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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1491 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 13, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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Do the religious people on here actually believe in Christianity? Like do you actually believe that Christ rose from the dead, Garden of Eden, Jesus is the son of God, the Trinity, virgin birth, etc? Or is more Deism and you like the community from going to church? I have a hard time believing most adult converts i.e. JD Vance actually believe these things, but I'm curious if I'm wrong here.

Yes….?

If your model of the US is one where most educated practicing and professing Catholics don’t really believe it, you’re very wrong. Now of course, you can give some side eye to politicians, but if your assumption is that we all are mostly just larping, no.

That's probably a true model, however. Most Catholics regardless of education are nonpracticing and only partial believers.

Right about non practicing Catholics of course. But mentioning Vance OP seemed to be asking whether practitioners actively believed it.

Best guess estimates is that there’s about 25% of practicing Catholics who don’t intend to believe much in the way of catholic doctrine, and this definitely applies to many democrat politicians, which we know because they’ve said so.

It’s not implausible to me that VP Vance could be in the same category with opposite political valence. It’s not the explanation I’d go with.

Eh, I tend to give Vance the benefit of the doubt because he converted from evangelical Protestantism. If he had merely been chasing clout for the "smart people" version of Christianity, he'd have gone to one of the mainline denominations - Episcopalians for most snobbery value but they probably would all have turned green and had a fit of the vapours at the very notion, so one of the Lutheran or Methodist liberal churches. Bill Clinton is Baptist, but American Baptist, the northern and more liberal sibling of the Southern Baptists. There are progressive Baptists, and one James Talarico is doing his best for the Democrats in Texas by being a (liberal) Presbyterian (heavy on the liberal, less so on the Christian as anything stronger than "Jesus wants us all to be nice" doctrines).

I want to register that I think this is wrong. Catholics have as good or (I suspect) better networking in the halls of political power than Protestants, very strong institutions, and they are accepted on both sides of the aisle. If you are a member of a Protestant mainline denomination Protestants will quickly ask "PCA or PCUSA" (or whatever the equivalent is for that denomination) and with Catholics unless you go to Latin Mass or something, just being Catholic isn't necessarily a political tell.

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