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Notes -
The reaction to fraternity hazing incidents is extremely funny to me. “These poor willing adult male participants were socially pressured to do something humiliating to strengthen the bonds of friendship. Such harm can’t go unnoticed; we must publicly humiliate them on the news for millions of people to see and comment on while showing their faces on video whenever possible.” It’s just so stupid.
Frats market themselves as a conspiracy against outsiders that demands your dignity if you want to get in on it. It's not a bad thing that this is being attacked as bad and suboptimal and worthy of being shamed over. The victims of hazing are actually unscrupulous people trying to get in on it to perpetuate it, so it's fair if everyone sees their humiliation on the internet.
I mean that’s certainty one theory, but another theory would be that stressful experiences build brotherhood, which I recall reading in a study involving militant groups a long time ago. If fraternities selected and promoted suboptimal norms then we should expect to see members perform worse, but we see them perform better. In any case, America is one long humiliation ritual so it’s not actually a bad thing for young men to become habituated to this early, provided there is no actual harm being committed.
Than what?
Than non-Greek students. But Greek members typically perform better than non-students
Do you believe that Greek students and non-Greek students differ only in whether or not they undergo stressful experiences?
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Care to elaborate?
You’re liable to be replaced by H1B or passed over for AA hires, your tax dollars may go to a senseless war or random Somali / Haredi scams, your town might become +60 foreign in a decade, that sort of thing. There’s just a lot of humiliation involved with being an American today, so it’s good to get training in dealing with that early.
It's interesting, my read on you (and I try to keep Mottizens sorted in my head) is a Christian who takes his faith seriously. I associate that (perhaps wrongly) with goodwill toward one's fellow human, love one another, if he hath all this yet hath not charity, etc. So... that, but you also have this other, angry, intolerant, legalistic, pessimistic side. I don't think you're as old as I am but maybe you've personally had many negative experiences? None of ny business. We all contain multitudes, to misquote Whitman.
Read Lamentations or the Prophets sometime, or the last five chapters of Judges. Or if the New Testament is preferred, Jesus cleansing the temple is overdone as a reference, but there's no shortage of other examples in the gospels ("brood of vipers", sons of satan) from Christ himself, or if you prefer something a bit more visceral, there's always the Whore of Babylon.
Your observation fits me as well, I think. On the Red side, there is a pervasive sense that things are very bad and probably going to get a lot worse, and that very likely it is not going to be possible to do anything about it. It's acutely frustrating from the Christian perspective because, as many of us see it, Christianity and the Christians in it have been trying to accommodate the secular world for quite some time now, trying to find some way to fit the secular image of what Christians are supposed to be, and at this point it seems pretty clear that this was never going to be possible and many of the compromises we made appear to have been foolish in the extreme. On the one hand, this world is not our home, and so the amount that the present decline can matter to us ought to be sharply limited. On the other hand, we do have to live through it, and it does seem quite woeful.
When I was young, I grew up in a fairly conservative evangelical denomination. When I got into my teens and started grappling with theological questions seriously, all the social push was toward Liberalism; we looked at the previous generation, and we asked, "isn't this too rigid and hidebound, too legalistic, too dogmatic?" We looked at a structure that claimed it was the one correct way to be a Christian, and we asked, "Is it really plausible that the codified rules of this one group of churches in late-90s southern America is the only way to follow Christ?"
Looking back, that question was dishonest in several ways, but none of us noticed at the time, and we, for lack of a better term, declined to harden into the shape the previous generation sketched out for us. If all humans fail, sin, go astray, then no church has ever been what Jesus wanted us to be. If we presume that at least some Christians are doing the job that Jesus laid out for us, then it follows that the job does not require perfection, and further that there must be a channel of acceptable Christianity, not a single line. And so we, well to the conservative side, opened up to the idea that those further out from us might nonetheless also be Christians attempting to follow Christ to the best of their knowledge and ability. Despite the questionable starting point, it seems to me that this was a good conclusion to arrive at.
Coming back to the church after some years away, though, I noticed that this logic only ever ran one way. It was always applied from a "conservative" position toward "liberal" positions, but I noticed how neither I myself nor anyone around me ever ran this logic the other way, to the people more conservative than ourselves, whether in the previous generation or throughout history. We were open to considering the idea of a looser Christianity being valid, but not a tighter one. We entertained the idea that the Unitary Universalists might be in some way valid Christians, but never the Westboro Baptist Church. I get why the secular world might prefer it to work this way, but it's not clear to me why, from a Christian perspective, drawing the boundaries much too tight ought to be considered a worse failure than drawing them much too loose. If Christianity is a channel, and perhaps even a wide channel, why suppose that the center of that channel is the midpoint between modern liberal and conservative Christians, rather than somewhere like the midpoint of all Christians since Christ? Should one argue that the only true understanding of Christian love, charity, etc is the one from some particular tribal slice of post-2000s American Christianity?
It was Kierkegaard who said in Works of Love (1847) (I did a paper on him in undergrad for some reason):
I didn't take this to mean Christianity was dangerous in the sense of violence, but in the sense that it will upend one's life. If I were to start noticing motes in eyes, I'd say I have met precious few I'd say lived up to my idea of Christianity. Maybe one or two of them in a church. And none of them were particularly into proselytizing. And all of them held a kind of charitable goodwill and patience toward others--that always took the form of actual behavior and proactive doing.
I've also met a lot of people who claim Christianity as their guiding principle and are full of a seething anger (I'd characterize the stereotype of the Westboro Baptist members here. Mind you just before I attended Catholic churches for a few years I had been attending Baptist churches.)
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