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PaperclipPerfector  18d ago (text post)   3520 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 28, 2024

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.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Given the (pretty good, IMHO) case Michael Lind lays out in this Tablet piece about how demographic trends still strongly favor utter dominance by the Democratic Party, what can people on the right do, then? Note, I'm not asking what the Republican party does, which is move left to capture moderate voters so to remain electorally viable (per the median voter theorem and Duverger's law); I'm asking what voters who care about the policies that would thus be abandoned, as opposed to the "politics as sports" folks who are happy just so long as "their team" beats the other guy.

If I was a white gentile I’d probably become a tradcath. I have no particular fondness for Catholicism, but I get the impression many tradcaths don’t either, especially when it comes to the Pope, the Vatican and the actual hierarchical structure and institution of the Catholic Church in practice.

As @coffee_enjoyer said, you need to pick some kind of religious narrative, and almost all invented or new age religions fail and have failed. Tight knit traditionalist religious groups have the best chance of being able to preserve functioning communities.

The only viable option is to pick an existing one. That leaves you with various insular forms of Protestantism, like the Mennonites/Amish, but they take few converts and would require an unlikely degree of adaptation to a new life, with Orthodoxy, which is very ethnically tied to some specific groups like Greeks and Russians in the US, or with Catholicism. Mormonism is in rapid decline and is very goofy. Tradcath groups see many converts, many from mainstream Catholicism but sometimes from outside it too.

There may be fundamental issues with Christianity having some kind of inherent leftward drift (I think the evidence is inconclusive) but in the near/medium term this is probably the best option.

If I was a white gentile I’d probably become a tradcath.

First, how does this answer my question? What does this do, politically, for the right?

And second, isn't this instrumentalizing religion, joining a denomination for reasons other than genuine belief?

There are less isolationist, committed, conservative varieties of protestantism out there as well…

The Orthodox Presbyterian Church, or I'm sure some Lutheran denominations (WELS?) aren't going to be abandoning their teaching anytime soon, for example, and they don't have especially high barriers to joining. It won't be as tightly knit as the Amish, but it might be comparable to tradcaths.

As an actual IRL tradcath my understanding is that WELS, ROCOR Orthodox, and certain greek-catholic groups whose membership often overlaps with latin-mass groups anyways are the closest sociological analogues to traditional Catholicism(which is growing and does have staying power even if it's overstated). Maybe add Opus Dei too if you count them as a group. At @2rafa 's point about a possible inherent leftward drift- the SSPX is by far the oldest major tradcath group and also tends to be the most moderate on hot-button issues, despite having an uberconservative reputation, with the SSPX supporting things like old-earth instead of young-earth creation, knuckle under and get the covid vax if you have truly no other option, accepting longer periods of dating before marriage, etc. Now that could also just be because of having relatively fewer Americans in top positions making it less firmly red-tribe aligned, also, it's not inherently less conservative to believe you should get the covid vaccine if your employer won't accept any religious exemptions or that the earth might be as much as 30,000 years old.

which is growing

Yeah, I certainly got that impression.

and also tends to be the most moderate on hot-button issues

Huh, I would have expected the FSSP to be more moderate in general. Is that not the case?

No, it is not, although the most moderate individual priests are probably with the FSSP. In general the FSSP has the biggest tent out of the major traditionalist groups while the others have tighter control over individual representatives, but the ‘typical’ FSSP line will be a bit more socially and sometimes liturgically conservative than other English-speaking traditionalists, although the SSPX probably does more purity testing. Conservative, top-down organizations with a history of purging their ultra conservative wing(in fairness, usually for genuine bad behavior) do not tolerate unapproved right wing radicalism very well.

Of course a slim plurality of the IRL tradcath world is French-speaking, and rules of thumb like that could easily be different across a language barrier.

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