domain:drmanhattan16.substack.com
hydroacetylene
7m ago
The religious right has always played second fiddle in the republican coalition; there were times it was more prominent, of course, but the moral majority in the eighties was not running the GOP theocratically.
hydroacetylene
8m ago
If you're referencing the "TradCath" social media movement in some way
No, we really are growing. There’s a real ‘there’ there.
A lot of the social media movement posters are at best loosely affiliated but normie rad trads are a thing with enough growth to be notable. As the boomers die and traditional forms continue to grow(both through natural increase and conversion) it will become a bigger and bigger part of the American Catholic experience. It’s already- even per secular pollsters- at a notable single digit percentage of Catholics in America.
felis-parenthesis
14m ago
I wonder if Q-anon causes difficulties for the Nicene Creed. The right wing spaces that I monitor, mostly patriots.win, mock posts trailing things that are "about to happen". News that prosecutions are coming gets mocked with a sarcastic chorus of "two more weeks" or "trust the plan".
Meanwhile the Nicene Creed tells us
He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead
I've four guesses
- That looks to my eyes like the kind of "trust the plan" pitch that currently excites contempt, and this will be an obstacle to Christian revival.
- Q-anon is profane. The Nicene Creed is sacred. The profane cannot contaminate the sacred. There is no obstacle to Christian revival.
- Going to Methodist church as a child (England, 1965‐1970) the second coming did register at all. Later, when I learned that some branches of American Christianity centered on the second coming, I initially thought: I know about that. It features in the book Father and Son; it is a weird, Plymouth Brethren thing. It has been quietly dropped, and doubts about it will not be an obstacle to Christian revival
- The second coming is an important part of traditional Christianity. If people in 2025 find "about to happen, trust the plan" gives them the ick, then that will be an obstacle to Christian revival.
My guesses contradict each other. I'm really confused :-(
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
19m ago
However, the evangelical right has been losing quite a bit of power and cultural cachet, and we're seeing the rise of more traditional versions of Christianity such as Catholicism and to a lesser extent, Orthodoxy. Buddhism has also made inroads in a more serious way, as well as Islam mostly via immigration of Muslim peoples.
That's not been what I've personally observed? I do recognize that Catholic churches have seen a very slight uptick in attendance over the past decade, though, after bottoming out during the Obama admin and the height of the scandals. If you're referencing the "TradCath" social media movement in some way, I've not been convinced that it's anything more than an aesthetic circlejerk of 1950s-1980s view on femininity and masculinity than an actual revival of Catholic belief systems.
My extended family is traditionally Catholic, in a way where we attend churches in America that still give services in our ancestors' language as well as English. There are portions of our family that have broken tradition and started attending "Evangelical" megachurches, and it's caused quite a rift that was only exacerbated by issues that aging elders bring to the table (think: kidnapping grandma while she's suffering from Alzheimer's). Notably, the Catholic portion of our extended family is relatively socially liberal (for Catholics), but the Evangelical portion has taken a hard right turn: lots of Facebook drama for the world to see. The family undoubtedly split votes for Harris / Trump according to religious views, based on my personal interactions and what they post on Facebook.
I see more of the same happening. The prosperity gospel is too enticing for many people, and I see megachurches as validation for the modern American vices that more traditional Christian religions would preach against. The guiding voice of the religious right in the US has never really been the Pope, but now it's undoubtedly the chorus of grifters and cheats who call themselves holy men while flying on private jets to their private islands. I will throw them a bone, in that they are succeeding in creating communities where communities have been hollowed out: some of the healthiest white, rural communities (in terms of networks) are organized around these Evangelical churches. But my praise stops abruptly there.
My (naive?) theory is that Trump owes his victory as much to the Evangelical community more than any other - they very much represent his spirit. The GOP would do well to embrace that community, and I think they are doing so especially in the House led by Mike Johnson.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
21m ago
Calling your belief system a religion makes you vulnerable to certain laws and regulations that apply only to religions.
There are also benefits to calling your system a religion: "I want to smoke peyote" makes the DEA show up, but "I want to smoke peyote because of my religion", despite losing in court in Employment Division v. Smith spurned the passing of lots of RFRA laws, not to mention other religious carveouts like the Amish with Social Security, beards in the military, and such.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
23m ago
Well, if anything I think we’ll see a lot more “orthodox” religious expression than anything else. The thing that seems to be happening is that people join churches with stronger dogmas and less ecumenical practices and a sort of “purity culture”. For example there are a fair number of converts to orthodoxy that seem to push for rebapism as if they’re joining a new religion. On the Protestant end, the number of things that are “demonic” are growing really fast. There are influencers who are convinced that fast food is demonic, or that relatively common symbols are demonic. Fast food is unhealthy, but I think most people would have laughed at the idea of McDonald’s being satanic (the teen spitting in your food might have been a “satanist” in the goth bug your parents sense when I was in high school, but nobody thought that McDonald’s itself was demonic. Catholics have always had sedavacantists and traditionalists.
I expect that these groups will basically push to create places where they can live in religious communities perhaps something on the order of the Mennonite or Amish communities where those religious values and interpretations are at least social expectations if not codified in local laws. Convinced that these groups want religion to play a very large role in how life is lived. They want to have I.e. orthodoxy and those rules inform every aspect of their lives.
Sunshine
24m ago
Even if the overall population of Christians is going up due to population growth, there's a clear trend towards secularism in the countries at the end of their development cycles (high education, wealthy, etc). If current trends continue then all the currently-developing countries will eventually become developed countries and go through the same secularization process. If current trends don't continue then all bets are off anyway.
Also, it's pretty clear that political power has largely gone out of religion in the world's great powers. The Church of England used to spend its time trying to stamp out Catholicism in Ireland, now it's a nearly-atheistic social club. The medieval Vatican waged wars against kings and emperors, now the Pope is just a celebrity ruling over a country the size of a park. If you're at all familiar with the power religion used to have, it should be self-evident that it doesn't have that anymore.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
36m ago
it's no surprise that the religions with this disadvantage are dying.
Source for this? It seems to me that Christianity is growing again as the more 'scientific' ideologies are on the decline.
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
38m ago
The quality of legal advice current LLMs give is miles better than what you could get in 2023. It's still not perfect but now it's at the point where you need to have a decent idea of the field to understand where it goes wrong compared to back then when an intelligent layman with Google would have been able to point out the errors.
Calling your belief system a religion makes you vulnerable to certain laws and regulations that apply only to religions. For example, you can't teach it in schools. Indoctrinating other people's children is one of the main reasons to have a religion in the first place, so it's no surprise that the religions with this disadvantage are dying.
Nowadays, if you have a metaphysical theory about the intangible nature of human essence with strong dictates about how humans should behave, you call it a new field of science and loudly insist that your priests are scientists. Since your "field of science" does not interact with any previously-existing field of science and all scientists within that field will be your priests, no one can prove your "science" wrong.
See: gender science.
I expect to see religions gradually replaced by a variety of woo-woo superstitions and mystery cults that loudly insist that they aren't religious in nature.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
56m ago
Sûre, my point was men already know about this- there’s already a trope about some butch undesirable brunhilda who won’t take no for an answer in entertainment(usually played for laughs, admittedly).
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