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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   31902 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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I had quite the throwback culture war experience this past weekend. While at a family gathering, my dad was cornered by an in-law and quizzed about my “agnosticism”.

He was asked if he had led me to this lack of faith, and was then informed that it’s the patriarch’s responsibility to “get his family into heaven” – a neat little double-duty insult of both himself and me.

I tend to be a very laid-back guy in meatspace, but found myself livid. I’ve been in this family for close to a decade, and the sheer cowardice and arrogance of this exchange was breathtaking. To circle around to one of my direct family members instead of having the cajones to challenge me directly was ridiculous (and in hindsight, what I should have really expected from these people).

We’ve been existing in what I thought was a reasonable detente. As a victorious participant in the Atheism culture war, I’ve been kinda-sorta prepared to have these skirmishes with my wife’s catholic family for a long time. The unspoken agreement was that I go to church for holidays, let you splash water on my children, and don’t bring up anyone’s hypocrisy/the church’s corruption, rampant pedophilia/the inherent idiocy in believing in god.

In exchange, I get to stay balls deep in my excellent wife and should be left alone.

I’ll be the first to admit the excesses of Atheism’s victory laps and see how “live and let live” can slide down the slope into a children’s drag show. But this indirect exchange reminded me that when the culture war pendulum swings back, I should be prepared for the petty tyrants and fools on the religious right to reassert themselves. We’re already starting to see the tendrils of this, even if some of their forces have been replaced with rainbow-skinsuit churches across the US.

For Christian motteziens - No disrespect intended. I'm aware of the hypocrisy of my arrogance in this post, and it's intended to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek

So how do you want me to interact with this post other than saying "nice blog bro!"? We aren't here to be your therapist.

But yes, the detente is over and was over when the state closed churches and masses for COVID. Even when reopening occured, diktats came down as to how Churches were to administer the Eucharist, which I might remind you is the holiest and most central ritual in Christiandom.

So your father-in-law is for all intents and purposes trying to figure out if you are going to be an asset or liability in the culture war. Are you sending your children to a classical school or a public school?

We aren't here to be your therapist.

While @yofuckreddit would probably have been better off making their post a bit less rant-y, sneering at them does not help matters. Please avoid this level of antagonism in the future.

Tophat, is that you?

You could make this same argument about literally any political wedge, or even tangential events. Oh, they shot Kennedy, guess the Catholic detente must be over. What’s so special about COVID lockdowns to decide that now is the time to strike?

Screwing with the Eucharist is messing with a central pillar of the religion. That is very clearly an invasion of the sacred by the state, in the way an assasination of the head of the state is not.

Why not? Murdering Christians is surely frowned upon. Yet the death of a Christian is not sufficient to end the detente, because there are other factors at play.

So why is that line drawn here, at “screwing with” the Eucharist? Why not at the death penalty? At Roe v. Wade? At every bump and scrape of a religious institution against the world’s competing secular interests?

This is silly.

  1. The assasination of Kennedy was a national tragedy and the killer died before prosecution. Oswald, the 60's equivalent if a tankie, is also wildly unrepresentative of secular America.
  2. Roe v. Wade and other legal decisions Christians don't like are the state making rules for what the state wants to permit. The stated deal with seperation of church and state is that the state and church don't get a privlidged interference in the realm of the other. No established churches, no state telling the faithful how to worship. Christians don't have to get abortions, and its their civil right to protest laws they find unjust. Roe v. Wade fits nicely into the deal.
  3. Curtailing the Eucharist (in Canada, we still can't drink the sacred blood) directly violates the deal. Telling the faithful they can't do a core part of the faith on pain of legal penalty is the state privlidging itself in the realm of the spiritual. The equally unacceptable inverse would be the state establishing a church with mandatory attendence on pain if legal penalty.

Christians have always been murdered. That doesn't in itself delegitimize the state for Christians. If Christian murders were selectively under-prosecuted, perhaps it would.

Forbidding people from worship is altogether different. It proves that the free exercise clause has no weight. No one will be held accountable for violating it, and the state is free to violate it again. Already there's movement to do away with priest-penitent privilege, invading upon another critical sacrament for Catholics.

There are plausible reasons for opinions on the death penalty or abortion that have nothing to do with religion, even if some of them may be insincere. Not allowing gatherings to take the Eucharist while allowing secular gatherings can only be because of hostility to religion.

But Christian denominations oppose those things, sometimes quite forcefully, without ending some mythical detente. Why should this be different? Why is this the case where they are supposed to sharpen the knives and prepare for the tribulation?

I don't begrudge Christians their distaste for such a rule. I'm asking why such distaste is supposed to be unique.

... because of hostility to religion.

Maybe, but I think you need to show more work here for your conclusion? Eucharist involves taking off a mask and eating something that someone hands to you or places directly in your mouth. Even pre-COVID, I remember thinking this was not particularly sanitary. A secular gathering might not involve taking off a mask at all. The risk profiles are different. And while terrible, the pandemic gave people a stake in others' private sanitation habits. (Whether or not you think that stake thereby gives the general public the right to restrict behavior, the stake exists.)

Yeah, but at the time we had "No, you can't go to Mass (or a service) because singing hymns will spread infection" while at the same time "it is a human right to march in unmasked street protests of hundreds of people and racism is a bigger threat than Covid" for the BLM protests.

So, you know: here's the goose, here's the sauce, why is the gander not here too?

There was quite a while where I could show up to a bar without a mask for a drink but couldn't sing or participate in rituals at a church.

Assuming that I am not lying, is that an injustice?

An injustice? Yeah.

Only because of hostility to religion? I don't think so. Apathy is sufficient.

So how do you want me to interact with this post other than saying "nice blog bro!"? We aren't here to be your therapist.

This part is needlessly antagonistic. Plenty of other people found ways to interact without sneering, including those who replied before you. Surely you could have read their responses for inspiration.

Back when the US had military conscription, did any significant fraction of Christian churches in the US protest against it? WW1, WW2, the Korean War, the Vietnam War... all of these were wars of choice for the US. We can argue about the morality of the US participation in these wars and whether conscription was justified, but we can just as well argue about the morality of covid lockdowns.

Would the church protest if the US government brought back conscription for the sake of fighting some war of choice?

If Christendom does not protest against its own sons, and the sons of others, being conscripted into wars of choice, then I do not see why it would protest against the much milder infringement on freedom posed by covid lockdowns.

The US catholic bishops were pretty strongly opposed to the Iraq war and one can assume that’d be a better predictor of their future behavior than Vietnam.

That is interesting to find out about. Are Catholics in the US generally more anti-war than Protestants are?

Catholic religious leadership is typically more outspoken and less beholden to a particular party than Protestants are(see also abortion), and has a long history of being opposed to wars of choice(Vietnam opposition had a lot of priests in prominent positions).

As an atheist I deny all responsibility for covid lockdowns.

So how do you want me to interact with this post other than saying "nice blog bro!"? We aren't here to be your therapist.

I considered skipping posting for precisely this reason but figured it was an angle we don't tackle often. My worst fears are confirmed!

Are you sending your children to a classical school or a public school?

I don't have any good options here. The short answer is I don't know. I draw the line of our compromise at funding anything related to religion, and being the sole breadwinner provides me significant leverage. The public schools where I live now are unacceptable, and if I were to return to my hometown they'd be high-quality public (but my kids would be put through the same social shit I went through as a non-believer).

I considered skipping posting for precisely this reason but figured it was an angle we don't tackle often. My worst fears are confirmed!

I'd be kinder if it wasn't written like a channish nastygram and had some point where I could interact that wasn't quizzing someone twice removed from your in-law's mindstate about his intent and words.

Like, what would you like to talk about? Does this represent increased activity in your life? Do you want advice about how to speak to your in-law? Do you want to talk about Christianity in the public sphere? I need some guidelines on how to help you that isn't a request to sneer at your family.

I don't have any good options here. The short answer is I don't know. I draw the line of our compromise at funding anything related to religion, and being the sole breadwinner provides me significant leverage. The public schools where I live now are unacceptable, and if I were to return to my hometown they'd be high-quality public (but my kids would be put through the same social shit I went through as a non-believer).

Of the religious school models, classical schools are extremely new and attempt to be more implicit than explicit. Religious instruction is saved for the final years of schooling in the school near me and has a different approach than the usual, many do not provide it at all. If you have the opportunity I'd recommend investigating them, the people running them are far from fundamentalist baptists in the worst case, and you might have one that isn't religious at all and may actually be a charter school.

Do you want advice about how to speak to your in-law? Do you want to talk about Christianity in the public sphere? I need some guidelines on how to help you that isn't a request to sneer at your family.

I don't need any help navigating my personal relationships, and this post wasn't intended to be a celebration or validation of my personal beliefs. TheMotte needs some counter-jerk every once in a while and (to be frank) the tenor of much of this thread indicates my instincts were correct on that front! The anecdote is window dressing, no more than that.

I hadn't heard anything about a different model of religious schooling, so I appreciate the information there. I still have a few years before having to make a firm decision, and I'm also having to balance a quality education with ensuring we can comfortably afford it. My wife does the vast majority of activity and school scouting - the kids are actually in Catholic day care as we speak - but I may need to grab the reins on the K-12 front.

Part of the problem is that he made an agreement, he knew he would have to make an agreement, and he went ahead and did it while privately holding that he intended none of it (e.g. about raising the kids as Catholics, and "I may need to grab the reins on the K-12 front").

This would invalidate a civil contract, and I don't know if anyone would say that people pointing out how he broke the law were engaging in "sneering and patronising tone of comments". If I take out a bank loan, know that I have to repay it within a certain period at a certain interest rate, then go "how dare my bank manager send me three letters about how I didn't make any repayments, more fool he I never intended to pay it back even when I signed the contract", how many supporters on "I can't believe the arrogance of that guy, asking you to uphold your commitments!" would I get?

This is all separate from the behaviour of the in-law, and mixing the two is what is causing most of the disagreement. I can agree the in-law was in the wrong while still thinking OP doesn't come out of it smelling of roses, either.

So how do you want me to interact with this post other than saying "nice blog bro!"? We aren't here to be your therapist.

The rest of your response is...alright, I guess, but this line we could do without. His post is exactly about culture war, and at that, a part of it that is relatively rarely discussed. I found it interesting.

the detente is over and was over when the state closed churches and masses for COVID

Covid policy ended an individual family's "détente" over Christianity? Letting national politics (and they're barely even related specifically to Christianity!) shape your personal relationships with your family seems hopelessly mind-killed.

My mom isn't a fan of Big Tech but I don't give her the silent treatment whenever the EU hands out another fine.

National? The city police were the ones fencing off churches.

If I change one word in my comment will you respond to the rest of it?

You ignored the part of mine where I stated that the most central rituals of Christianity were being interfered with and changed by government fiat, so if you fix that we can make something work.

And are your local police and politicians a bunch of atheists? I don't suppose mine are.

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