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Ok so I am at a Notre Dame wedding where I went. I’ve fallen away from the news of the place the last few years. A few people did the student to administrator route so I got some news on how the place is doing. The school no longer has priest in the dorms. From what I can guess it’s because people aren’t entering religious life so they lack the numbers. Notre Dame isn’t the church but I do think it had a special place in American Catholicism.
I feel like this has a culture war point. The right is no longer reproducing itself. The right perhaps is a larp from people who remember the old days but aren’t living that life. Which would explain how someone like Trump could be the chosen leader.
When I went there we would all do our things during the week and live together then our rector a Priest would give mass. And if you wanted to you could go to daily mass and walk down the hall.
I feel like this is anecdotal but there is something here when an institution is failing to reproduce itself.
At the same time non religious women's fertility is falling while religious women are still reproducing.
Religiousness is hard in a world when it isn't the norm. It is hard to be a genuine believer in a nihilistic society. Religiously inclined people who are pushed in a more liberal direction by the zeitgeist of society are becoming the dominant group along with the welfare class who fail at using contraceptives. Once religiously inclined people gain a significant portion of the population, they will move the norms in their direction, thus creating a religious revival.
Our society is heavily selecting for two groups: the religious with conservative values and welfare class people. The liberal left are not reproducing.
political ideology is 40% heritable
What about life extension or ideological capture, or a thousand other things that could change? Birth rates aren’t everything, you cant just use them to predict the future so confidently, even if it fits your preferred narrative.
Long term highly secular liberal-ish societies usually fail at inducing mass apostasy in conservative religious groups(French integrists, Dutch calvinists, laestadians in Scandinavia, etc).
I was reading Ed Dutton’s new book just the other day and an interesting thing he points out (not too surprisingly), is that religiosity is correlated with the same regions of the brain that are responsible for ethnocentrism. When environmental selection pressures weaken due to the removal of competition and conflict, groupish ties and religiosity decline predictably, along with it. Which reintroduces those selection pressures at a later time.
He also has another amazing book I recommend to people.
As a descendant of non-ethnocentric Yankee Americans, whose grandparents were lifelong attendees of highly ecumenical or spiritual-not-religious churches, I have felt the strong pull of atheism and giving up on religion.
Yet as a person with autism, I feel the primacy of the value of truth as a fundamental value in my life. I’ve examined religions and faith-ways alongside philosophy and politics, seeking truth.
I’ve concluded that, with the evidence I have, and the logic of it all, I must be a Christian and I must be a libertarian. It was a drive for truth which returned me to the former and brought me to the latter.
I would be fascinated to see a similar study which includes the autism spectrum. We’ve had scribes, eccentrics, and intellectuals throughout human history, but since we’ve only known of the spectrum since WWII, it would be more difficult.
I’ve speculated about having autism myself, given my lack of social graces and difficulty understanding their cues.
I’m an atheist myself but religion has always had a strong pull on me. It still feels like I’m dragging the dead, intellectual carcass of it behind me wherever I go. I think it’s that strong, cognitive itch that can’t be scratched, that comes from the feeling of lacking a strong ideological center that religion fulfills. It’s why I don’t have a problem with Christianity, even though I don’t believe it. I think the societal utility it provides is far greater than we would have if it weren’t around.
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