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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 29, 2026

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There is no Jewish equivalent to the Catholic Church. This is actually relevant to this topic. Take something you and I have discussed many times, which is the that Jews support an ethnostate that is politically designed to preserve their demographic majority in Israel but promote mass immigration to the West. We can both agree that some do and some don’t, although we disagree on the proportion in each group.

The Catholic Church, though, is a legal and hierarchical entity to which its adherents must maintain a degree of underlying institutional loyalty, as the timely drama discussed above about the SSPX helpfully shows. If the Pope wants you out, you’re out. Leading rabbis in various Jewish sects can arbitrarily decide Jews are or aren’t devout, following the rules, or even Jewish at all (in the case of rules around patrilineal descent, conversion etc), but there is no universal standard; even in Israel where there is a semi-formal structure for religious courts some rabbis are far more lenient than others and scholars in the same niche chareidi sects overrule each other on interpreting the Talmud and indeed Torah all the time.

The Catholic Church has a leader who hands out judgments its members have to follow. You can be a Catholic who doubts or disagrees with some of them to an extent (which I noted when mentioning lay Catholics in my comment), but it is also correct to say that the Catholic Church, as an organization, believes or supports something. The Catholic Church supports mass immigration to Western lands. Those who oppose it have views that run directly contrary to the objective governing structure of the Church in America and globally. This is more like saying “Russia wants to permanently occupy Crimea”. It is not reasonable to ascribe this motivation to every Russian, but it is reasonable to ascribe it to the Russian state.

You may reply that Jews are a nation, or consider themselves one, but if this is taken literally it is an anarchist nation rather than a coherent or governed polity - unlike both Russia and the Catholic Church.