence.

The biggest point of conflict is that unlike Catholics and Jews, Protestants have no will to power in the sense of large state or quasi-state institutions, while Catholics and Jews do. To American Protestants, the dream is to be self-sovereign and free not merely from control by the centralised state, but free even from dependency on it in the first place. As far as I can tell from extensive interaction with Catholics and Jews, this dream is... not at all shared by them. This entire thought paradigm doesn't even exist in their heads, and to the extent they try to entertain it, it seems silly and quaint. Their model of the world is there is centralised power and we need to be in control of it. The Catholic view is they're the rightful shepherds of the sheeple, and the sheeple ought to defer to their expertise, and this is the rightful way of the world; the Jewish view is to exploit the discrepancy in cognitive ability and offer the sheeple bad deals which put the Jews in charge of everything, then say "Well, the sheeple signed off on it right here! Look at the contract they signed!" Potter from It's a Wonderful Life, basically. Or Mark Zuckerberg.

As someone from a Protestant-adjacent background, I do find both of these views naturally repulsive. But at the same time, the root problem of the Protestant model is that the sheeple are indeed completely retarded, and trying to give them a say in anything really does just result in them putting shysters in charge of everything. As is abundantly displayed in software choice, if you offer people sovereignty and freedom, they don't want it: they want the mass surveillance, censorship, and ads. I don't fault the Jews for the slur "goyim": it's completely justified.

Protestants have no will to power in the sense of large state or quasi-state institutions

Let me roll on the floor laughing here. Yep, no will to power. Just wanna sit at home being a Quietist Pietist, reading the Bible at mother's knee and knitting in the rocking chair.

Not like they went out to conquer empires or the likes.

Not like they went out to conquer empires or the likes.

Those Protestants were Church of England, whom I've heard described as 'Catholics who flunked Latin'.

I probably should have specified "American Protestants" in the first instance, rather than the second. There is, in fact, a difference between people who cross an ocean to brave a frontier with their own little religious sect and a monarch who wants to get a divorce.

Protestants have no will to power in the sense of large state or quasi-state institutions

I think that this is downstream of the grievous damage that Mainstream Protestantism did to itself and the United States when it started dabbling in theological liberalism. Since mainstream Protestants controlled the institutions, their liberalization kicked off a withdrawal by theologically conservative Protestants. The conservatives ended up with the numbers and zeal, but didn't inherit the institutional capacity (although they have been working to build it back up).

To American Protestants, the dream is to be self-sovereign and free not merely from control by the centralised state, but free even from dependency on it in the first place

I am pretty libertarian and so sympathetic to this desire, so I'd interrogate to what degree this is actually a problem. But I definitely don't think it's inherent to Protestantism (and fwiw you see much less of this sort of thinking, from what I can tell, among the Reformed Protestants).

I don't think theological liberalisation or even a loss of faith among Protestants necessarily entails a decay into centralised power. In fact, if anything, I'd say libertarianism is the more fundamental ideology that was hallucinated into existence as a way of dealing with religious fracture. I wouldn't say things like homesteading, having solar panels, raising cattle, hosting your own git server, self-custody of your Bitcoin, etc., have any particular rooting in Protestant theology itself (although I won't pretend some Protestants don't try to contend so; but I think this is them failing to recognise their own reflection in the Rorschach dots, rather than remotely serious exegesis of what's actually being said in the text).

As for whether theological liberalism resulted in a loss of power, I mean, kind of? But the Jews who are actually in power are not the sort who take the Torah particularly seriously. I mean, they do in a sort of "It's tradition, and it's our tradition" sense. It's clear Scott in Unsong has great affection for Jewish tradition. But it's also definitely not the same sort of respect as religious fundamentalists have.

And the Catholics in power today... well, as has been questioned on this very forum: "Is the pope Catholic?"

I don't think theological liberalisation or even a loss of faith among Protestants necessarily entails a decay into centralised power.

No, you're mistaking me: I am saying Mainline Protestants had a lot of power in America for a long time, but theological liberalization split them and the (conservative) splitters by default didn't have institutional control. Here, this comment explains more of what I am getting at.

if anything, I'd say libertarianism is the more fundamental ideology that was hallucinated into existence as a way of dealing with religious fracture.

Libertarianism is famously hard to define but the traits that are shared by libertarian-leaning Americans predate the fundamentalist-mainline split.

I wouldn't say things like homesteading, having solar panels, raising cattle, hosting your own git server, self-custody of your Bitcoin, etc., have any particular rooting in Protestant theology itself

WELL THIS IS AN INTERESTING QUESTION and what I would say is that the theology and culture are all caught up together. To grossly simplify things, there's a good argument to be had that the libertarian tendency in the United States is in no small part downstream of the British Isles and specifically the borderers. Now, Christianity in the Isles were always distinct from the mainland. Check in on the Scottish clergy and you'll find them doing things like "illegally seating an excommunicated guy as king." It's not particularly surprising that if you check in on them a bit later you find that their theology is, if not "libertarian," skeptical of tyranny and ("papish") centralized authority. I think the culture and theology accelerated each other; necessity is the mother of invention and all that.

As for whether theological liberalism resulted in a loss of power, I mean, kind of? But the Jews who are actually in power are not the sort who take the Torah particularly seriously.

  1. I didn't say anything about the Jews, I am only talking about Protestant Christians
  2. I am not arguing that theological liberalism inherently leads to a loss of power. I am saying it split Christianity in the States.

And the Catholics in power today... well, as has been questioned on this very forum: "Is the pope Catholic?"

Power is downstream of institution-building. I have had an unusually high amount of exposure to institutions of both Protestant and Catholic origin and I have every respect for Catholic institution building. They are very smart, very serious, and their approach to the world helps them avoid some pitfalls that Protestants often fall into, in my opinion. Protestants are extremely likely to want their organizations to be a fully confessional community, which has serious advantages but cuts Protestant entities off from the talent of other faith groups. This is easiest to see in their universities: Catholic institutions are typically quite happy to hire talented professors and staff of all or no faith, while conservative Protestant schools often restrict staff to those who share their faith. This has real benefits but narrows their talent pool, sometimes fairly dramatically.

Indeed, my own Catholic people's history since 1759 has been trying to set themselves free from Protestants, so I think the parent's opinion requires being very selective with evidence. I'm sure the Irish also would have some choice words about Protestants' will to power.

Yes, I think conservative Protestants were likely under pressure from three different directions

  1. that they were getting outflanked in the institutions
  2. the institutions were genuinely doing stuff that was inimical to their culture and beliefs and in some cases also really bad
  3. there's long been an anti-institutional conservative-libertarian-borderer-frontiersman cultural streak in the United States that many Protestants were also a part of

For all of these reasons, chunking the ring into Mount Doom instead of trying to continue to wield it began to look increasingly attractive. I think the degree to which Protestants actually bailed out of institutional competitiveness is likely overstated, but I wouldn't say it's not real.

there's long been an anti-institutional conservative-libertarian-borderer-frontiersman cultural streak in the United States that many Protestants were also a part of

That seems a much more likely reason, that early colonisation of the american frontier selected heavily for people who prefer to be away from centralized power, and that is not necessarily downstream of being protestants, lest we forget that the US states were not the only european colonies in early America.

Which leads one to ask why they present themselves as Catholic.

Why do you present yourself as American, given the demographics of the country, which you linked yourself?

Yeah. When I heard that the jury in Karmelo Anthony's case was 'all white' I could only imagine 12 obese Mexicans in buttoned up shirts with white cowboy hats sitting in the courtroom sweating profusely under the Texas sun.

I feel like the American identity isn't a comparable thing to say, Austrian, Dutch, Polish or similar. It's more like a gameshow competition where the last one to stop touching it wins. Though to be fair many European countries are moving in that direction.

Yeah. When I heard that the jury in Karmelo Anthony's case was 'all white' I could only imagine 12 obese Mexicans in buttoned up shirts with white cowboy hats sitting in the courtroom sweating profusely under the Texas sun.

It had no black people, but it did have asians, hispanics, etc, as was frequently pointed out. The people claiming it was "all white" were lying for their immediate social advantage; this proves nothing about how assimilation operates in the general context.

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