I think you are mistaken about the willingness of whites to discuss black crime. I'm sure there is a substantial quotient of people in the mix who wouldn't be embarrassed to declare themselves n***** haters, because there always is, but in comments section related to urban crimes, possibly the most frequent thing one sees is the disgusted "Gee, I wonder what race 'the man' the cops are looking for is," and variants, and my impression is that most of these commenters are not racists. I can't delineate reasons for this conviction because I don't know how it is I think I can "read" them, but I do. To me, the genuine racists are only slightly harder to ferret out than Jew haters who protest that it's Zionism they're against, not Jews.
It's the politicians who in contemplating the prospect of addressing it are riven with anxiety attacks, not us ordinary schmos. This could be a Sister Souljah opportunity for The Orange Menace.
I once had a gun pointed at me by a white thug. There may have been a black guy behind him-- it was very dark and the other guy stood in the shadows-- he could have been pink with purple polka dots for all I could tell.
By the way, Jon, I attended a Greek Orthodox funeral today at the Greek cemetery in Woodlawn, just west of Baltimore. The chapel was beautiful but the ceremony was even more beautiful with five different priests singing. Do all Greek Orthodox priests sing wonderfully?
Oh, how good for you (other than it being a funeral, presumably someone you knew, being the reason). I've never been to the Greek cemetery, only to my Church's (St Andrews OCA), and the Russian cemetery near Elkridge.
Not every Orthodox priest has a good voice, but since almost everything is chanted (other than the sermon) they do get training in the required tones.
If you ever have the opportunity I would recommend a vespers service, which is not overly long (~45 minutes). The hymnody is beautiful, and while I'm not sure about the Greek musical tradition, it's fairly easy to sing along when you get the hang of it.
I have been friends with a family originally from Essex since my college days. Uncle Bob was 84 when his body began to shut down last month. He'll be missed but he had a good, long life. His wife was Green and Greek Orthodox in religion. He converted and was an usher at the Greek Orthodox church in Frederick, MD.
Trump's motto appears to be "Panta agan" - Everything in excess. If he opens his mouth on this issue he'll tar everyone whose skin is darker than the average Greek's with being a depraved criminal.
Re: ...where America is becoming a minority-majority nation
It would be more accurate to say the US may be becoming (ethnically) a no-majority nation. Though white people will remain a plurality-- and if Hispanic people are assimilated under "white" (as Jews, Irish, Italians, etc, were in the past) then white people will still be a majority.
Hispanic is really a multi-ethnic designation. Mostly not people from Spain, but from Spanish-speaking South America. The vast majority are of mixed indigenous and Spanish ancestry.
I want to ‘like’ your comment but for some reason I’m not able to. I am aware of the differences that’s why I used the term Spanish. I assume culturally most are Spanish European also, Argentina comes to mind…
Irish and Italians and Ashkenazi Jews are European it doesn’t matter what the definitions were at the time or even now (jew haters I encounter online).
I’m honestly surprised Rod thinks that no one actually supports Russia. With all the people he’s meeting and just where he lives, it should be pretty easy to find or hear about people supporting Russia. If he means nations… then what the heck is BRICS and company? Heck, I support Russia because I see the world firstly from a spiritual lens and they’re Orthodox and are against the anti-God wokeism.
Which leads me to say that I’m one of the small “o” orthodox Christians that pursues and believes in the unity of Christians across all sects—Catholics, Orthodox, Protestant—all are welcome as long as we have the same view of Jesus, with our own particulars being acknowledged as differences that don’t matter.
But I’m in the Protestant camp, and I despair at the corruption and institutionalization that has occurred since forever ago, which has led to what Rod calls the little popes. I agree with him—deconstructing Christians and exvangelicals are probably more leaving their own particular pastor’s fundamental framework of Christianity, instead of actual Christianity. It pains me that for some fixation on some silly doctrinal differences, Christian “leaders” feel led by God to condemn any and all who don’t toe the line. Insanity.
So I cheer the death of institutional Protestant church. Why? Because it’s man made and man centered.
Half of Protestant pastors minister to congregations which can't afford to support them well enough that they don't have to work "day jobs" during the week. Theirs really are labors of love.
I would like to have Jerry Falwell dug up and hung upside down somewhere in the suitably named Lynchburg. What hot young seminarians were to priests after Vatican II., political power, and power, period, was to Falwell and other "influencers." The Devil takes great pleasure in studying the inclinations of those he will be catering to.
I think you underestimate the extent to which faithful Protestant pastors yearn for unity with the other branches of Christendom. ( Apostates are as naturally chummy as frat bros. ) My Presbyterian church has a late Tuesday afternoon men's reading group in a Celtic pub. St. Basil is in the on deck circle at the moment.
Most of us sense that we are living in a time in which principalities and powers are being given freer rein by The One who holds their leash. If the young are walking away from church it's out of learned or at least imitated disgust with Western civilization, which like Byron White and pornography they cannot define but know when they see its workers and ways.
The Spirit of the Age is coming close to killing off the Anglican Church in North America, which as Dr Tighe points out in links he provides in his daily mailings to heavy hitters and the occasional slummer like me was compromised from the start. And the Southern Baptists are maybe three conventions at most away from approving women's ordination.
In the ground war, we have such exhibits as the woman who stabbed the three year old boy to death about ten days ago. On his YouTube channel, Michael Knowles has a several minutes long vignette of her arraignment. I urge readers to watch it. It's shocking.
Interesting point about ACNA. I had already concluded they were not to be relied on due to their tolerance of ordained women among their ranks from the outset.
Exactly. When I heard their declaration of existence in 2009, I was thrilled. When I heard that they had compromised on women's ordination, I thought they were like a lovely baby born challenged from the beginning by a genetic vulnerability of some kind. The doctors may have been optimistic, but the parents' instinct was that the optimism was unjustified.
My less charitable thought was, "Same clueless but reliably gutless Episcopalians!"
ACNA reminds me of my mom's denomination, ECO- a.k.a. the Evangelical Covenant Order of Presbyterians, a splinter from the PCUSA over the gay marriage issue for those who still wanted to ordain women. For whatever reason, they didn't join the EPC. Hard to say just how many years will have to pass before they figure out that systematically obeying scripture in one area while disobeying it in another, will ultimately still end in destruction.
Hey, you're welcome, Jon. You would be unlikely to admit it because you actually developed an adult psychology, but I suspect you may have had similar thoughts! ( I will admit to being charmed by Barry Goldwater's take, too: "Every good Christian ought to kick Jerry Falwell in the ass." ) I remember that when I heard about The Moral Majority, I thought "Huh? We ain't got one anymore. He doesn't know that?"
And though I couldn't have imagined I'd live to see post Christian America with a popular "culture" as desiccated and loathsome as ours, my instinct from the beginning was that his "Every Christian who doesn't register to vote is a bad Christian" schtick was daft. Didn't he know that Christ's Kingdom was not of this world? That evangelism by the ballot was an impossibility, and only likely to irritate people at best?
Oh no I am not close to any ACNA churches anymore so I don’t know what’s happening. What’s going on? I still have intense anger about TEC and what they did so was very hopeful about ACNA...
Well, from their beginning fifteen years ago, they compromised on the matter of women's ordination: they decided to let individual Bishops ordain women but not make it mandatory that any Bishop ordain them.
I'm pretty sure I actually groaned aloud when I heard about that. Talk about neither hot nor cold! ( Grab something to shield yourself from the spew. )
I keep hoping someone will make a convincing Biblical argument for the permissibility of fornication.
I have been a liberal for for over forty years, and I think that the “liberalism” of our elites isn’t liberalism. They are anointed so, but it is not real, and it certainly does not comport with classical liberalism. Actually, I can say the same with modern American leftism (which is not the same thing as liberalism) and to some extent with American conservatism. People keep saying that they are such and such, but I ain’t seeing it. I do see different excuses for money worship, denigrating community, and mocking anything besides extremely hard material viewpoints while simultaneously mocking facts and reason.
All this barrage of bullshit, lies, idiotic oversimplification, and general ignorance makes want to be an alcoholic.
It depends, I think, on your genetic heritage. Some people seem to have an inborn problem with alcohol (Native Americans most notably). Others of us are more resilient. Even in my party boy youth I didn't want to see another drunk for a good long while after an exceptionally Bacchic festivity.
My Italian-American friend at church and I have discussed alcoholism at great length. In Mediterranean peoples with longer exposure to alcohol, alcoholism is lower. Northern Europeans have been exposed to alcohol for a shorter time and have higher alcoholism rates. In the Americas, those with large amounts of Indian blood seem to have strong alcoholic tendencies.
Thanks for providing the embedded Kennedy clip, Rod. Kennedy is his by now unsurprising solid self. God bless him. He's so untelegenic I'm beginning to crush on him the way a beautiful woman will a man who looks like his driver's license photo.
But the best part about it is Tom Cotton, just to Kennedy's left. As Kennedy begins to read out possible forms of address womyn might wish to be called by, such as "Mx," Cotton comes close to laughing outright, and must quickly cover his mouth with his palm. O! The humanity! Diogenes may have found his man.
Let me tell you something about Sen. Kennedy. Some years ago, I was in Australia on a speaking tour. When my host found out I was from Louisiana, he said, "Ah, you must know my Oxford roommate, Sen. Kennedy." No, I said, I don't -- but Oxford roommate?! Really?! I thought of his cornpone demeanor.
The Australian (who was an Englishman by birth) just laughed. He said Kennedy was a Rhodes Scholar who showed up at Oxford, took the most difficult course of study, and aced it. The guy is brilliant. The cornpone thing is something he leans into.
I was living outside of Louisiana when Kennedy came to prominence as a state politician. I found out later that when he first got going, he spoke in a dramatically less folksy way. Whatever the truth, I'm really pleased with him here, and in general.
He's my favorite U.S. Senator, by far, and not just for his demeanor. He did a ginsu knife number on some nominee some years ago and his effortless command of legal theory and his demand for answers to the quite simple questions he posed made me look up his C.V. I make it a point to watch what he posts on X through to the end (have you seen his Christmas message?). It's never less than amusing. As far as Biden's nominees go, there is one thing to remember: he made a castrate in a skirt the assistant secretary of HHS and an admiral. Really everything follows.
I must say I felt a pang of pity for Chuck Schumer in re BurgerGate over the weekend. The cheese on top of the raw meat did make my stomach go all flippy floppy, but he admitted up front he'd lived in apartments all his life.
I'm in a Facebook group which seemed promising, The Decline of America into Cultural Idiocy. The first postings I saw were jolly chartings of this, but it quickly became clear that unbeknownst to them, most of the members were evidence of it.
Recently, I ran across something in the Cast and Crew section of a World War II. movie on one of the movie channels. Right in the middle of the lineup was a photo of Joachim von Ribbentrop. I took a screenshot, cropped it, and tried to post it to the group with the headline, "No matter your past, if you can deliver, Hollywood has a place for you." They didn't approve it because it made no sense to them. What was funny about it? They had never heard of von Ribbentrop, and to them, I had submitted a dud post.
The first rule of the group is "No politics," and of course most of what gets posted is by self imagined sophisticates who take shots at Trump voters. The commenters are shocking. They cannot think, if it can be called thinking, without cliches. Trump voters are Nazis, Southerners with gun racks in their pickups, inbreds, illiterates. The members give their fellows plenty of laughing emojis, and they give me great opportunities to take shots at them. Yesterday, a post was a photo of Trump standing face to face with some stock company good looking blonde. I don't remember the caption, but it was something about Stormy. It gave me the chance to say, "But he never took showers with Ivanka when she was a little girl."
I went through the rest of the comments, which provided me with at least a dozen openings to cite this or that and tell the commenters the impressiveness of their lack of originality. I'll keep doing it until I insult my way out of the group.
I've found an entertaining group which is called "A group in which we're intentionally vague just for the f*cking hell of it." It's fun. It also accommodates itself genially to non sequiturs.
WHAT! Sen. Kennedy's cornpone demeanor is nothing more than an affectation? Say it ain't so, Rod ... please say it ain't so. But even if is is all just an act, I could still listen to him for days on end because he uses it to such great advantage. He asks simple but pointed questions that in most instances wouldn't require more than a yes-or-no answer, but forces interviewees to resort to extremes of bloviation, dissembling and verbal gobbledegook to avoid looking like the charlatans that they are.
1st things first, I am getting your sub stacks regularly via email so all good from my end.
Interesting bit about the evangelicals. Having grown up in a Plymouth Brethren church then I have a lot of sympathy with the article. Doing my 1st degree in Theology at a (theologically) liberal university was literally mind blowing and so I basically spent the three years drinking heavily and playing sport!
I went back to the non conformist church (more charismatic this time around) thinking it was still the right way to follow Christ but it all again to fall apart once I got into a conversation with the pastor about a "right reading of scripture" and it was as if a light bulb went off in my head and I realised that we were just making it up as we went along.
On a separate matter look up Zahal Levy the next time he is in Budapest (he's normally there quite regularly). He's an Israeli Jew who works in Romania and Hungary. He's a great guy to have a conversation with.
Yes, and you should feel free to opine on any subject you want, except you must never, ever say anything positive about Jorge Bergoglio or Joe Biden. I have a reputation to protect.
I would say that a magisterial Protestant is one whose church holds to one of the historic Protestant confessions of faith. Augsburg (Lutheran), 39 Articles (Anglican), Westminster (Presbyterian), London 1689 (Reformed Baptist) and so on.
Having said that, I would not say that a Fundamentalist Baptist with zero interest in church history and who claims to have "no creed but the Bible" is not Protestant. He clearly is descended, ultimately, from Reformation figures such as Zwingli and
Karlstadt. Yes, I know Zwingli had people who rejected infant baptism put to death. But otherwise he seems very close to modern Fundamentalist or Independent Baptists in his theology.
Some Baptists claim that they are not Protestants because in fact Baptists have been around ever since the time of the Apostles (see J.M. Carroll's tract 'The Trail of Blood'). That thesis, to put it mildly, does not withstand historical scrutiny.
Former Southern Baptist (now Orthodox) here. Ah, "The Trail of Blood", haven't heard that one in a while! Because it was so crazy from an actual historical perspective, it had largely fallen out of favor by the time I started thinking seriously about the theology of my faith (I was born in early 80s, so this would have been late 90s), but I remember discussing it with my grandparents on a few occasions (lifelong Southern Baptists on both sides) who remembered these currents and taking them seriously in the mid twentieth century. It is probably less so now, but the thing I chafed most at as a Baptist was the ant intellectualism; as a bright young man eager to know everything I could, I felt as though I was being constantly told that there were things better not thought too deeply about.
In any event, it is interesting to think about whether or not all churches which are not Catholic or Orthodox are correctly linked under the monicker of "Protestant" because it is very true that these later traditions weren't' really developed in protest against anything distinct (and certainly not against Rome, though many of them largely maintain the animus). World Anglicanism is sometimes called Protestant but is really its own thing, and arguably belongs within the ambit of the older East/West Church division given its reliance on Apostolic Succession as a sign of validity, in much the way that the non-Chalcedonian Orthodox are generally folded in among the Eastern Orthodox, though they are not in communion.
The first time I came across Landmarkism it was from an Armstrongist (the group that sells "Plain Truth"). It was only later that I found out about the Baptists teaching it.
There seem to me to be Landmarkist currents in a lot of secular thought. I mean the modern feminists who paint their views onto the victims of the witch craze or whatever. Queer studies is a bit like that too, don't you think? I guess any attempt to force historical ideologies into a modern straitjacket is like that?
"I mean the modern feminists who paint their views onto the victims of the witch craze or whatever. Queer studies is a bit like that too, don't you think? I guess any attempt to force historical ideologies into a modern straitjacket is like that?"
There are scholars, and then there are "true believers," often, at least. Sometimes they can happily coincide or maybe just coexist, in the same individual. On the other hand, I don't think that many feminists or queerists give a toss about history (or History), really . Their forays in to the past seem designed to reassure those of them "almost persuaded" but weak in their faith that their enterprise is more than yet one more attempt to square - or should I write squeer - the circle.
This ,"reliance on Apostolic Succession as a sign of validity,"was no part of the Church of England as established in the "Elizabethan Settlement" of 1559. "Apostolic succession of bishops" meant no more to the Church of England (and its bishops) than it meant to any other Protestant churches of the Reformation, whether or not they retained officials called "bishops" as in Sweden, or "superintendents," as in Denmark (where they were later renamed "bishops") or parts of Germany, or, as in most places, dispensed with them altogether. It was, rather, the product of a school of anti-Calvinist divines, originally very small in size - think of the name of Lancelot Andrewes - who came to control the Church of England in the 1630s, thanks to the favor and patronage of Charles I, as "the Laudians;" and whose perceived "catholicizing" did a lot to fuel sentiments that erupted in the English Civil War (aka "Puritan Revolution"). This "high-church party" has played a significant part in Anglican myth-making, but down to the present day its views, on "apostolic succession" and many other things, are rejected by Anglican Evangelicals, especially in England.
May I respectfully suggest that you read these two articles?:
James I also resisted the Puritanizing of the English Church he inherited from Elizabeth. He is reputed to have told those seeking to abolish the episcopate "No bishop, no king" seeing (rightly IMO) that challenging traditional authority in the Church would lead to challenging it in the State too.
But he largely agreed (at least until, perhaps, his last years) with their Reformed Calvinist sensibilities, even if rejecting their claims about a presbyterian polity having the best claim to be "scriptural." It was because most of his Scots compatriots were assured about the basic "soundness" of his faith that he was able to push the Kirk, little by little, towards the episcopal polity and royal governorship of the Church of England (and he appointed a fair number of Scots Calvinists to university positions and cathedral deanships in England). Needless to say, they lacked any such confidence in the "soundness" of his son and heir.
James was an oddball, and in many ways a better monarch than he was often given credit for (the disastrous reign of his son tarred him as well). Whatever his own religious scruples he did have to put up with the fact that his wife had converted to Catholicism and when it came to foreign policy he spent much of his reign wooing the Spanish, reluctant to break with them even over the beginning of the Thirty Years War when his own daughter and her husband were booted from their German lands by Catholic force of arms. He only turned against Spain when his son was publicly humiliated in Madrid while wooing the Infanta, and afterward James' boy toy, the Duke of Buckingham, wanted a nice little war to earn glory in.
"it is interesting to think about whether or not all churches which are not Catholic or Orthodox are correctly linked under the monicker of "Protestant" because it is very true that these later traditions weren't' really developed in protest against anything distinct (and certainly not against Rome, though many of them largely maintain the animus). World Anglicanism is sometimes called Protestant but is really its own thing, and arguably belongs within the ambit of the older East/West Church division given its reliance on Apostolic Succession as a sign of validity"
The claims about Anglicanism being Catholic are not all that old. In truth, even before the current liberalism, Anglicanism was all over the place. There is the Evangelical vs. Anglo-Catholic division under the liberal vs. conservative one, so I don't think ACNA will survive, unless it makes the choice there. I met a US woman whose parents are members of the "Anglican Catholic Church"; does anyone know anything about that? It sounds like it's made its choice.
Otherwise, I'd consider to be Protestant any group that has its roots in Western Europe in the 16th or 17th centuries. I wouldn't consider some of the Russian sects, for example, to be Protestant.
The Wikipedia article I have linked above is comprehensive and accurate.
The ACC, of all the Continuing Anglican bodies, is the one which most clearly vaunts the purported "Catholic essence" of Anglicanism. In doing so, it explicitly conditions and subordinates its acceptance of the 39 Articles to the St' Louis Declaration of 1977:
as well as to "the Seven Ecumenical Councils," including the iconophiliac seventh council which, historically, Lutherans have tended to pass over in silence and the Reformed to reject as embracing and mandating idolatry. Elizabethan Anglicans fully shared the Reformed rejection of that council, as also did the "Caroline Divines," by and large. Only in the 19th Century did it begin to find Anglican defenders and advocates, mostly of an Anglo-Catholic or Orthodoxophile persuasion. The ACC accepts the ecumenical authority of that seventh council, but does not require its congregations actually to practice iconodulia, while other "Continuing Anglican" jurisdictions seem to regard the practice as a matter of spiritual or devotional "taste," to be practiced or eschewed according to individual or congregational fancy. There are still Conservative Anglicans, and not only Evangelicals, who reject the practice, as one may discern by perusing this website:
The ACC is one of three Continuing Anglican bodies engaged in a slow merger. I hope that this process does not in any way compromise their Catholic stance.
<<This is radical — I mean that literally: it strikes at the very roots of our justice system. This is the institutionalization of the old Leninist principle of “who/whom?”, in that he really believes that justice requires different standards based on your race and identity as an “oppressed” person…>>
He does not. I listened to that Congressional hearing exchange in its entirety, in which the judge’s words were repeatedly taken out of context, btw. He said over and over that in a court of law, our traditional standards of evidence and proof and so on should apply. When he’d been talking or writing about pronouns or the hated ‘diversity, equity and inclusion” stuff, etc., he was referring to interpersonal relations, not the law or our judicial system. When he’d written that color matters, again, he wasn’t talking about justice or within our judicial system. As a “person of color,” he was explaining why he didn’t like poster or clothing proclamations of color blindness. In fact, he was saying something very similar to what traditionalists mean when they talk about ethnicity or traditional cultures: They matter. That doesn’t mean he or they think the law or our court system should have different standards for different people of different colors or ethnic groups. This tendency to distort the words of people perceived as opponents is just wrong when anybody does it.
Thank you for this alternative perspective. Shading things for your bias and to make a point is not good.
Still, I was struck by the nominee's stammering. Had he defended himself eloquently (as you did) there wouldn't be a viral clip. But he couldn't. And he didn't. He was wholly unprepared to defend himself and his previous writing. To me it suggests he hasn't thought his views through. And he certainly, unlike you, hasn't thought through how his perspective might cohere with historical U.S. jurisprudence--which is odd given he was nominated to be a federal judge.
<<He was wholly unprepared to defend himself and his previous writing. To me it suggests he hasn't thought his views through. And he certainly, unlike you, hasn't thought through how his perspective might cohere with historical U.S. jurisprudence--which is odd given he was nominated to be a federal judge.>>
I’m afraid most judges aren’t any more used to being cross-examined over matters that don’t directly pertain to their judicial behavior or philosophy than the rest of us. The thing is anger over DEI corporate training programs and pronoun concerns just isn’t as familiar to people in the rest of America as they are to consumers of rightwing media. That’s just a fact. As it was, the judge answered fairly quickly. Others can be thrown off their stride quite easily with culture war drubbings. Most Americans still aren’t totally keyed in to what’s happening with this stuff, no matter which “side” they might come down on if they were. Respecting which pronouns people want you to use, for example, can be perceived as no more than a question of manners, even to a polite conservative. Or someone like me who values clear communications might object to the use of the plural “they” for a singular subject regardless of how they judge transgender issues in themselves. Culture warriors don’t own our public forum. Several of them just think they do.
Your take is a valid one. But why did the judge not say, "I was talking about conversation, and that we should not apply legal standards of proof to conversation. The legal standards of proof should apply in legal proceedings, regardless of race, regardless of whether the matter is equity."
The judge was being disingenuous claiming that his directives on pronouns and honorific were suggestions. One does not risk irritating a judge deciding one's case by not following his directed suggestions, and i wish the senator had made that explicit.
It is Kasubhai's disingenuousness regarding his pronoun directives that makes me question his claim now that he meant different standards of proof apply only to conversation and not to legal proceedings.
You really expect us to believe he personally supports that bilge but it doesn’t in any way affect his judgement in a courtroom?? Right, and judge Marchon was utterly unbiased in the Trump circ..uh trial.
In the quoted writing about directing/suggesting the announcement of pronouns and honorifics he referred to "introducing your client." That is a legal proceeding and the power exerted by the judge means a lawyer and client had better go along - not really a suggestion, not when he says, "You should." Critical theory applied here - who has the power?
I had initially shared your view about the the discussion of proof, but the denial of the pronouns directive made me suspicious of the earlier statement. Who talks about requiring proof in conversation in the first place?
Was it an essay in a legal context, academic context, alumni magazine, or about personal conversations about touchy subjects like race and equity?
Is it a conversation about changing the law? So that the standards which he presently observes would no longer apply?
Context matters, and legal context would be concerning .
Air quotes aside, Maximillian Krah is a POS. Just because he says some good cultural stuff doesn’t mean he isn’t bad news. The SS interview - No need to go there unless there was something lurking underneath.
Maybe pride of his Teutonic heritage? That seems to have been banned in Germany for the last 80 years, but at a certain point a nation can't last having to continually apologize for their ancestors
Which Teutonic Heritage? The one that enabled ordinary men to slaughter 1500 Jews in the village of Josefov in one day? That Teutonic Heritage?
There’s a difference between “heritage” and what the SS and Wehrmacht did in Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine from 1941-1945. Why bring up the SS when he can talk about Bach and Beethoven?
Rod - keep reading this post to discover why, when I first saw, I did not buy The Benedict Option. (Of course I've now read it.)
<<<I’d love to know what you Evangelical or non-Evangelical Protestant readers have to say. What is magisterial Protestantism, anyway? On what grounds do you tell Pastor Bob and his congregation that they aren’t really Protestant?>>>
This piece seems rife with POVs that may interfere with things. My POV may help. First "magisterial Protestantism". That is the opposite of what Protestantism is! Protestantism is Sola Scriptura. No magisterial body ultimately defines what the Scripture says.
So, how do Protestants know truth. Yes, the Bible is open to interpretation. Yes, one source said there are 45,000 denomination (not sure that is right, but it gives an idea). Yet, the differences are not huge. You have movements generally considered outside Protestantism (e.g. Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses) but they do not come close what are - they exist - they plain readings of Scripture Not all is plain, but the basics are. "Outside" groups deny the other Protestant groups are even part of the kingdom of God, thus they are not Protestant. Even my Baptist cousin explicitly states the Nicene Creed plus Sola Scriptura is what makes a Protestant, not a Catholic/Orthodox, and not a heretic. In his mind, the early chuch was not "Roman Catholic", that took 2 or 3 hundred years, and they did have true beliefs without "adding anything" at first.
I was Baptist until age 12, then we started attending a church labeled "Church of God" that was actually Charismatic. From 18-25 I was Charismatic, then I converted to Catholicism, and was a Catholic Charismatic. I am not angry at Evangelicals like the Exvangelicals in this piece. Why did I leave? First, I visited a mass, heard the creed recited and realized Catholics did not believe terrible errors so why no join "the original", stop the division, and work from within if change was needed. Second, I'd been in Ireland that summer partly to "spread the good news of Jesus" but was challenged that "There are miracles at Lourdes and do you think it is the devil?" I didn't. Third, I also saw contradictions in Scripture - the accounts of what happened when Jesus first rose differ for instance, and was half way to losing my faith over things like this. I could lose Christian faith entirely or find the Magesterium to help with what to believe.
Differences in Protestant belief are not "essentials". They all agree with the Nicene creed (except about baptism "for the remission of sins" - disagreement there, though they all baptize). The Bible does lend itself that that much unity. I know, Rod, you are not comfortable with this. But why not attend a service or two of , say, Danube International Church just to learn, and relate to Evangelicals more. It is "non-denominational" and in belief, close to Baptist, with Charismatic accepted. Most Evangelical churches are either "Baptist - or not denominational but close to Baptist" or else "Charismatic". The differences are just how much enthusiasm is shown in worship and whether the people believe gifts of the Spirit ceased. The "denominational stuff" - like predestination (very few Evangelicals are Calvinist) or infant baptism (few do this, though of course Catholic Charismatics do) - well this "denominational" stuff is not essential to faith and practice - not necessary for salvation. Typically, differences trouble Evangelicals no more than the fact that Catholic and Orthodox have differences troubles liturgical Christians.
Is Pastor Bob the pope? Heck no. Billy Graham and Pat Robertson may has well have been the Popes for all practical purposes. You did not have to believe everything the taught, but virtually no one doubted anything Graham said - he said the basics - and most of Robertson (not tongues, not a separate Baptism in the Spirit) was believed by most. Pastors themselves were influenced by these two men. Non-charismatic Evangelicals has a few minor people, maybe James Dobson (Focus on the Family, or John MacArthur (Grace to You) - I'm not sure, but they were not as universally accepted as Graham (essentially all Evangelicals) and Robertson (essentially all Charismatics and most of what he said by most Evangelicals). Is it kind of dangerous that two men were so very listened to? Yes, but in the end they did not teach errors that were dangerous.
What about community? I did not buy "The Benedict Option" at first because I had been in three failed Christian communities. The doctrinal groundwork for community was something I already knew, and I could see it would be in the book when I picked it up and Borders and considered it. Protestants yearn for community, but it very often fails because people come into conflict, and there is not a church authority established strongly enough to settle the conflicts. Don't like the community? Go to a different congregation or even start a new denomination. A sad state. I'm still not sure community works well for Protestants, though I know now there are exceptions. I did not realize Rod, that you wrote from an Orthodox perspective when I first encountered you. So I was delayed until 2020's Live Not By Lies in reading you. - Glad I did.
With their absence of a Pope and the catechism and hierarchical structure emanating from Rome, I've often thought Orthodox churches were prettier versions of the protestant churches. I know this is naive and probably fighting words here on this substack. Feel free to have at me. But really how is one schism any different from any other schism?
I get that. Justified split/schism. But so was Luther's. I think someone made the observation that once you schism the first time you're destined to keep splitting into smaller and smaller factions. There's no limiting principle after the first split.
Well, I 'm not sure I was clear. I do not think Rome is the only original Christian church. The original Christian church is now it two parts. As to which split from which, and which is "the original" and which is "the split" - I think neither. They are the two halves of the original is my view. And I tried to make the case that the Orthodox are more faithful to original Christian doctrine that even the RCs.
If you know what original Christian doctrine is( was there any such thing).you’re a better man- woman than me Gunga Din. Not being mean but all Christians invariably say they are true to some form of “ originality “. Baptists think they existed before they even existed.Muslims claim they preexist Christianity and Judaism. I guess Mormons think everything was messed up until the Angel Moroni helped out.
I do think I used hedging language such as "I think" and "is my view". Yes, I realize that reading Acts, we have something that may have been like a Synagogue in the very first years, then reading Paul's letters we have meetings that included the Lord's Supper, multiple people giving prophecies, tongues, etc., plus teachings, and letters being read. Writings in the early church do show us something about the doctrines, and where they settled, which was my concern. Eventually they settled into the Nicene Creed. And it is a matter of faith that I accept the point where these doctrines settled were the beliefs of "the original church". (The churches also say where there are additions not always preached, for instance about Mary, the immaculate conception and assumption, if I am not mistaken, so no one claims that is "original".)
<<Baptists think they existed before they even existed. Muslims claim they preexist Christianity and Judaism.>>> I assume there were typos here - neither is true and I've never seen anyone say they were true.
Yes, John, please clarify the "Muslims claim they preexist Christianity." Do you mean because they trace their lineage to Abraham and his son Ishmael? I haven't heard this argument from Muslims, but I imagine they make it. This week is Eid al-Adha which celebrates Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Ishmael. I admire that Islam places such importance and prominence to remembering Abraham's faith. But I can, in my Catholic bias, also see that they have made this their penultimate holiday to emphasize their lineage through Ishmael--when for over a 1000 years before Muhammed the Jews commemorated Abraham's near sacrifice of Isaac.
OIC. Thank you for clarifying. It would be helpful to me to adopt this view -- two halves of the same origin. Especially since I appreciate all the Orthodox I get to interact with here. And I know many of your conversions to the Orthodox Church were very, very thoughtful. It will help me control my Catholic biases.
Ah...well thanks, but not I see I may not have spoken well, seeing as you are Catholic. I am unsure, but the Catholic church may indeed say the Orthodox were a split. But I do know they say the Orthodox are not heretical, and they acknowledge that they and the Orthodox have Apostolic Succession. Actually, perhaps the words Apostolic Succession are best used, rather than "the original".
Except that this really hasn't happened much with either the Orthodox or the Catholics. Sure, there are splinter groups, small breakoffs, etc., but by-and-large neither group has come close to anything like the fission-proneness of Protestantism.
I've heard different versions of this before. A couple of years ago, I was at a birthday party where I started talking to a man who is in the leadership at the Lutheran school my kids go to. When I said I was a convert to Orthodox Christianity, he made a comment kind of along the lines that I ended up there because I must not have wanted to make the full jump to becoming a Catholic. It wasn't mean spirited, and I responded with "well, not really" because... Yeah, it was a birthday party for his granddaughter turning six. *L*
I've been around a lot of Catholics, and the idea that a very formal, top-down hierarchy is necessary to keep things in line is pretty common. It certainly does have its advantages, but it does have its disadvantages as well, including the fact that it's much easier to introduce things from above because there's very little participation that's going from the bottom up. Our bishops are important, but in some sense less important than a Catholic bishop of the same rank. I knew a priest who got assigned an OCA parish with a lot of "old-school" Russians. It didn't matter that the church was officially on the New Calendar, and things *in church* were celebrated that way; the people were still on the old in their hearts, and when it came to the priest's name's day, for instance, anyone who did give him a present gave it to him 13(ish) days later. The priest understood that his job was not to fight the parishioners on this, and somehow they made this work.
Like Linda said, I think there's a lot to there being a split between the Catholic and Orthodox in the beginning more than there being a splintering.
I recently joined a church that splintered (how very Protestant) from a larger body in the hopes of escaping managerial Christianity https://www.seekingthehiddenthing.com/p/managerial-christianity . I very much wanted to throw myself into the new church with my time (aging bachelor, wah-wah) but after asking the pastor in person and sending a few emails I got “I’ll let you know…” Meanwhile the life of the church gets busy without me. After making a lot of attempts in the last five years I’m very much giving up the church and doing my best to keep the faith.
I'm grieved to hear about your church. All churches have cliques for the same reason popular music groups break up frequently. The members realize they have a great deal in common with other musicians, but as for the ones they work with? Not so much. But your entire church is a clique.
Many years ago, I was a brief attendee of a church fat with cliques. One day, I heard a woman behind me say, "I think it will take a year for me to figure out how to fit in here." Damn it!
I don't know where you are, but there are almost certain to be good churches reasonably nearby. Denominations have online church finders. Contacting a seminary which runs along your general line of convictions can also be a good move.
Keen Christians WANT others to find churches.
Please don't give up. In candor, I need to tell you that given the rot within so many groups, you may find yourself solitary for awhile. If so, your faith can still be strengthened. You have the Bible, Sermon Audio, a library of sound books about theology and every aspect of the Christian life. There are wonderful channels on YouTube. ( Can anything good come out of YouTube? )
Because of medical "issues" I've spent far more of my life in not going to church than the opposite. I grew nonetheless. I had The Holy Spirit. You do, as well.
I think it is important to attend services. I see the difference in my life after returning to them.
I do not think your American church is at all likely to be friendly, but attend anyway. The USA is just not that way, especially if you are unmarried. Could you volunteer with a charity? This will get you talking to people and doing good work.
Not sure if I was clear, but "The Benedict Option" only helped. I do think it is more difficult for Protestants to form community because of the priesthood of believers (every believer their own priest) and such, but community is a good thing, and I am glad Rod helped with information for those who would try. And of course, liturgical Christians have a long history of monastic communities and some of lay communities. Rod's encouragement and innovation was very timely. I learned that after reading the book I originally did not read because "community" had not worked in some of my former attempts.
"Yes, the Bible is open to interpretation. Yes, one source said there are 45,000 denomination (not sure that is right, but it gives an idea). Yet, the differences are not huge. You have movements generally considered outside Protestantism (e.g. Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses) but they do not come close what are - they exist - they plain readings of Scripture Not all is plain, but the basics are."
I get the exclusion of Mormonism, as they have a later revelation, and additional scriptures, so they're clearly a new religion, analogous to Islam.
I don't get the exclusion of Jehovah's Witnesses, though. They are biblical fundamentalists who reject the Trinity, and have eccentric views about eschatology. I don't think the Trinity can be obtained by "plain readings of Scripture"; it took hundreds of years of debate. There are other fundamentalist groups that I would call Protestant that reject the Trinity, such as the Armstrongists and the Iglesia ni Kristo. This is really one of my central objections to Protestantism (the other is belief in the physical presence of Christ in the Eucharist).
It seems to me that the Catholic Church is a pillar, and the Protestant groups revolve around it, hesitant to deviate too far, by rejecting Nicaea, for example. If the Catholic Church didn't exist, they would all spin off in different directions.
In any case, even among Nicene Protestants, there seem to me to be some pretty wacky doctrines. Calvinism is pretty weird, as is Dispensationalism. I struggle to imagine what it must be like to be Protestant. No doubt there's some group I could join (maybe some conservative Methodist sect?), but there'd be a lot of boxes to tick. They'd have to be non-Calvinist. They'd have to be conservative, taking the Bible seriously, and rejecting the Sexual Revolution. They'd have to not be right-wing nutcases with the US flag next to the pulpit, and preaching the need for global rule by the USA. I imagine thinking I'd found a suitable church, and then finding they believe that modern Israel is God's Chosen Nation, and the Palestinians are Amalekites, who have to be exterminated, every man, woman and child, and all the little girls raped.
Well, for Jehovah's Witnesses Jesus is an agent of Jehovah, and the first creation of God. Jesus occupies a position as the archangel of archangels; powerful, but not fully divine. I would say that is different from a "plain, basic" of Scripture that Nicene Christians would see.
For Amstrongists, i.e., British Israelism, I grew up with my grandmother, a staunch Zionist, warning me about that.Its racism, basically. I just finished this interesting video half an hour ago, about why that church (Worldwide Church of God) and its descendants are cults with impossible beliefs:
I don't mean any cruelty to JWs or Armstrongists, I am just saying they do not follow things plainly stated in the Bible, things that are in the Nicene Creed.
I was not clear it seemed like you said you objected to Protestantism because of the Trinity and the Real Presence?
Yes, you would have a hard time in any Protestant church that is conservative if you side with the Palestinians. Not all call Israel "still God's chosen people" but all believe in Zionism, defined as "the Jews were promised a homeland by God and have a right to a homeland". None think the Jews need "take away" any additional territory, but most understand, as horrible as it is, and though many human shields will die, that Hamas must be defeated. I would encourage you to read literature from the other side regarding the word "Amelekite" as presently used, and otherwise, I would not want to bother you on the subject. No Zionist believes all Palestinians have to be exterminated. I know the lie about that word that says they do, but it is not true. Palestinians live very happily in Israel (Israel proper) and are about 10 percent of the population with full rights. But I can't blame you for believing the BBC if that is what is happening - they are often still good - but they can be out of balance and are on this one.
"I was not clear it seemed like you said you objected to Protestantism because of the Trinity and the Real Presence?"
My point is that the Trinity is not biblical, or at least not in the sense that one can pull a passage out of the Bible to point to. It was the result of centuries of debate, leading to Nicaea. If one accepts Sola Scriptura, and rejects most philosophical reflection, etc., I don't see how to rule out non-Trinitarian doctrines. There may be other objections to the JWs besides the Trinity (I don't know much about them), but that's what I'm talking about now.
My central objections to Protestantism are:
1. I believe in the real, physical presence in the Eucharist.
2. The logical implications of Sola Scriptura include not necessarily believing in the Trinity or accepting the Nicene Creed. As I say, I don't see how to rule out the JWs.
3. I believe that the Church has to be a real institution with continuity from the Apostles: "the gates of hell shall never close upon it". To be Protestant is to make the Church a sort of club, but Christ said "upon this rock I will build my church", not "upon this rock I will write my scripture".
4. This is less important, but I am uncomfortable with the politics that goes together with conservative Protestantism: US/Western imperialism, Zionism, militarism, and extreme right-wing economics. Conservative Catholics are often left or centrist politically, but that doesn't seem to be the case often with Protestants. There are probably exceptions, such as Methodists, Peace churches, and some black churches?
I especially like point number 3. I also very much like the way you dialogue even though you know I'm a Zionist and right wing. Thanks.
I did not mean JWs are not "Christian". I don't have a real "magical knowledge" of what pleases God. I have a strong heart-and-spirit belief, because I can feel it, of the Real Presence and the power of sacraments. Thus I tend to assume those churches have more truth, but I don't assume they are perfect.
As for the Trinity - it is almost like a mathematical proof. If A = B and B = C then A = C. It never says "three are one". Christ says "the Father and I are one". John 1: 1 establishing Jesus is God. Make man in "our" image. Hear O Israel the Lord our god is One. (Ehrad is the Hebrew word, a word for one that can have distinctions within it). "Now the Lord is the Spirit", "Baptize in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit".
So why not just spell out "three are one" in Scripture? I don't know. The Holy Spirit was only recently revealed, even after the Son was revealed. But I think Scripture says they are all God and God is one. The word Nicean Christianity uses for this is "Trinity" but it is not a sacred word. The teaching that God is one and is three distinct persons however, that is Scripture.
I support right-wing economics because they work and left-wing economics do not. Of course I support safety nets for those unable to help themselves. I know very few on the right who do not support that...probably less than one percent of those who way they are right wing, I'd guess. (Though I admit the right is sensitive about unsustainable levels of support such as 12 million economic immigrants, but that position is best in the long run.)
"As for the Trinity - it is almost like a mathematical proof. "
The objection to that is that so many people - people who consider themselves to be Bible-believing Christians - reject it, such as the JWs, Iglesia ni Kristo, etc., and historically the Arians.
Mathematical proofs generally are accepted by virtually everyone.
I see it more like a scientific proof, although the analogy is not exact. It is possible to argue for a flat earth. In a field in which one is not oneself expert, one accepts the authority of the consensus of experts. I frame the Council of Nicaea as something like that, although of course I would argue that the Holy Spirit was in on it too. If one insists on Sola Scriptura, one has to go back and reinvent the wheel.
OK, I guess what I am saying is that if the groups took Scripture as stated ("The Father and I are one", etc.) then used logic, they would have One god - Three persons. Those who disagree may try to explain away those Scriptures in special ways.
Arianism is extinct as I understand it and was much more common before the canon of Scripture. In it, Christ is the Logos and did create the world, but it not eternal - the Father created him.
I am not condemning other groups who seek to follow Christ. And I am not saying much of Scripture is not wide open to interpretation - it is. That is a big reason I am not Sola Scriptura. But I do think "One God, three persons" is plain. One of the basics, on par with "God created the universe".
I haven’t yet read Levine’s essay about China and the auto destruction of the West, but it occurs to me that many of the negative trends identified by him are equally prevalent in East Asia ( e.g., collapsing birth rates, social atomization on steroids, decline in the role of the family, loss of faith in institutions, … ). Is the East really rising, or is the entire world sinking?
Yes, this. China's demographics make ours look positively healthy. And while there are certainly devout Christians, Muslims, Buddhists in China, it is an utterly secular nation.
Rod, and others here, seem unable to perceive that the crisis of our times is a truly global crisis, albeit taking slightly different form in different parts of the globe.
Good points, Laurence. The entire world may be sinking, but we are sinking more quickly than the East, if only because they are still proud of their history, values, traditions, and less likely to allow foreign influence in their affairs. In other words, they are doing a better job maintaining the core of what and who they are. They still believe in themselves and are not as divided among themselves.
Replacement rate is a good counter argument in that a culture that truly believed in itself would not be afraid to propagate itself. Having a child is a vote for the future. That said, my sense is that the West has more oikophobia than the East.
We are not sinking faster, at all. To the contrary, we’re going through very mild challenges in comparison to the rest of the developed world. The USA (as well as Canada and Mexico) is going to be the only real game in town for the foreseeable future.
Yes it's a world issue and one without any obvious solution. As countries get richer, regardless of culture or civilization or political system, birth rates crash, marriage rates drop, and atomization increases. It's a feature of being a rich (relative to the world) society. China is not yet a rich country, in toto, but its coastal cities and Beijing largely are up to the international standards of other East Asian rich countries.
As The Economist pointed out in a recent leader (it was sometime in the past month or so), policy seems to have only very small impacts on birth rates. That is, making it easier on couples who have kids makes good sense from a fairness point of view, but there isn't strong evidence that it makes people more likely to have kids (Euro countries with fairly lavish child-related care schemes and benefits compared to other places feature low birth rates like everyone else in most cases). From their point of view, the challenge isn't how to get people to have more kids, or marry, etc., but rather to devise policies to deal with low population growth demographics, which will require a rejiiggering of the socio-economic contract.
I wonder if the fetishization of economic growth hasn't clouded how we view low birth rates. Why can't we be happy with low population and economic growth? Does the world really fall apart if you have 0 growth? Japan hasn't grown in a decade. And sure they aren't minting stock-market millionaires, but their life expectancy is improving. Their culture, from my outsider's perspective, seems strong and vibrant.
It's not just zero growth. It's actual population decline. S. Korea is probably the worst case, at approximately zero-point-eight children per woman. What this means in their case is that each generation will be less than half the size of the previous one. For example, imagine a current population of 1 million. Half of them (500K) will be women. 500K * 0.8 = 400K. Half of that 400K will be women, thus 200K * 0.8 = 160K. So in 2 generations they will have gone from 1 million to 160,000. Now SK has more than 1 million people, but this example should suffice to show the speed and scale of the decline. Of course, people live for more than one generation, so the decline will be spread out over several generations.
Thanks for doing the math. I see that it's a big change and disruptive. But I don't fully buy that this change will be bad. Also, I think the obsession with economic growth leads countries to adopt policies (like mass immigration and offshoring) that undermine the population for the sake of more and more dollars. What is wrong with pursuing equilibrium or even reduction in size? Reduction in output? I see that it leads to less dollars. But does it really lead to less human fulfillment? Less time with the family you do have, for example? Less time to pursue non-economic interests?
I certainly agree with you about the bad policies that are adopted in pursuit of growth and that stable or even slowly declining populations wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing.
Unforeseen consequences include invasion and land/resource grabs by larger forces and the collapse of public services like healthcare and social security-like payouts because there won’t be enough working to pay forward the benefits. Old and infirm with no choice but be at the mercy of minimum wage caretakers who may or may not be immigrants with no cultural connection. That said I support such contraction if it means immigration is stopped altogether.
In theory, yes, but the problem is the rejiggering.
One thing that happens, for example, is that the entire retirement system ceases to work. Everywhere, it's based on the young workers paying into the system to support the retired ones, and that there will always be enough younger workers to do the same down the line. Once that ceases to be the case, there are shortfalls, and you can't make up for them by means of taxes (again, because of lower population to tax, less output etc), so you need to cut benefits for people who worked their whole lives and expected/planned to have the benefits. Naturally they don't like that, and they vote. In France, to take a recent example, Macron tried to raise the retirement age by a couple of years to plug a budget deficit and people were marching in the streets and burning stuff for weeks.
A further problem relates to people's economic expectations overall. That is, do people expect to have a good deal of economic well-being (aka, material purchasing power), or are they content with a more basic, simple lifestyle focused on things other than material goods? I think we can argue in a combox that the latter is better than the former, but getting most people to agree that their material living standards should decline to accommodate slow or low growth is very challenging, and these people vote, too.
This is why it's destabiliizing. When people feel the rug being pulled out (and demographic shrinking makes that happen, either way), they tend to get angry and politically reactive in ways that can be hard to predict.
I actually think S. Korea is a special case. Their culture combines the worst of various worlds. They have hellish working conditions. It's an extremely conservative culture (and Confucian, which is much more anti-female than Christianity). I knocked around with a lot of Koreans in Japan at one time, and their attitudes are eye-opening. On the other hand, it's prosperous enough for women not to be forced into marriage. Lesbian separatism is actually a real thing there, with urban neighbourhoods from which men are excluded, whereas it's pretty much a joke in the West.
Yikes! Good thing that you mention this now, since I'm thinking of trying a journey to Korea at some point. I wouldn't want to wander into a forbidden zone. How long have those existed?
I don't know much about them. I read an article a while ago, and I've heard people comment on them. I do know that Korean feminism is really extreme. Mind you, in my experience, Koreans seem extremist about whatever they do.
My vote is for "the entire world sinking." The West and particularly the United States has driven innovation and material progress globally. How could our decline not affect the whole world.
Regarding disagreement – when I met Rod I said something like “I post disagreements – sometimes I think you won’t like that”. He said that was not the case at all – that he welcomed disagreement. Not insult of course. Rod does not take mere disagreement as someone trying to “show him wrong”. It is a discussion among people looking for truth.
OK- my disagreement today - Perhaps there is a reason Zimmerman’s classic is “forgotten”. We have to cope with the fact that the Roman Empire adopted Christianity in the early 300s, and fell sometime around the mid-400s. Tom Holland speaks of the very, very positive changes Christianity brings. In pre-Christian families, the man had rights to rape the servants, for example. Women had less of a position of respect when it came to sex. Christ commanded “love your wives as Christ loved the church”. Christianity does emphasize the family. I really do not see how we can look to “the decline of the family” nor the “decline of sexual morals” to something worse than they had been prior to Christianity as a main cause of the fall. - - This unless Christianity tried to make things better but they were already so bad nothing could save Rome.
Rod’s post stated – “bad morals were not the cause – it is complex”, then “society has to depend on certain forms”. OK, both true – but then the discussion of Zimmerman seems to say degeneration of the family was a major cause. I do not believe it degenerated in the final century of Rome. I believe it was strengthened.
There may be better historians here than I, for I am no historian, who can set me straight on this. But it seems to me things such as totalitarianism, e.g. the end of a Republic, over-expansion, corruption, division and Barbarian tribes would have been enough in themselves. I do not know the other causes, but I am uncertain sexual morals got worse at the end of the empire.
But basic agreement: decline is sexual morals is a major reason for the decline of the West.
Thanks for this. I've made this point too in the past. Gibbon went to the other extreme, blaming the fall of Rome on Christianity which (he claimed) taught men to care only about the things of the next world (in which Gibbon did not believe) and ignore this-worldly necessities. Yet it does not appear late Rome neglected its worldly business, though the western empire was afflicted with bad leadership. But there's no evidence that late Rome was especially degenerate morally beyond the sort of baseline degeneracy one can find everywhere in every time. In some ways Rome may have gotten better.
Re: decline is sexual morals is a major reason for the decline of the West.
I have to disagree (surprising I know) because we have been through eras of great libertinism before. The Renaissance. The 18th century. These things appear to come in cycles. And the seeds of a new Puritanism (or maybe Victorianism) have already been sown, though they be slow to sprout and take root. The #MeToo thing is an example.
Gibbon certainly hated Christianity, and does make the charge you detail. But he wouldn't be a great historian (and such he is) if he posited a monocausal "explanation" for something like the fall of the Roman Empire, which "will always be remembered and is still felt by the nations of the earth." The interstitial chapters on weakness of a monarchy pretending to be something else, and especially the first three high altitude chapters posit many other reasons for what happened. And he goes out of his way to be fair to those Christians he finds admirable in a human way ("the intrepid Ambrose").
"we have been through eras of great libertinism before. The Renaissance. The 18th century"
True, but mostly confined to the elite folk who could (up to a point) "afford" that sort of degeneracy. I'm not sure that we're in the same state, since degeneracy seems to run all the way up and down the social; scale. We're in a different ball game now, I fear - and I think our technological and technocratic "advances," while they may prop up the decaying hulk longer than we may hope (or fear), will fail in the end - or else succeed in producing (I know the analogy is remote) a world of eloi and morlocks.
Often unrecorded but among the lowest orders there was a great deal of dysfunction too. The "Gin Lane" stuff in Britain is an example.
And these days most of us are those "elite" `given our standard of living. Though one can find plenty of people who are not bed hopping, and didn't even do that much of it in their "wild oats" days. Moralists (yes, that includes Rod too) often tar with overly broad brushes
Contraception, IVF and transgender surgery for the masses have rendered Christian moral teachings irrelevant to most people. Want sex - take a pill - use a condom. Can’t have children? Oh yes you can. Unhappy as a man - be a woman. Why not?Pregnant
- have an abortion. It will be just fine.We want what we want and we will have it even if we go extinct, which is likely.
Well it depends on how rare hen’s teeth are. As far as transgender surgery goes- that I had to look up- 5000 to 20000 per year. If that’s hens teeth rare - ok.Eunuchs- look they were slaves! Not gender disphoric teenagers.The Ottomans seized the village- and guess what.But you know what, that wasn’t my point. My point was , individuals see the ability to be ultimate sovereigns of their desires. That could be considered a wonderful thing. So if you have no essence, and your existence is a matter of will , you can be what you want to be, biology , who cares! Ok - long term that kind of of fantasy strikes me as not conducive to biological or social reproduction. Could I be wrong, of course. Over time, I’ve been wrong about all kinds of things.
<<<we have been through eras of great libertinism before. The Renaissance. The 18th century.>>>
Nothing like today! C'mon - Fatherless, undisciplined children happily shoplift just under $1000 dollars worth of goods, car jack almost at will, etc. Out of wedlock birth are a near-majority. There was never a society in which a woman was expected to sleep around before marriage, probably something wrong if she didn't. There was never a society which male and female - part of the idealogy of family - were so confused that substantial numbers of people were convinced they were born as the wrong gender. Birth control, and a cheering media telling us what our morals should be, has made promiscuity common. It was around before, but as common as now? I think not.
Crime rates in the 18th and 19th centuries were astronomically high compared to today. We have stats on alcohol sales and on prostitution (generally legal back then) from the early years of the American republic. Since most alcohol was consumed by men, we have to conclude that lots and lots of guys were stumbling about drink as skunks by the end of each day. There's a reason Temperance took off when it did. As far as prostitution goes even in staid cities like Boston, there were so many ladies of the evening that a large fraction of men must have regularly patronized them.
The tyranny of Now, which naysayers like you always seem to forget, is that due to technology and instant worldwide communication the rot is everywhere, even extending to most people's pockets. This is truly a new thing under the sun.
No, our technology merely makes us aware that such things are happening in parts distant. Back in Ye Olden Days there was plenty of "naughty nookie". Any town of any size at all had its "naughty lady on Shady Lane", larger towns might have a street walker or two, and maybe an actual "sporting house". Boozing was at absolutely epidemic levels. The use of narcotic drugs in so-called patent medicines ("Good for what ails ye") created scads of drug addicts. Cohabiting without benefit of clergy was common enough that many jurisdictions had laws (common law marriage) which imputed married status to such people-- among the Founding Fathers Ben Franklin was not married to his main squeeze as well as having at least one bastard son, and Gouvenour Morris was the kind of guy who, if he came to visit, you would advise the womenfolk to keep to their rooms. Need we even get into "yellow babies" and slave concubinage (as Margaret Mitchell euphemistically called it in GWTW)?
"No, our technology merely makes us aware that such things are happening in parts distant."
So technology plays no part in their spread? Complete and utter nonsense. Pornography was in no sense ubiquitous until it had the technological ability to become so. People in the past took drugs but drugs weren't "everywhere" in anything like the same manner they are today. Prostitution has always been around but it was confined to certain areas, except if you had money. Now it's almost as easily accessible as porn is.
You sound like the guy I once argued with on another website who put forth the idea that the porn problem is no greater now than it was in the past because after all, soldiers in WWI had dirty playing cards.
I like this point that the Roman Empire fell even though Christianity was radically improving family morals. Overturning them, in fact. I think a culture's myths need to be protected and fought for. Christ explicitly defeated the myths or gods of Rome. Rome had to fall. The woke left is explicitly trying to overturn and destroy/defeat the myths of the U.S. and the West in general. They must be defeated or the U.S. and the West will fall.
It is actually true that there was no clear break or moment when Rome ceased to be the Western empire and became early medieval Europe. Feudalism was, for all intents and purposes, the de facto form of administration in late Rome. As to the inflection point when Rome ceased to be a political entity, the Western empire was already dying in the 300s. The pivot to Byzantium wasn’t a product of convenience, but because the West was no longer governable in any meaningful sense. Much of this had to do with economic reasons - the economy had suffered because of massive deficit spending, and naive attempts to rein it in - but also because of gross political corruption and mismanagement.
I would suggest that the primary reason Rome ceased to exist, however, is very stark and little talked about because of the implications for our own modern state - simply put, people in Rome stopped feeling like there was any reason to try to keep propping the whole rotten mess up. Universal citizenship implemented by Caracalla meant that a major incentive to support and protect Rome was gone. The economy had become a poorly implemented command economy. General servitude due, being the end result of cruel tax policies, meant the end of any social or economic mobility (not to be reversed for a thousand years). Self-serving leadership at all levels meant that public officials long since had ceased to work to govern, but instead either milked the system or openly fought against each other or the state. Abandoning policies for settlement of barbarians meant that the barbarians were free to form their own states within Rome (that eventually became the nascent medieval kingdoms), and so on. Christianity, in spite of what Gibbon thought, had nothing to do with the fall of Rome. It had everything to do with giving up what had made Rome strong in the first place. We are on the same road, except that Christianity was something that made us strong, and we are giving it, and all the things that it brought with it, it it is only one thing of many.
The gradual cooling of the climate cut into agricultural yields, and serious epidemics affected population numbers. Both of these realities shrank the tax base yet did not shrink the Empire's obligations. Deficit spending did not really exist back then- money-lending was primitive. The response of the regime was to debase the coinage, leading to ruinous inflation until Diocletian and his successors replaced silver with gold as the standard (the Byzantine solidus was THE monetary standard for centuries well into the Middle Ages, even in the Islamic lands). The late empire did not have either the men or the money to maintain itself-- and that got a lot worse in the 500s.
You are correct that deficit spending, in a strict sense, did not exist. It is a convenient shorthand to sum of what was the ultimate effect of the spending and monetary policies of the time. In other words, the Western Empire could not afford to maintain itself. One other point is that trade had steadily shifted east, so the economic base of the west was further eroded. One last thing of note was that the infighting of the early 5th century meant that the attempts to reestablish control over various parts of the empire failed due to petty attempts to seize internal power. The 3rd century doomed Rome, but it took a while for it to finally get to the logical end.
Speaking of the climate I have abone to pick with you. Some of your Florida weather got out of the yard and is making itself a nusiance up here in ohio, would you please come up here and get it! :P It's predicted to be in almost in triple didgets on Saturday! (Off topic, but I was looking for an in)
Not sure where you are in FL, but I heard the rainy season has begun down there.
In news of the weird there was a story not that long ago about a guy who was mourning the loss of his "emotional support alligator" whom some teenage pranksters apparently kidnapped and lost. I think I'll stick with housecats.
I'm sure they would. I spent my childhood from 2 to 11 in middle Georgia and grew up 2 miles from the Ocmulgee River. I was pretty much a free range kid and hadn't ranged out that far yet (it would have happened, we had nothing but fields and forest for quite some distance behind the house) but was under strict orders not to go to the river because of the aligators.
I think I saw that story. I felt really bad for the guy.
Well, that's the Pirenne thesis, right? That the structure of the empire was in place until Islam showed up. But the research unser Wirt references says that the traditional view--that there was rapid collapse following the barbarian invasions--is much closer to the truth.
It seems that it would be more accurate to say that Rome’s weakness by the point of mass barbarian incursion made it impossible to maintain any sort of political integrity at that point.
The other thing people forget is that Rome had dealt with barbarians since its existence, and had successfully assimilated many peoples. I guess by the time of the late western empire, Rome was unable to assimilate due to various factors that worked against effective governance, and also that the barbarians themselves no longer saw much advantage to assimilating.
The male heirs of Theodosios were doofuses and they squandered the order their capable father had left them. In the East capable new emperors soon arose, but in the West there was a long succession of short-lived incompetents.
Not so much the barbarian invasions (other than in Britain) as the demographic collapse of the 6th century due to the one-two punch of famine and plague. And in Italy the severity of Justinian's attempted reconquest.
The Pirenne Thesis, taken as referring primarily to the persistence of patterns of trade, commerce and "wandering about," albeit on a much reduced scale after ca. 480 - a date chosen arbitrarily as the date of the murder of Julius Nepos - and then worsened by the "Justinianic Plague" of the 540s - is not incompatible with a view stressing the effects of the decay of civilizational infrastructure throughout the Latin West.
Your list of Rome's problems is large and I agree. I would add that the violent transfer of emperors in the 200s weakened the Roman system. 36 emperors and 33 who died violently.
Whether this is true or not, I can't say but it's interesting. The other day, I was speaking to a retired police officer whose son is a police officer in the Kensington section of Philadelphia. For those of you who don't know, Kensington is where the open-air drug market is with addicts shooting up on the sidewalks and frozen like zombies in fentanyl-induced trances. There are numerous videos on Youtube showing scenes there that resemble the apocalypse. The retired police officer's son told his father that the Chinese were buying up lots of properties in Kensington where rowhomes are selling for $20,000. I asked him if the Chinese were doing anything with the properties to which he replied that they were just sitting on them. Imagine that? Our competitor buying the worst properties (as of today) in the region. Seems like they are playing the long game.
It has long been my pet theory, that Chinese Maoism is the true force behind the insanity of the far left in the West. There are simply too many parallels with Maoism 1.0 to ignore, especially the way it first infects educational institutions by appealing to "social justice" and fomenting revolution through radical change, denunciations, public shaming and even political violence (antifa, BLM, etc...).
That is indeed a threat and it wouldn't surprise me if China were behind it all, in order to weaken and eventually destroy the West.
On the other hand, China and other East Asian countries are hardly better. Most urban areas in East Asia have fertility rates that are a quarter of replacement levels (It's 0.5 in Seoul, instead of 2,1, which is the minimum required for a stable population).
I lived in Singapore in the 2000s and fertility rates there have been below replacement for decades now. No amount of ideology, social policy or incentives is going to turn that around. Singapore tried in the 80s, but it made little difference. Hungary has also tried in the past decade or so, to turn things around demographically, but despite the astronomical cost, it hardly made a difference to birth rates.
Simply put, urbanites don't need or want children, as they are little more than expensive and noisy pieces of furniture. Much easier to just have a pet to channel your fatherly / motherly feelings into. In contrast rural dwellers need a lot of children as it is free labour and they have plenty of space anyway. Social relations, especially in terms of relations between men and women, are in the toilet. This is again much further gone in East Asia, where young people have stopped dating and having sex altogether, not recently, but a couple of decades ago. The West is catching up, but it's not quite there yet.
As for LGBTQ+ acceptance, it is not widely known that other parts of the world have traditionally been far more accepting, than the West. In the Islamic world, homosexual relationships between men were extremely widespread, even the norm until about WW2 and the subsequent Islamisation wave, which in itself was caused by universal literacy. In other words, people started reading the Quran and taking its desert society teachings seriously, whereas previously only Imams could read and selectively interpret scripture.
Thailand has had LGBT acceptance for thousands of years and transgenderism has been widespread there for centuries. They even have a third gender in the Thai language, which is used by trans people and this isn't a new invention, has been around for many centuries, maybe even longer. If you think LGBT folk are numerous, you haven't been to Thailand, where it is common for young people to be LGBT in some form until later in life, when they decide to get married. Even China and India, both of which claim that LGBT is a western invention, have had widespread practices of this sort going back to ancient history. In actual fact, it was Christians who came in to many Asian countries and outlawed homosexuality through sodomy laws, a British legal term that has its roots in the Bible.
Singapore and India have only recently gotten rid of their colonial-era sodomy laws, which legalised homosexuality after centuries of prohibition.
Very astute. Some years ago I read a novel set in India called Narcopolis. It deals explicitly with the tradition of eunuch prostitution and opium use. This was traditional stuff not Western imported. One might also ponder Mishima( if you haven’t seen The Black Lizard - it’s a weird treat). Back in the 19th century Europeans used to go on what amounted to sex tours in North Africa. This isn’t obscure. Read up on Flaubert. What were Paul Bowles and William Burroughs doing in Tangier? Take a look at Passolonis film of the Arabian Nights partly filmed in Yemen. So while Rock and Roll might be a Western import, Sex and Drugs and transgenderism aren’t. You nailed something about the Islamic countries . If you read Mahfouz Cairo novels and the Iranian Blind Owl which are set in the early 20th century you get a clear picture of how those societies have changed. They are far more punctilious in their observance of Islamic law than they were.Westerners seem to have forgotten that the “ Orient” was once the realm of the senses , at least in their fantasies.
Foucault took those North African sex tours to a whole 'nother level. And the starry-eyed grad students regurgitating theories of power & language couldn't care less.
Yes anyone who is familiar with Foucault knows about that and some have suggested that this is a bit problematic. Overall it’s remarkable how much of a pass he gets . I saw him speak once and found it interesting. Foucault can be of some interest when you can figure out what he’s talking about. But he was definitely an operator and more than a bit of a conman.
When you saw Foucault (that's very cool) did he obfuscate? Was he clear in any way in his speaking? I've often wondered how such a dense and miserable writer could be so influential.
It was 1979 at NYU - Richard Senett was the host. I honestly can’t remember whether a translator was used.Foucault had a great look . The bald head, the glasses. I think he might already have had AIDS. What did he talk about. I don’t remember. Foucault can be interesting, particularly when he’s at his most Nietzschean. Forget the Marxist stuff. Looking at the sociology of life ( sorry for that - but I can’t think of a better way to say it)in terms of power is useful. Of course, it’s limiting and misleading. No life and truth aren’t mere power dynamics
There was disapproval of homosexuality in China before Christians came - and after all significant numbers never converted. I am not sure but what this disapproval was the type of thought said to be typical of Greeks and many ancients - the receiving male (if adult) was doing something "bad", chiefly because it was effeminate and the female role. However, the penetrator was more or less being natural, though neglecting his duty to procreate if that was all he did. Lesbianism was more not as seriously objected to, I think. At any rate, I'm not widely read on these things, but this is my current understanding.
We know the English officially frowned on it for years, but in reality most thought it something schoolboys got over, a developmental delay that would or should right itself.
Even in old Russia there were no laws against homosexuality until Peter the Great banned it in the army and among the clergy(!) It took Stalin to make lesbanism illegal.
Yes. The commissioners were shocked shocked to find it, but find it they did. I don't know whether it was the epidemic they said it was, but it was another charge in the docket.
It was a widespread Henrician propaganda meme that the monasteries were dens of idleness and buggery, but I can't think, offhand, of any monks (or even abbots) prosecuted for it in the 1530s. Most of those who were executed - abbots and monks, I mean - were charged either with speaking (usually in private) against the King's "Supreme Headship" of the Church of England (which constituted treason according to the 1534 parliamentary legislation acknowledging - not "conferring" - the king's new title) or with felonious theft (trying to keep a treasured item, say a chalice, or a book from the monastic library, from the commissioners sent to inventory a monastery's possessions). If they did "find it," they made surprisingly little legal use of what they found.
Cities have always been demographic sinks, with death rates in excess of birth rates, sustained mainly by in-migration of rural people. That's not an option for a city-state like Singapore.
And that is my point. Highly developed East Asian countries are over 90 percent urban, hence their populations are projected to disappear within a few generations, given that each generation will be a quarter of the size of the previous one. It will probably take less than a century for East Asians to disappear into the dustbin of History. Most Western countries are on the same path as well.
Well, no. It's not legitimate to extend any trend of today indefinitely out into the future. *Stuff* happens after all, and sometimes complex trends end up negating themselves.
Not Demography. Demography is destiny, as they say and these trends are now irreversible, baked into the cake. In the opposite direction, sure, high birth rates can come down and usually do over time. However, there has not been a single recorded instance of a society reversing a collapsing birth rate. In the case of China, the one-child policy and gender-selective abortions have made the current population collapse inevitable, there just aren't enough young people, particularly women left, who can reverse the decline, even if they started having more children. But there's no sign of that. China may not have more than a few years left as a major economic power, it is already undergoing major distress as the unsustainable chickens come home to roost.
And history is littered with temporary demographic trends-- in fact there's no other kind.
And yes, there certainly are examples of falling birth rates reversing and rising again. In 15th century Britain for example. Or western Europe during the 17th century. Or for that matter, given that we reference it here, the late Roman Empire too-- it's not like Mediterranean Europe was stuck with permanently low birth rates.
Re: there just aren't enough young people, particularly women left, who can reverse the decline,
Um, no. Populations everywhere were once a minor fraction of what they are today. Yet there were enough young and fertile people to reverse any all demographic disasters, the only exceptions being instances where populations were completely annihilated (including by forcible merger into other conquering populations). Hence the disappearance of the Tasmanians, the Taino, and the Beothuk.
The European examples you gave were after major plagues, if I'm not mistaken and after the population had already collapsed. Sure, eventually, birth rates will recover, post-collapse, but from a much lower level and the population often doesn't fully recover for decades or centuries.
I actually looked for cases online, where a birth rate collapse has been successfully reversed and the examples usually cited are all sus.
France and Sweden have higher birthrates due to mass Islamic immigration. Hungary's birthrate rise as miniscule and Russia's is simply bad reporting, it probably never happened.
Demography is not destiny. That's a conceit of the left, for certain, and Ruy Teixeira in particular. If it were destiny, Florida would be a solid blue state today, Hillary would have won in a landslide, and Japan would be irrelevant.
Another advantage the Chinese have is that it is a 94% Han Chinese nation and the minorities like the Tibetans and Uighurs are marginalized. America was 85% white in 1960 and a much more confident nation. America is now about 65% white and very disunited. Adding to that is the rapid decline of Christianity in America leading to America's moral collapse. America does have advantages, however. America doesn't have the stultifying conformity of the Chinese. Americans are energetic and we take risks. Our land is unusually productive.
We also have the advantage of not having a shrinking population, a higher fertility rate, and we got rich before we got old. Oh and we are not reliant on international shipping for oil
Re: For contemporary readers, one striking aspect of the book is that Zimmerman published it in 1947
Yes, before the volcanic winter of the 6th century was known (the references in ancient documents were dismissed as fanciful exaggerations) and when many historians even doubted that the plague pandemic of the 6th century was all that big of deal.
Civilizations may be conquered by other people. Plenty of historical examples there, and that often comes down to the fortunes of war. But civilzational collapse has always required natural disaster-- maybe an abrupt one, like the volcano Thera devastating the Aegean basin and doing in the Minoans, or maybe a slower one that gradually destroys agriculture. And yes, with good old global warming we are definitely at risk. Or we could have an abrupt downfall: A strong solar flare (Carrington Event) would bring it all down, all across the planet.
I think you are mistaken about the willingness of whites to discuss black crime. I'm sure there is a substantial quotient of people in the mix who wouldn't be embarrassed to declare themselves n***** haters, because there always is, but in comments section related to urban crimes, possibly the most frequent thing one sees is the disgusted "Gee, I wonder what race 'the man' the cops are looking for is," and variants, and my impression is that most of these commenters are not racists. I can't delineate reasons for this conviction because I don't know how it is I think I can "read" them, but I do. To me, the genuine racists are only slightly harder to ferret out than Jew haters who protest that it's Zionism they're against, not Jews.
It's the politicians who in contemplating the prospect of addressing it are riven with anxiety attacks, not us ordinary schmos. This could be a Sister Souljah opportunity for The Orange Menace.
You go to a bar or a picnic or a barbeque and whites are more than willing to discuss black crime. Not viciously but truthfully.
You do hear gross exaggerations. Some suburbanite snowflakes think you can't poke your nose out the door in cities without being shot at.
For what it’s worth, the only person in New York who threatened to shoot me was White. He was bluffing!
I once had a gun pointed at me by a white thug. There may have been a black guy behind him-- it was very dark and the other guy stood in the shadows-- he could have been pink with purple polka dots for all I could tell.
By the way, Jon, I attended a Greek Orthodox funeral today at the Greek cemetery in Woodlawn, just west of Baltimore. The chapel was beautiful but the ceremony was even more beautiful with five different priests singing. Do all Greek Orthodox priests sing wonderfully?
Oh, how good for you (other than it being a funeral, presumably someone you knew, being the reason). I've never been to the Greek cemetery, only to my Church's (St Andrews OCA), and the Russian cemetery near Elkridge.
Not every Orthodox priest has a good voice, but since almost everything is chanted (other than the sermon) they do get training in the required tones.
If you ever have the opportunity I would recommend a vespers service, which is not overly long (~45 minutes). The hymnody is beautiful, and while I'm not sure about the Greek musical tradition, it's fairly easy to sing along when you get the hang of it.
I have been friends with a family originally from Essex since my college days. Uncle Bob was 84 when his body began to shut down last month. He'll be missed but he had a good, long life. His wife was Green and Greek Orthodox in religion. He converted and was an usher at the Greek Orthodox church in Frederick, MD.
Trump's motto appears to be "Panta agan" - Everything in excess. If he opens his mouth on this issue he'll tar everyone whose skin is darker than the average Greek's with being a depraved criminal.
Re: ...where America is becoming a minority-majority nation
It would be more accurate to say the US may be becoming (ethnically) a no-majority nation. Though white people will remain a plurality-- and if Hispanic people are assimilated under "white" (as Jews, Irish, Italians, etc, were in the past) then white people will still be a majority.
Spanish people are European, pretty sure there’s a division.
Hispanic is really a multi-ethnic designation. Mostly not people from Spain, but from Spanish-speaking South America. The vast majority are of mixed indigenous and Spanish ancestry.
I want to ‘like’ your comment but for some reason I’m not able to. I am aware of the differences that’s why I used the term Spanish. I assume culturally most are Spanish European also, Argentina comes to mind…
Irish and Italians and Ashkenazi Jews are European it doesn’t matter what the definitions were at the time or even now (jew haters I encounter online).
I’m honestly surprised Rod thinks that no one actually supports Russia. With all the people he’s meeting and just where he lives, it should be pretty easy to find or hear about people supporting Russia. If he means nations… then what the heck is BRICS and company? Heck, I support Russia because I see the world firstly from a spiritual lens and they’re Orthodox and are against the anti-God wokeism.
Which leads me to say that I’m one of the small “o” orthodox Christians that pursues and believes in the unity of Christians across all sects—Catholics, Orthodox, Protestant—all are welcome as long as we have the same view of Jesus, with our own particulars being acknowledged as differences that don’t matter.
But I’m in the Protestant camp, and I despair at the corruption and institutionalization that has occurred since forever ago, which has led to what Rod calls the little popes. I agree with him—deconstructing Christians and exvangelicals are probably more leaving their own particular pastor’s fundamental framework of Christianity, instead of actual Christianity. It pains me that for some fixation on some silly doctrinal differences, Christian “leaders” feel led by God to condemn any and all who don’t toe the line. Insanity.
So I cheer the death of institutional Protestant church. Why? Because it’s man made and man centered.
Half of Protestant pastors minister to congregations which can't afford to support them well enough that they don't have to work "day jobs" during the week. Theirs really are labors of love.
I would like to have Jerry Falwell dug up and hung upside down somewhere in the suitably named Lynchburg. What hot young seminarians were to priests after Vatican II., political power, and power, period, was to Falwell and other "influencers." The Devil takes great pleasure in studying the inclinations of those he will be catering to.
I think you underestimate the extent to which faithful Protestant pastors yearn for unity with the other branches of Christendom. ( Apostates are as naturally chummy as frat bros. ) My Presbyterian church has a late Tuesday afternoon men's reading group in a Celtic pub. St. Basil is in the on deck circle at the moment.
Most of us sense that we are living in a time in which principalities and powers are being given freer rein by The One who holds their leash. If the young are walking away from church it's out of learned or at least imitated disgust with Western civilization, which like Byron White and pornography they cannot define but know when they see its workers and ways.
The Spirit of the Age is coming close to killing off the Anglican Church in North America, which as Dr Tighe points out in links he provides in his daily mailings to heavy hitters and the occasional slummer like me was compromised from the start. And the Southern Baptists are maybe three conventions at most away from approving women's ordination.
In the ground war, we have such exhibits as the woman who stabbed the three year old boy to death about ten days ago. On his YouTube channel, Michael Knowles has a several minutes long vignette of her arraignment. I urge readers to watch it. It's shocking.
Interesting point about ACNA. I had already concluded they were not to be relied on due to their tolerance of ordained women among their ranks from the outset.
Exactly. When I heard their declaration of existence in 2009, I was thrilled. When I heard that they had compromised on women's ordination, I thought they were like a lovely baby born challenged from the beginning by a genetic vulnerability of some kind. The doctors may have been optimistic, but the parents' instinct was that the optimism was unjustified.
My less charitable thought was, "Same clueless but reliably gutless Episcopalians!"
ACNA reminds me of my mom's denomination, ECO- a.k.a. the Evangelical Covenant Order of Presbyterians, a splinter from the PCUSA over the gay marriage issue for those who still wanted to ordain women. For whatever reason, they didn't join the EPC. Hard to say just how many years will have to pass before they figure out that systematically obeying scripture in one area while disobeying it in another, will ultimately still end in destruction.
More on the ACNA:
https://ministrywatch.com/the-anglican-church-in-north-america-faces-existential-challenges/
https://northamanglican.com/calling-for-full-communion-within-the-anglican-church-in-north-america/
https://northamanglican.com/holy-orders-in-the-acna-a-public-appeal-to-the-college-of-bishops-of-the-acna/
Thank you!
Re: I would like to have Jerry Falwell dug up and hung upside down somewhere in the suitably named Lynchburg.
Thanks for a morning giggle!
Hey, you're welcome, Jon. You would be unlikely to admit it because you actually developed an adult psychology, but I suspect you may have had similar thoughts! ( I will admit to being charmed by Barry Goldwater's take, too: "Every good Christian ought to kick Jerry Falwell in the ass." ) I remember that when I heard about The Moral Majority, I thought "Huh? We ain't got one anymore. He doesn't know that?"
And though I couldn't have imagined I'd live to see post Christian America with a popular "culture" as desiccated and loathsome as ours, my instinct from the beginning was that his "Every Christian who doesn't register to vote is a bad Christian" schtick was daft. Didn't he know that Christ's Kingdom was not of this world? That evangelism by the ballot was an impossibility, and only likely to irritate people at best?
The whole point of Christianity is that we have an Immoral Unanimity.
Oh no I am not close to any ACNA churches anymore so I don’t know what’s happening. What’s going on? I still have intense anger about TEC and what they did so was very hopeful about ACNA...
Well, from their beginning fifteen years ago, they compromised on the matter of women's ordination: they decided to let individual Bishops ordain women but not make it mandatory that any Bishop ordain them.
I'm pretty sure I actually groaned aloud when I heard about that. Talk about neither hot nor cold! ( Grab something to shield yourself from the spew. )
I keep hoping someone will make a convincing Biblical argument for the permissibility of fornication.
Yah that should have been a hard no from the beginning. The organization needed to be an alternative not episcopal lite.
I have been a liberal for for over forty years, and I think that the “liberalism” of our elites isn’t liberalism. They are anointed so, but it is not real, and it certainly does not comport with classical liberalism. Actually, I can say the same with modern American leftism (which is not the same thing as liberalism) and to some extent with American conservatism. People keep saying that they are such and such, but I ain’t seeing it. I do see different excuses for money worship, denigrating community, and mocking anything besides extremely hard material viewpoints while simultaneously mocking facts and reason.
All this barrage of bullshit, lies, idiotic oversimplification, and general ignorance makes want to be an alcoholic.
It's really quite easy to become an alcoholic.
Yet at the same time, a full time job!
It depends, I think, on your genetic heritage. Some people seem to have an inborn problem with alcohol (Native Americans most notably). Others of us are more resilient. Even in my party boy youth I didn't want to see another drunk for a good long while after an exceptionally Bacchic festivity.
My Italian-American friend at church and I have discussed alcoholism at great length. In Mediterranean peoples with longer exposure to alcohol, alcoholism is lower. Northern Europeans have been exposed to alcohol for a shorter time and have higher alcoholism rates. In the Americas, those with large amounts of Indian blood seem to have strong alcoholic tendencies.
I think also that Mediterranean culture usually prefers wine to hard liquor, and, importantly, treats wine as a normal part of a meal.
In America, drinking is separate, and is treated almost as a rite of initiation into adulthood and/or into the cool crowd.
Thanks for providing the embedded Kennedy clip, Rod. Kennedy is his by now unsurprising solid self. God bless him. He's so untelegenic I'm beginning to crush on him the way a beautiful woman will a man who looks like his driver's license photo.
But the best part about it is Tom Cotton, just to Kennedy's left. As Kennedy begins to read out possible forms of address womyn might wish to be called by, such as "Mx," Cotton comes close to laughing outright, and must quickly cover his mouth with his palm. O! The humanity! Diogenes may have found his man.
Let me tell you something about Sen. Kennedy. Some years ago, I was in Australia on a speaking tour. When my host found out I was from Louisiana, he said, "Ah, you must know my Oxford roommate, Sen. Kennedy." No, I said, I don't -- but Oxford roommate?! Really?! I thought of his cornpone demeanor.
The Australian (who was an Englishman by birth) just laughed. He said Kennedy was a Rhodes Scholar who showed up at Oxford, took the most difficult course of study, and aced it. The guy is brilliant. The cornpone thing is something he leans into.
I was living outside of Louisiana when Kennedy came to prominence as a state politician. I found out later that when he first got going, he spoke in a dramatically less folksy way. Whatever the truth, I'm really pleased with him here, and in general.
I don't doubt it. Wouldn't he have been likely to have been a remarkable President?
He's my favorite U.S. Senator, by far, and not just for his demeanor. He did a ginsu knife number on some nominee some years ago and his effortless command of legal theory and his demand for answers to the quite simple questions he posed made me look up his C.V. I make it a point to watch what he posts on X through to the end (have you seen his Christmas message?). It's never less than amusing. As far as Biden's nominees go, there is one thing to remember: he made a castrate in a skirt the assistant secretary of HHS and an admiral. Really everything follows.
I must say I felt a pang of pity for Chuck Schumer in re BurgerGate over the weekend. The cheese on top of the raw meat did make my stomach go all flippy floppy, but he admitted up front he'd lived in apartments all his life.
I'm in a Facebook group which seemed promising, The Decline of America into Cultural Idiocy. The first postings I saw were jolly chartings of this, but it quickly became clear that unbeknownst to them, most of the members were evidence of it.
Recently, I ran across something in the Cast and Crew section of a World War II. movie on one of the movie channels. Right in the middle of the lineup was a photo of Joachim von Ribbentrop. I took a screenshot, cropped it, and tried to post it to the group with the headline, "No matter your past, if you can deliver, Hollywood has a place for you." They didn't approve it because it made no sense to them. What was funny about it? They had never heard of von Ribbentrop, and to them, I had submitted a dud post.
The first rule of the group is "No politics," and of course most of what gets posted is by self imagined sophisticates who take shots at Trump voters. The commenters are shocking. They cannot think, if it can be called thinking, without cliches. Trump voters are Nazis, Southerners with gun racks in their pickups, inbreds, illiterates. The members give their fellows plenty of laughing emojis, and they give me great opportunities to take shots at them. Yesterday, a post was a photo of Trump standing face to face with some stock company good looking blonde. I don't remember the caption, but it was something about Stormy. It gave me the chance to say, "But he never took showers with Ivanka when she was a little girl."
I went through the rest of the comments, which provided me with at least a dozen openings to cite this or that and tell the commenters the impressiveness of their lack of originality. I'll keep doing it until I insult my way out of the group.
I've found an entertaining group which is called "A group in which we're intentionally vague just for the f*cking hell of it." It's fun. It also accommodates itself genially to non sequiturs.
WHAT! Sen. Kennedy's cornpone demeanor is nothing more than an affectation? Say it ain't so, Rod ... please say it ain't so. But even if is is all just an act, I could still listen to him for days on end because he uses it to such great advantage. He asks simple but pointed questions that in most instances wouldn't require more than a yes-or-no answer, but forces interviewees to resort to extremes of bloviation, dissembling and verbal gobbledegook to avoid looking like the charlatans that they are.
Sen. Kennedy is a national treasure.
Hi Rod
1st things first, I am getting your sub stacks regularly via email so all good from my end.
Interesting bit about the evangelicals. Having grown up in a Plymouth Brethren church then I have a lot of sympathy with the article. Doing my 1st degree in Theology at a (theologically) liberal university was literally mind blowing and so I basically spent the three years drinking heavily and playing sport!
I went back to the non conformist church (more charismatic this time around) thinking it was still the right way to follow Christ but it all again to fall apart once I got into a conversation with the pastor about a "right reading of scripture" and it was as if a light bulb went off in my head and I realised that we were just making it up as we went along.
On a separate matter look up Zahal Levy the next time he is in Budapest (he's normally there quite regularly). He's an Israeli Jew who works in Romania and Hungary. He's a great guy to have a conversation with.
All the best
The 95 Theses of Richard Rex:
https://afkimel.wordpress.com/2020/06/20/the-95-theses-of-richard-rex/
I had no idea I had a doppelganger here. I hope you maintain my high standards.
With a name like ours then I imagine high standards will simply be the norm
Yes, and you should feel free to opine on any subject you want, except you must never, ever say anything positive about Jorge Bergoglio or Joe Biden. I have a reputation to protect.
I would say that a magisterial Protestant is one whose church holds to one of the historic Protestant confessions of faith. Augsburg (Lutheran), 39 Articles (Anglican), Westminster (Presbyterian), London 1689 (Reformed Baptist) and so on.
Having said that, I would not say that a Fundamentalist Baptist with zero interest in church history and who claims to have "no creed but the Bible" is not Protestant. He clearly is descended, ultimately, from Reformation figures such as Zwingli and
Karlstadt. Yes, I know Zwingli had people who rejected infant baptism put to death. But otherwise he seems very close to modern Fundamentalist or Independent Baptists in his theology.
Some Baptists claim that they are not Protestants because in fact Baptists have been around ever since the time of the Apostles (see J.M. Carroll's tract 'The Trail of Blood'). That thesis, to put it mildly, does not withstand historical scrutiny.
Having grown up Independent Baptist (now Presbyterian) I totally concur.
Former Southern Baptist (now Orthodox) here. Ah, "The Trail of Blood", haven't heard that one in a while! Because it was so crazy from an actual historical perspective, it had largely fallen out of favor by the time I started thinking seriously about the theology of my faith (I was born in early 80s, so this would have been late 90s), but I remember discussing it with my grandparents on a few occasions (lifelong Southern Baptists on both sides) who remembered these currents and taking them seriously in the mid twentieth century. It is probably less so now, but the thing I chafed most at as a Baptist was the ant intellectualism; as a bright young man eager to know everything I could, I felt as though I was being constantly told that there were things better not thought too deeply about.
In any event, it is interesting to think about whether or not all churches which are not Catholic or Orthodox are correctly linked under the monicker of "Protestant" because it is very true that these later traditions weren't' really developed in protest against anything distinct (and certainly not against Rome, though many of them largely maintain the animus). World Anglicanism is sometimes called Protestant but is really its own thing, and arguably belongs within the ambit of the older East/West Church division given its reliance on Apostolic Succession as a sign of validity, in much the way that the non-Chalcedonian Orthodox are generally folded in among the Eastern Orthodox, though they are not in communion.
This book from 1999 by a Reformation historian (and a Baptist) is both cogent and, at times, amusing:
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Baptist_Successionism/OiMRAxZMqyMC?hl=en
The author of the book confesses that he was brought up a "Landmarkian."
The first time I came across Landmarkism it was from an Armstrongist (the group that sells "Plain Truth"). It was only later that I found out about the Baptists teaching it.
There seem to me to be Landmarkist currents in a lot of secular thought. I mean the modern feminists who paint their views onto the victims of the witch craze or whatever. Queer studies is a bit like that too, don't you think? I guess any attempt to force historical ideologies into a modern straitjacket is like that?
"I mean the modern feminists who paint their views onto the victims of the witch craze or whatever. Queer studies is a bit like that too, don't you think? I guess any attempt to force historical ideologies into a modern straitjacket is like that?"
There are scholars, and then there are "true believers," often, at least. Sometimes they can happily coincide or maybe just coexist, in the same individual. On the other hand, I don't think that many feminists or queerists give a toss about history (or History), really . Their forays in to the past seem designed to reassure those of them "almost persuaded" but weak in their faith that their enterprise is more than yet one more attempt to square - or should I write squeer - the circle.
This ,"reliance on Apostolic Succession as a sign of validity,"was no part of the Church of England as established in the "Elizabethan Settlement" of 1559. "Apostolic succession of bishops" meant no more to the Church of England (and its bishops) than it meant to any other Protestant churches of the Reformation, whether or not they retained officials called "bishops" as in Sweden, or "superintendents," as in Denmark (where they were later renamed "bishops") or parts of Germany, or, as in most places, dispensed with them altogether. It was, rather, the product of a school of anti-Calvinist divines, originally very small in size - think of the name of Lancelot Andrewes - who came to control the Church of England in the 1630s, thanks to the favor and patronage of Charles I, as "the Laudians;" and whose perceived "catholicizing" did a lot to fuel sentiments that erupted in the English Civil War (aka "Puritan Revolution"). This "high-church party" has played a significant part in Anglican myth-making, but down to the present day its views, on "apostolic succession" and many other things, are rejected by Anglican Evangelicals, especially in England.
May I respectfully suggest that you read these two articles?:
https://anglicanism.org/putting-the-english-reformation-on-the-map
https://anglicanism.org/the-latitude-of-the-church-of-england
This is also worth reading, if you can access it:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1750-0206.12165
Good articles!
James I also resisted the Puritanizing of the English Church he inherited from Elizabeth. He is reputed to have told those seeking to abolish the episcopate "No bishop, no king" seeing (rightly IMO) that challenging traditional authority in the Church would lead to challenging it in the State too.
But he largely agreed (at least until, perhaps, his last years) with their Reformed Calvinist sensibilities, even if rejecting their claims about a presbyterian polity having the best claim to be "scriptural." It was because most of his Scots compatriots were assured about the basic "soundness" of his faith that he was able to push the Kirk, little by little, towards the episcopal polity and royal governorship of the Church of England (and he appointed a fair number of Scots Calvinists to university positions and cathedral deanships in England). Needless to say, they lacked any such confidence in the "soundness" of his son and heir.
James was an oddball, and in many ways a better monarch than he was often given credit for (the disastrous reign of his son tarred him as well). Whatever his own religious scruples he did have to put up with the fact that his wife had converted to Catholicism and when it came to foreign policy he spent much of his reign wooing the Spanish, reluctant to break with them even over the beginning of the Thirty Years War when his own daughter and her husband were booted from their German lands by Catholic force of arms. He only turned against Spain when his son was publicly humiliated in Madrid while wooing the Infanta, and afterward James' boy toy, the Duke of Buckingham, wanted a nice little war to earn glory in.
And yet James managed to delay actually declaring war on Spain until he died.
"it is interesting to think about whether or not all churches which are not Catholic or Orthodox are correctly linked under the monicker of "Protestant" because it is very true that these later traditions weren't' really developed in protest against anything distinct (and certainly not against Rome, though many of them largely maintain the animus). World Anglicanism is sometimes called Protestant but is really its own thing, and arguably belongs within the ambit of the older East/West Church division given its reliance on Apostolic Succession as a sign of validity"
The claims about Anglicanism being Catholic are not all that old. In truth, even before the current liberalism, Anglicanism was all over the place. There is the Evangelical vs. Anglo-Catholic division under the liberal vs. conservative one, so I don't think ACNA will survive, unless it makes the choice there. I met a US woman whose parents are members of the "Anglican Catholic Church"; does anyone know anything about that? It sounds like it's made its choice.
Otherwise, I'd consider to be Protestant any group that has its roots in Western Europe in the 16th or 17th centuries. I wouldn't consider some of the Russian sects, for example, to be Protestant.
The Anglican Catholic Church is an admirable body, although I don't hold with its claims:
https://anglicancatholic.org/about-us/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglican_Catholic_Church
The Wikipedia article I have linked above is comprehensive and accurate.
The ACC, of all the Continuing Anglican bodies, is the one which most clearly vaunts the purported "Catholic essence" of Anglicanism. In doing so, it explicitly conditions and subordinates its acceptance of the 39 Articles to the St' Louis Declaration of 1977:
https://anglicancatholic.org/mt-content/uploads/2020/10/the-affirmation-of-st.-louis.pdf
as well as to "the Seven Ecumenical Councils," including the iconophiliac seventh council which, historically, Lutherans have tended to pass over in silence and the Reformed to reject as embracing and mandating idolatry. Elizabethan Anglicans fully shared the Reformed rejection of that council, as also did the "Caroline Divines," by and large. Only in the 19th Century did it begin to find Anglican defenders and advocates, mostly of an Anglo-Catholic or Orthodoxophile persuasion. The ACC accepts the ecumenical authority of that seventh council, but does not require its congregations actually to practice iconodulia, while other "Continuing Anglican" jurisdictions seem to regard the practice as a matter of spiritual or devotional "taste," to be practiced or eschewed according to individual or congregational fancy. There are still Conservative Anglicans, and not only Evangelicals, who reject the practice, as one may discern by perusing this website:
https://northamanglican.com/
https://northamanglican.com/category/subject/religious-images/
The ACC is one of three Continuing Anglican bodies engaged in a slow merger. I hope that this process does not in any way compromise their Catholic stance.
<<This is radical — I mean that literally: it strikes at the very roots of our justice system. This is the institutionalization of the old Leninist principle of “who/whom?”, in that he really believes that justice requires different standards based on your race and identity as an “oppressed” person…>>
He does not. I listened to that Congressional hearing exchange in its entirety, in which the judge’s words were repeatedly taken out of context, btw. He said over and over that in a court of law, our traditional standards of evidence and proof and so on should apply. When he’d been talking or writing about pronouns or the hated ‘diversity, equity and inclusion” stuff, etc., he was referring to interpersonal relations, not the law or our judicial system. When he’d written that color matters, again, he wasn’t talking about justice or within our judicial system. As a “person of color,” he was explaining why he didn’t like poster or clothing proclamations of color blindness. In fact, he was saying something very similar to what traditionalists mean when they talk about ethnicity or traditional cultures: They matter. That doesn’t mean he or they think the law or our court system should have different standards for different people of different colors or ethnic groups. This tendency to distort the words of people perceived as opponents is just wrong when anybody does it.
Oh, "out of context".
Thank you for this alternative perspective. Shading things for your bias and to make a point is not good.
Still, I was struck by the nominee's stammering. Had he defended himself eloquently (as you did) there wouldn't be a viral clip. But he couldn't. And he didn't. He was wholly unprepared to defend himself and his previous writing. To me it suggests he hasn't thought his views through. And he certainly, unlike you, hasn't thought through how his perspective might cohere with historical U.S. jurisprudence--which is odd given he was nominated to be a federal judge.
<<He was wholly unprepared to defend himself and his previous writing. To me it suggests he hasn't thought his views through. And he certainly, unlike you, hasn't thought through how his perspective might cohere with historical U.S. jurisprudence--which is odd given he was nominated to be a federal judge.>>
I’m afraid most judges aren’t any more used to being cross-examined over matters that don’t directly pertain to their judicial behavior or philosophy than the rest of us. The thing is anger over DEI corporate training programs and pronoun concerns just isn’t as familiar to people in the rest of America as they are to consumers of rightwing media. That’s just a fact. As it was, the judge answered fairly quickly. Others can be thrown off their stride quite easily with culture war drubbings. Most Americans still aren’t totally keyed in to what’s happening with this stuff, no matter which “side” they might come down on if they were. Respecting which pronouns people want you to use, for example, can be perceived as no more than a question of manners, even to a polite conservative. Or someone like me who values clear communications might object to the use of the plural “they” for a singular subject regardless of how they judge transgender issues in themselves. Culture warriors don’t own our public forum. Several of them just think they do.
Your take is a valid one. But why did the judge not say, "I was talking about conversation, and that we should not apply legal standards of proof to conversation. The legal standards of proof should apply in legal proceedings, regardless of race, regardless of whether the matter is equity."
The judge was being disingenuous claiming that his directives on pronouns and honorific were suggestions. One does not risk irritating a judge deciding one's case by not following his directed suggestions, and i wish the senator had made that explicit.
It is Kasubhai's disingenuousness regarding his pronoun directives that makes me question his claim now that he meant different standards of proof apply only to conversation and not to legal proceedings.
<<…why did the judge not say, "I was talking about conversation, and that we should not apply legal standards of proof to conversation>>
He did. He said he’d been talking about interpersonal relations.
You really expect us to believe he personally supports that bilge but it doesn’t in any way affect his judgement in a courtroom?? Right, and judge Marchon was utterly unbiased in the Trump circ..uh trial.
In the quoted writing about directing/suggesting the announcement of pronouns and honorifics he referred to "introducing your client." That is a legal proceeding and the power exerted by the judge means a lawyer and client had better go along - not really a suggestion, not when he says, "You should." Critical theory applied here - who has the power?
I had initially shared your view about the the discussion of proof, but the denial of the pronouns directive made me suspicious of the earlier statement. Who talks about requiring proof in conversation in the first place?
Was it an essay in a legal context, academic context, alumni magazine, or about personal conversations about touchy subjects like race and equity?
Is it a conversation about changing the law? So that the standards which he presently observes would no longer apply?
Context matters, and legal context would be concerning .
Air quotes aside, Maximillian Krah is a POS. Just because he says some good cultural stuff doesn’t mean he isn’t bad news. The SS interview - No need to go there unless there was something lurking underneath.
"Something lurking underneath"
Maybe pride of his Teutonic heritage? That seems to have been banned in Germany for the last 80 years, but at a certain point a nation can't last having to continually apologize for their ancestors
Which Teutonic Heritage? The one that enabled ordinary men to slaughter 1500 Jews in the village of Josefov in one day? That Teutonic Heritage?
There’s a difference between “heritage” and what the SS and Wehrmacht did in Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine from 1941-1945. Why bring up the SS when he can talk about Bach and Beethoven?
Rod - keep reading this post to discover why, when I first saw, I did not buy The Benedict Option. (Of course I've now read it.)
<<<I’d love to know what you Evangelical or non-Evangelical Protestant readers have to say. What is magisterial Protestantism, anyway? On what grounds do you tell Pastor Bob and his congregation that they aren’t really Protestant?>>>
This piece seems rife with POVs that may interfere with things. My POV may help. First "magisterial Protestantism". That is the opposite of what Protestantism is! Protestantism is Sola Scriptura. No magisterial body ultimately defines what the Scripture says.
So, how do Protestants know truth. Yes, the Bible is open to interpretation. Yes, one source said there are 45,000 denomination (not sure that is right, but it gives an idea). Yet, the differences are not huge. You have movements generally considered outside Protestantism (e.g. Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses) but they do not come close what are - they exist - they plain readings of Scripture Not all is plain, but the basics are. "Outside" groups deny the other Protestant groups are even part of the kingdom of God, thus they are not Protestant. Even my Baptist cousin explicitly states the Nicene Creed plus Sola Scriptura is what makes a Protestant, not a Catholic/Orthodox, and not a heretic. In his mind, the early chuch was not "Roman Catholic", that took 2 or 3 hundred years, and they did have true beliefs without "adding anything" at first.
I was Baptist until age 12, then we started attending a church labeled "Church of God" that was actually Charismatic. From 18-25 I was Charismatic, then I converted to Catholicism, and was a Catholic Charismatic. I am not angry at Evangelicals like the Exvangelicals in this piece. Why did I leave? First, I visited a mass, heard the creed recited and realized Catholics did not believe terrible errors so why no join "the original", stop the division, and work from within if change was needed. Second, I'd been in Ireland that summer partly to "spread the good news of Jesus" but was challenged that "There are miracles at Lourdes and do you think it is the devil?" I didn't. Third, I also saw contradictions in Scripture - the accounts of what happened when Jesus first rose differ for instance, and was half way to losing my faith over things like this. I could lose Christian faith entirely or find the Magesterium to help with what to believe.
Differences in Protestant belief are not "essentials". They all agree with the Nicene creed (except about baptism "for the remission of sins" - disagreement there, though they all baptize). The Bible does lend itself that that much unity. I know, Rod, you are not comfortable with this. But why not attend a service or two of , say, Danube International Church just to learn, and relate to Evangelicals more. It is "non-denominational" and in belief, close to Baptist, with Charismatic accepted. Most Evangelical churches are either "Baptist - or not denominational but close to Baptist" or else "Charismatic". The differences are just how much enthusiasm is shown in worship and whether the people believe gifts of the Spirit ceased. The "denominational stuff" - like predestination (very few Evangelicals are Calvinist) or infant baptism (few do this, though of course Catholic Charismatics do) - well this "denominational" stuff is not essential to faith and practice - not necessary for salvation. Typically, differences trouble Evangelicals no more than the fact that Catholic and Orthodox have differences troubles liturgical Christians.
Is Pastor Bob the pope? Heck no. Billy Graham and Pat Robertson may has well have been the Popes for all practical purposes. You did not have to believe everything the taught, but virtually no one doubted anything Graham said - he said the basics - and most of Robertson (not tongues, not a separate Baptism in the Spirit) was believed by most. Pastors themselves were influenced by these two men. Non-charismatic Evangelicals has a few minor people, maybe James Dobson (Focus on the Family, or John MacArthur (Grace to You) - I'm not sure, but they were not as universally accepted as Graham (essentially all Evangelicals) and Robertson (essentially all Charismatics and most of what he said by most Evangelicals). Is it kind of dangerous that two men were so very listened to? Yes, but in the end they did not teach errors that were dangerous.
What about community? I did not buy "The Benedict Option" at first because I had been in three failed Christian communities. The doctrinal groundwork for community was something I already knew, and I could see it would be in the book when I picked it up and Borders and considered it. Protestants yearn for community, but it very often fails because people come into conflict, and there is not a church authority established strongly enough to settle the conflicts. Don't like the community? Go to a different congregation or even start a new denomination. A sad state. I'm still not sure community works well for Protestants, though I know now there are exceptions. I did not realize Rod, that you wrote from an Orthodox perspective when I first encountered you. So I was delayed until 2020's Live Not By Lies in reading you. - Glad I did.
With their absence of a Pope and the catechism and hierarchical structure emanating from Rome, I've often thought Orthodox churches were prettier versions of the protestant churches. I know this is naive and probably fighting words here on this substack. Feel free to have at me. But really how is one schism any different from any other schism?
Hmmm..not having at you but I see both as valid and RC as having split due to Filioque, increased authority of Bishop of Rome by RCs etc.
I get that. Justified split/schism. But so was Luther's. I think someone made the observation that once you schism the first time you're destined to keep splitting into smaller and smaller factions. There's no limiting principle after the first split.
Well, I 'm not sure I was clear. I do not think Rome is the only original Christian church. The original Christian church is now it two parts. As to which split from which, and which is "the original" and which is "the split" - I think neither. They are the two halves of the original is my view. And I tried to make the case that the Orthodox are more faithful to original Christian doctrine that even the RCs.
If you know what original Christian doctrine is( was there any such thing).you’re a better man- woman than me Gunga Din. Not being mean but all Christians invariably say they are true to some form of “ originality “. Baptists think they existed before they even existed.Muslims claim they preexist Christianity and Judaism. I guess Mormons think everything was messed up until the Angel Moroni helped out.
I do think I used hedging language such as "I think" and "is my view". Yes, I realize that reading Acts, we have something that may have been like a Synagogue in the very first years, then reading Paul's letters we have meetings that included the Lord's Supper, multiple people giving prophecies, tongues, etc., plus teachings, and letters being read. Writings in the early church do show us something about the doctrines, and where they settled, which was my concern. Eventually they settled into the Nicene Creed. And it is a matter of faith that I accept the point where these doctrines settled were the beliefs of "the original church". (The churches also say where there are additions not always preached, for instance about Mary, the immaculate conception and assumption, if I am not mistaken, so no one claims that is "original".)
<<Baptists think they existed before they even existed. Muslims claim they preexist Christianity and Judaism.>>> I assume there were typos here - neither is true and I've never seen anyone say they were true.
Yes, John, please clarify the "Muslims claim they preexist Christianity." Do you mean because they trace their lineage to Abraham and his son Ishmael? I haven't heard this argument from Muslims, but I imagine they make it. This week is Eid al-Adha which celebrates Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Ishmael. I admire that Islam places such importance and prominence to remembering Abraham's faith. But I can, in my Catholic bias, also see that they have made this their penultimate holiday to emphasize their lineage through Ishmael--when for over a 1000 years before Muhammed the Jews commemorated Abraham's near sacrifice of Isaac.
OIC. Thank you for clarifying. It would be helpful to me to adopt this view -- two halves of the same origin. Especially since I appreciate all the Orthodox I get to interact with here. And I know many of your conversions to the Orthodox Church were very, very thoughtful. It will help me control my Catholic biases.
Ah...well thanks, but not I see I may not have spoken well, seeing as you are Catholic. I am unsure, but the Catholic church may indeed say the Orthodox were a split. But I do know they say the Orthodox are not heretical, and they acknowledge that they and the Orthodox have Apostolic Succession. Actually, perhaps the words Apostolic Succession are best used, rather than "the original".
Except that this really hasn't happened much with either the Orthodox or the Catholics. Sure, there are splinter groups, small breakoffs, etc., but by-and-large neither group has come close to anything like the fission-proneness of Protestantism.
Good point. Why do you think this is? Is the inherent emphasis on personal revelation via reading scripture fraught with a Nietzschean perspectivism?
That would be my guess.
This comment was meant to be tongue in cheek. Your point is well taken.
I've heard different versions of this before. A couple of years ago, I was at a birthday party where I started talking to a man who is in the leadership at the Lutheran school my kids go to. When I said I was a convert to Orthodox Christianity, he made a comment kind of along the lines that I ended up there because I must not have wanted to make the full jump to becoming a Catholic. It wasn't mean spirited, and I responded with "well, not really" because... Yeah, it was a birthday party for his granddaughter turning six. *L*
I've been around a lot of Catholics, and the idea that a very formal, top-down hierarchy is necessary to keep things in line is pretty common. It certainly does have its advantages, but it does have its disadvantages as well, including the fact that it's much easier to introduce things from above because there's very little participation that's going from the bottom up. Our bishops are important, but in some sense less important than a Catholic bishop of the same rank. I knew a priest who got assigned an OCA parish with a lot of "old-school" Russians. It didn't matter that the church was officially on the New Calendar, and things *in church* were celebrated that way; the people were still on the old in their hearts, and when it came to the priest's name's day, for instance, anyone who did give him a present gave it to him 13(ish) days later. The priest understood that his job was not to fight the parishioners on this, and somehow they made this work.
Like Linda said, I think there's a lot to there being a split between the Catholic and Orthodox in the beginning more than there being a splintering.
Thanks for your comment. Through Catholic schools I was never taught Orthodox history. I really enjoy learning about it here.
Christian community… what a joke!
I recently joined a church that splintered (how very Protestant) from a larger body in the hopes of escaping managerial Christianity https://www.seekingthehiddenthing.com/p/managerial-christianity . I very much wanted to throw myself into the new church with my time (aging bachelor, wah-wah) but after asking the pastor in person and sending a few emails I got “I’ll let you know…” Meanwhile the life of the church gets busy without me. After making a lot of attempts in the last five years I’m very much giving up the church and doing my best to keep the faith.
I'm grieved to hear about your church. All churches have cliques for the same reason popular music groups break up frequently. The members realize they have a great deal in common with other musicians, but as for the ones they work with? Not so much. But your entire church is a clique.
Many years ago, I was a brief attendee of a church fat with cliques. One day, I heard a woman behind me say, "I think it will take a year for me to figure out how to fit in here." Damn it!
I don't know where you are, but there are almost certain to be good churches reasonably nearby. Denominations have online church finders. Contacting a seminary which runs along your general line of convictions can also be a good move.
Keen Christians WANT others to find churches.
Please don't give up. In candor, I need to tell you that given the rot within so many groups, you may find yourself solitary for awhile. If so, your faith can still be strengthened. You have the Bible, Sermon Audio, a library of sound books about theology and every aspect of the Christian life. There are wonderful channels on YouTube. ( Can anything good come out of YouTube? )
Because of medical "issues" I've spent far more of my life in not going to church than the opposite. I grew nonetheless. I had The Holy Spirit. You do, as well.
I think it is important to attend services. I see the difference in my life after returning to them.
I do not think your American church is at all likely to be friendly, but attend anyway. The USA is just not that way, especially if you are unmarried. Could you volunteer with a charity? This will get you talking to people and doing good work.
Not sure if I was clear, but "The Benedict Option" only helped. I do think it is more difficult for Protestants to form community because of the priesthood of believers (every believer their own priest) and such, but community is a good thing, and I am glad Rod helped with information for those who would try. And of course, liturgical Christians have a long history of monastic communities and some of lay communities. Rod's encouragement and innovation was very timely. I learned that after reading the book I originally did not read because "community" had not worked in some of my former attempts.
"Yes, the Bible is open to interpretation. Yes, one source said there are 45,000 denomination (not sure that is right, but it gives an idea). Yet, the differences are not huge. You have movements generally considered outside Protestantism (e.g. Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses) but they do not come close what are - they exist - they plain readings of Scripture Not all is plain, but the basics are."
I get the exclusion of Mormonism, as they have a later revelation, and additional scriptures, so they're clearly a new religion, analogous to Islam.
I don't get the exclusion of Jehovah's Witnesses, though. They are biblical fundamentalists who reject the Trinity, and have eccentric views about eschatology. I don't think the Trinity can be obtained by "plain readings of Scripture"; it took hundreds of years of debate. There are other fundamentalist groups that I would call Protestant that reject the Trinity, such as the Armstrongists and the Iglesia ni Kristo. This is really one of my central objections to Protestantism (the other is belief in the physical presence of Christ in the Eucharist).
It seems to me that the Catholic Church is a pillar, and the Protestant groups revolve around it, hesitant to deviate too far, by rejecting Nicaea, for example. If the Catholic Church didn't exist, they would all spin off in different directions.
In any case, even among Nicene Protestants, there seem to me to be some pretty wacky doctrines. Calvinism is pretty weird, as is Dispensationalism. I struggle to imagine what it must be like to be Protestant. No doubt there's some group I could join (maybe some conservative Methodist sect?), but there'd be a lot of boxes to tick. They'd have to be non-Calvinist. They'd have to be conservative, taking the Bible seriously, and rejecting the Sexual Revolution. They'd have to not be right-wing nutcases with the US flag next to the pulpit, and preaching the need for global rule by the USA. I imagine thinking I'd found a suitable church, and then finding they believe that modern Israel is God's Chosen Nation, and the Palestinians are Amalekites, who have to be exterminated, every man, woman and child, and all the little girls raped.
Well, for Jehovah's Witnesses Jesus is an agent of Jehovah, and the first creation of God. Jesus occupies a position as the archangel of archangels; powerful, but not fully divine. I would say that is different from a "plain, basic" of Scripture that Nicene Christians would see.
For Amstrongists, i.e., British Israelism, I grew up with my grandmother, a staunch Zionist, warning me about that.Its racism, basically. I just finished this interesting video half an hour ago, about why that church (Worldwide Church of God) and its descendants are cults with impossible beliefs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaKpI7tpryc&list=PL5Ag9n-o0IZAkhB4ZxzIs7zR7joUMLTwZ&index=14&ab_channel=UsefulCharts
I don't mean any cruelty to JWs or Armstrongists, I am just saying they do not follow things plainly stated in the Bible, things that are in the Nicene Creed.
I was not clear it seemed like you said you objected to Protestantism because of the Trinity and the Real Presence?
Yes, you would have a hard time in any Protestant church that is conservative if you side with the Palestinians. Not all call Israel "still God's chosen people" but all believe in Zionism, defined as "the Jews were promised a homeland by God and have a right to a homeland". None think the Jews need "take away" any additional territory, but most understand, as horrible as it is, and though many human shields will die, that Hamas must be defeated. I would encourage you to read literature from the other side regarding the word "Amelekite" as presently used, and otherwise, I would not want to bother you on the subject. No Zionist believes all Palestinians have to be exterminated. I know the lie about that word that says they do, but it is not true. Palestinians live very happily in Israel (Israel proper) and are about 10 percent of the population with full rights. But I can't blame you for believing the BBC if that is what is happening - they are often still good - but they can be out of balance and are on this one.
"I was not clear it seemed like you said you objected to Protestantism because of the Trinity and the Real Presence?"
My point is that the Trinity is not biblical, or at least not in the sense that one can pull a passage out of the Bible to point to. It was the result of centuries of debate, leading to Nicaea. If one accepts Sola Scriptura, and rejects most philosophical reflection, etc., I don't see how to rule out non-Trinitarian doctrines. There may be other objections to the JWs besides the Trinity (I don't know much about them), but that's what I'm talking about now.
My central objections to Protestantism are:
1. I believe in the real, physical presence in the Eucharist.
2. The logical implications of Sola Scriptura include not necessarily believing in the Trinity or accepting the Nicene Creed. As I say, I don't see how to rule out the JWs.
3. I believe that the Church has to be a real institution with continuity from the Apostles: "the gates of hell shall never close upon it". To be Protestant is to make the Church a sort of club, but Christ said "upon this rock I will build my church", not "upon this rock I will write my scripture".
4. This is less important, but I am uncomfortable with the politics that goes together with conservative Protestantism: US/Western imperialism, Zionism, militarism, and extreme right-wing economics. Conservative Catholics are often left or centrist politically, but that doesn't seem to be the case often with Protestants. There are probably exceptions, such as Methodists, Peace churches, and some black churches?
I especially like point number 3. I also very much like the way you dialogue even though you know I'm a Zionist and right wing. Thanks.
I did not mean JWs are not "Christian". I don't have a real "magical knowledge" of what pleases God. I have a strong heart-and-spirit belief, because I can feel it, of the Real Presence and the power of sacraments. Thus I tend to assume those churches have more truth, but I don't assume they are perfect.
As for the Trinity - it is almost like a mathematical proof. If A = B and B = C then A = C. It never says "three are one". Christ says "the Father and I are one". John 1: 1 establishing Jesus is God. Make man in "our" image. Hear O Israel the Lord our god is One. (Ehrad is the Hebrew word, a word for one that can have distinctions within it). "Now the Lord is the Spirit", "Baptize in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit".
So why not just spell out "three are one" in Scripture? I don't know. The Holy Spirit was only recently revealed, even after the Son was revealed. But I think Scripture says they are all God and God is one. The word Nicean Christianity uses for this is "Trinity" but it is not a sacred word. The teaching that God is one and is three distinct persons however, that is Scripture.
I support right-wing economics because they work and left-wing economics do not. Of course I support safety nets for those unable to help themselves. I know very few on the right who do not support that...probably less than one percent of those who way they are right wing, I'd guess. (Though I admit the right is sensitive about unsustainable levels of support such as 12 million economic immigrants, but that position is best in the long run.)
"As for the Trinity - it is almost like a mathematical proof. "
The objection to that is that so many people - people who consider themselves to be Bible-believing Christians - reject it, such as the JWs, Iglesia ni Kristo, etc., and historically the Arians.
Mathematical proofs generally are accepted by virtually everyone.
I see it more like a scientific proof, although the analogy is not exact. It is possible to argue for a flat earth. In a field in which one is not oneself expert, one accepts the authority of the consensus of experts. I frame the Council of Nicaea as something like that, although of course I would argue that the Holy Spirit was in on it too. If one insists on Sola Scriptura, one has to go back and reinvent the wheel.
OK, I guess what I am saying is that if the groups took Scripture as stated ("The Father and I are one", etc.) then used logic, they would have One god - Three persons. Those who disagree may try to explain away those Scriptures in special ways.
Arianism is extinct as I understand it and was much more common before the canon of Scripture. In it, Christ is the Logos and did create the world, but it not eternal - the Father created him.
I am not condemning other groups who seek to follow Christ. And I am not saying much of Scripture is not wide open to interpretation - it is. That is a big reason I am not Sola Scriptura. But I do think "One God, three persons" is plain. One of the basics, on par with "God created the universe".
I haven’t yet read Levine’s essay about China and the auto destruction of the West, but it occurs to me that many of the negative trends identified by him are equally prevalent in East Asia ( e.g., collapsing birth rates, social atomization on steroids, decline in the role of the family, loss of faith in institutions, … ). Is the East really rising, or is the entire world sinking?
Yes, this. China's demographics make ours look positively healthy. And while there are certainly devout Christians, Muslims, Buddhists in China, it is an utterly secular nation.
Rod, and others here, seem unable to perceive that the crisis of our times is a truly global crisis, albeit taking slightly different form in different parts of the globe.
Good points, Laurence. The entire world may be sinking, but we are sinking more quickly than the East, if only because they are still proud of their history, values, traditions, and less likely to allow foreign influence in their affairs. In other words, they are doing a better job maintaining the core of what and who they are. They still believe in themselves and are not as divided among themselves.
Are we sinking faster? Look at the East’s replacement rates.
Replacement rate is a good counter argument in that a culture that truly believed in itself would not be afraid to propagate itself. Having a child is a vote for the future. That said, my sense is that the West has more oikophobia than the East.
True on the oikophobia, but I believe under the right circumstances it is more easily reversed.
China at least turned more utterly against its traditions and past far more than the US ever has.
We are not sinking faster, at all. To the contrary, we’re going through very mild challenges in comparison to the rest of the developed world. The USA (as well as Canada and Mexico) is going to be the only real game in town for the foreseeable future.
the world is not for the first time at below replacement fertility
Yes it's a world issue and one without any obvious solution. As countries get richer, regardless of culture or civilization or political system, birth rates crash, marriage rates drop, and atomization increases. It's a feature of being a rich (relative to the world) society. China is not yet a rich country, in toto, but its coastal cities and Beijing largely are up to the international standards of other East Asian rich countries.
As The Economist pointed out in a recent leader (it was sometime in the past month or so), policy seems to have only very small impacts on birth rates. That is, making it easier on couples who have kids makes good sense from a fairness point of view, but there isn't strong evidence that it makes people more likely to have kids (Euro countries with fairly lavish child-related care schemes and benefits compared to other places feature low birth rates like everyone else in most cases). From their point of view, the challenge isn't how to get people to have more kids, or marry, etc., but rather to devise policies to deal with low population growth demographics, which will require a rejiiggering of the socio-economic contract.
I wonder if the fetishization of economic growth hasn't clouded how we view low birth rates. Why can't we be happy with low population and economic growth? Does the world really fall apart if you have 0 growth? Japan hasn't grown in a decade. And sure they aren't minting stock-market millionaires, but their life expectancy is improving. Their culture, from my outsider's perspective, seems strong and vibrant.
It's not just zero growth. It's actual population decline. S. Korea is probably the worst case, at approximately zero-point-eight children per woman. What this means in their case is that each generation will be less than half the size of the previous one. For example, imagine a current population of 1 million. Half of them (500K) will be women. 500K * 0.8 = 400K. Half of that 400K will be women, thus 200K * 0.8 = 160K. So in 2 generations they will have gone from 1 million to 160,000. Now SK has more than 1 million people, but this example should suffice to show the speed and scale of the decline. Of course, people live for more than one generation, so the decline will be spread out over several generations.
Thanks for doing the math. I see that it's a big change and disruptive. But I don't fully buy that this change will be bad. Also, I think the obsession with economic growth leads countries to adopt policies (like mass immigration and offshoring) that undermine the population for the sake of more and more dollars. What is wrong with pursuing equilibrium or even reduction in size? Reduction in output? I see that it leads to less dollars. But does it really lead to less human fulfillment? Less time with the family you do have, for example? Less time to pursue non-economic interests?
I certainly agree with you about the bad policies that are adopted in pursuit of growth and that stable or even slowly declining populations wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing.
Unforeseen consequences include invasion and land/resource grabs by larger forces and the collapse of public services like healthcare and social security-like payouts because there won’t be enough working to pay forward the benefits. Old and infirm with no choice but be at the mercy of minimum wage caretakers who may or may not be immigrants with no cultural connection. That said I support such contraction if it means immigration is stopped altogether.
In theory, yes, but the problem is the rejiggering.
One thing that happens, for example, is that the entire retirement system ceases to work. Everywhere, it's based on the young workers paying into the system to support the retired ones, and that there will always be enough younger workers to do the same down the line. Once that ceases to be the case, there are shortfalls, and you can't make up for them by means of taxes (again, because of lower population to tax, less output etc), so you need to cut benefits for people who worked their whole lives and expected/planned to have the benefits. Naturally they don't like that, and they vote. In France, to take a recent example, Macron tried to raise the retirement age by a couple of years to plug a budget deficit and people were marching in the streets and burning stuff for weeks.
A further problem relates to people's economic expectations overall. That is, do people expect to have a good deal of economic well-being (aka, material purchasing power), or are they content with a more basic, simple lifestyle focused on things other than material goods? I think we can argue in a combox that the latter is better than the former, but getting most people to agree that their material living standards should decline to accommodate slow or low growth is very challenging, and these people vote, too.
This is why it's destabiliizing. When people feel the rug being pulled out (and demographic shrinking makes that happen, either way), they tend to get angry and politically reactive in ways that can be hard to predict.
I actually think S. Korea is a special case. Their culture combines the worst of various worlds. They have hellish working conditions. It's an extremely conservative culture (and Confucian, which is much more anti-female than Christianity). I knocked around with a lot of Koreans in Japan at one time, and their attitudes are eye-opening. On the other hand, it's prosperous enough for women not to be forced into marriage. Lesbian separatism is actually a real thing there, with urban neighbourhoods from which men are excluded, whereas it's pretty much a joke in the West.
Yikes! Good thing that you mention this now, since I'm thinking of trying a journey to Korea at some point. I wouldn't want to wander into a forbidden zone. How long have those existed?
I don't know much about them. I read an article a while ago, and I've heard people comment on them. I do know that Korean feminism is really extreme. Mind you, in my experience, Koreans seem extremist about whatever they do.
If never actually been there, but it sounds like a more extreme version of Japan.
My vote is for "the entire world sinking." The West and particularly the United States has driven innovation and material progress globally. How could our decline not affect the whole world.
Regarding disagreement – when I met Rod I said something like “I post disagreements – sometimes I think you won’t like that”. He said that was not the case at all – that he welcomed disagreement. Not insult of course. Rod does not take mere disagreement as someone trying to “show him wrong”. It is a discussion among people looking for truth.
OK- my disagreement today - Perhaps there is a reason Zimmerman’s classic is “forgotten”. We have to cope with the fact that the Roman Empire adopted Christianity in the early 300s, and fell sometime around the mid-400s. Tom Holland speaks of the very, very positive changes Christianity brings. In pre-Christian families, the man had rights to rape the servants, for example. Women had less of a position of respect when it came to sex. Christ commanded “love your wives as Christ loved the church”. Christianity does emphasize the family. I really do not see how we can look to “the decline of the family” nor the “decline of sexual morals” to something worse than they had been prior to Christianity as a main cause of the fall. - - This unless Christianity tried to make things better but they were already so bad nothing could save Rome.
Rod’s post stated – “bad morals were not the cause – it is complex”, then “society has to depend on certain forms”. OK, both true – but then the discussion of Zimmerman seems to say degeneration of the family was a major cause. I do not believe it degenerated in the final century of Rome. I believe it was strengthened.
There may be better historians here than I, for I am no historian, who can set me straight on this. But it seems to me things such as totalitarianism, e.g. the end of a Republic, over-expansion, corruption, division and Barbarian tribes would have been enough in themselves. I do not know the other causes, but I am uncertain sexual morals got worse at the end of the empire.
But basic agreement: decline is sexual morals is a major reason for the decline of the West.
Thanks for this. I've made this point too in the past. Gibbon went to the other extreme, blaming the fall of Rome on Christianity which (he claimed) taught men to care only about the things of the next world (in which Gibbon did not believe) and ignore this-worldly necessities. Yet it does not appear late Rome neglected its worldly business, though the western empire was afflicted with bad leadership. But there's no evidence that late Rome was especially degenerate morally beyond the sort of baseline degeneracy one can find everywhere in every time. In some ways Rome may have gotten better.
Re: decline is sexual morals is a major reason for the decline of the West.
I have to disagree (surprising I know) because we have been through eras of great libertinism before. The Renaissance. The 18th century. These things appear to come in cycles. And the seeds of a new Puritanism (or maybe Victorianism) have already been sown, though they be slow to sprout and take root. The #MeToo thing is an example.
Gibbon certainly hated Christianity, and does make the charge you detail. But he wouldn't be a great historian (and such he is) if he posited a monocausal "explanation" for something like the fall of the Roman Empire, which "will always be remembered and is still felt by the nations of the earth." The interstitial chapters on weakness of a monarchy pretending to be something else, and especially the first three high altitude chapters posit many other reasons for what happened. And he goes out of his way to be fair to those Christians he finds admirable in a human way ("the intrepid Ambrose").
"we have been through eras of great libertinism before. The Renaissance. The 18th century"
True, but mostly confined to the elite folk who could (up to a point) "afford" that sort of degeneracy. I'm not sure that we're in the same state, since degeneracy seems to run all the way up and down the social; scale. We're in a different ball game now, I fear - and I think our technological and technocratic "advances," while they may prop up the decaying hulk longer than we may hope (or fear), will fail in the end - or else succeed in producing (I know the analogy is remote) a world of eloi and morlocks.
Often unrecorded but among the lowest orders there was a great deal of dysfunction too. The "Gin Lane" stuff in Britain is an example.
And these days most of us are those "elite" `given our standard of living. Though one can find plenty of people who are not bed hopping, and didn't even do that much of it in their "wild oats" days. Moralists (yes, that includes Rod too) often tar with overly broad brushes
Contraception, IVF and transgender surgery for the masses have rendered Christian moral teachings irrelevant to most people. Want sex - take a pill - use a condom. Can’t have children? Oh yes you can. Unhappy as a man - be a woman. Why not?Pregnant
- have an abortion. It will be just fine.We want what we want and we will have it even if we go extinct, which is likely.
Transgender surgery is rare as hen's teeth. And consider all the eunuch making in history. Yet those cultures endured centuries.
Well it depends on how rare hen’s teeth are. As far as transgender surgery goes- that I had to look up- 5000 to 20000 per year. If that’s hens teeth rare - ok.Eunuchs- look they were slaves! Not gender disphoric teenagers.The Ottomans seized the village- and guess what.But you know what, that wasn’t my point. My point was , individuals see the ability to be ultimate sovereigns of their desires. That could be considered a wonderful thing. So if you have no essence, and your existence is a matter of will , you can be what you want to be, biology , who cares! Ok - long term that kind of of fantasy strikes me as not conducive to biological or social reproduction. Could I be wrong, of course. Over time, I’ve been wrong about all kinds of things.
<<<we have been through eras of great libertinism before. The Renaissance. The 18th century.>>>
Nothing like today! C'mon - Fatherless, undisciplined children happily shoplift just under $1000 dollars worth of goods, car jack almost at will, etc. Out of wedlock birth are a near-majority. There was never a society in which a woman was expected to sleep around before marriage, probably something wrong if she didn't. There was never a society which male and female - part of the idealogy of family - were so confused that substantial numbers of people were convinced they were born as the wrong gender. Birth control, and a cheering media telling us what our morals should be, has made promiscuity common. It was around before, but as common as now? I think not.
Crime rates in the 18th and 19th centuries were astronomically high compared to today. We have stats on alcohol sales and on prostitution (generally legal back then) from the early years of the American republic. Since most alcohol was consumed by men, we have to conclude that lots and lots of guys were stumbling about drink as skunks by the end of each day. There's a reason Temperance took off when it did. As far as prostitution goes even in staid cities like Boston, there were so many ladies of the evening that a large fraction of men must have regularly patronized them.
Beware the tyranny of Now.
The tyranny of Now, which naysayers like you always seem to forget, is that due to technology and instant worldwide communication the rot is everywhere, even extending to most people's pockets. This is truly a new thing under the sun.
No, our technology merely makes us aware that such things are happening in parts distant. Back in Ye Olden Days there was plenty of "naughty nookie". Any town of any size at all had its "naughty lady on Shady Lane", larger towns might have a street walker or two, and maybe an actual "sporting house". Boozing was at absolutely epidemic levels. The use of narcotic drugs in so-called patent medicines ("Good for what ails ye") created scads of drug addicts. Cohabiting without benefit of clergy was common enough that many jurisdictions had laws (common law marriage) which imputed married status to such people-- among the Founding Fathers Ben Franklin was not married to his main squeeze as well as having at least one bastard son, and Gouvenour Morris was the kind of guy who, if he came to visit, you would advise the womenfolk to keep to their rooms. Need we even get into "yellow babies" and slave concubinage (as Margaret Mitchell euphemistically called it in GWTW)?
"No, our technology merely makes us aware that such things are happening in parts distant."
So technology plays no part in their spread? Complete and utter nonsense. Pornography was in no sense ubiquitous until it had the technological ability to become so. People in the past took drugs but drugs weren't "everywhere" in anything like the same manner they are today. Prostitution has always been around but it was confined to certain areas, except if you had money. Now it's almost as easily accessible as porn is.
You sound like the guy I once argued with on another website who put forth the idea that the porn problem is no greater now than it was in the past because after all, soldiers in WWI had dirty playing cards.
I like this point that the Roman Empire fell even though Christianity was radically improving family morals. Overturning them, in fact. I think a culture's myths need to be protected and fought for. Christ explicitly defeated the myths or gods of Rome. Rome had to fall. The woke left is explicitly trying to overturn and destroy/defeat the myths of the U.S. and the West in general. They must be defeated or the U.S. and the West will fall.
"Rome had to fall."
Or be transformed into something else. After all, it lasted until 1453.
Isn't there a case to be made that Christianity radically improved Rome's sexual morality AND this was part of the reason for its fall?
I tend to share Tolkien's antipathy to Rome.
I agree, on both counts (although I admire some facets of "East Roman" culture and civilization).
It is actually true that there was no clear break or moment when Rome ceased to be the Western empire and became early medieval Europe. Feudalism was, for all intents and purposes, the de facto form of administration in late Rome. As to the inflection point when Rome ceased to be a political entity, the Western empire was already dying in the 300s. The pivot to Byzantium wasn’t a product of convenience, but because the West was no longer governable in any meaningful sense. Much of this had to do with economic reasons - the economy had suffered because of massive deficit spending, and naive attempts to rein it in - but also because of gross political corruption and mismanagement.
I would suggest that the primary reason Rome ceased to exist, however, is very stark and little talked about because of the implications for our own modern state - simply put, people in Rome stopped feeling like there was any reason to try to keep propping the whole rotten mess up. Universal citizenship implemented by Caracalla meant that a major incentive to support and protect Rome was gone. The economy had become a poorly implemented command economy. General servitude due, being the end result of cruel tax policies, meant the end of any social or economic mobility (not to be reversed for a thousand years). Self-serving leadership at all levels meant that public officials long since had ceased to work to govern, but instead either milked the system or openly fought against each other or the state. Abandoning policies for settlement of barbarians meant that the barbarians were free to form their own states within Rome (that eventually became the nascent medieval kingdoms), and so on. Christianity, in spite of what Gibbon thought, had nothing to do with the fall of Rome. It had everything to do with giving up what had made Rome strong in the first place. We are on the same road, except that Christianity was something that made us strong, and we are giving it, and all the things that it brought with it, it it is only one thing of many.
The gradual cooling of the climate cut into agricultural yields, and serious epidemics affected population numbers. Both of these realities shrank the tax base yet did not shrink the Empire's obligations. Deficit spending did not really exist back then- money-lending was primitive. The response of the regime was to debase the coinage, leading to ruinous inflation until Diocletian and his successors replaced silver with gold as the standard (the Byzantine solidus was THE monetary standard for centuries well into the Middle Ages, even in the Islamic lands). The late empire did not have either the men or the money to maintain itself-- and that got a lot worse in the 500s.
You are correct that deficit spending, in a strict sense, did not exist. It is a convenient shorthand to sum of what was the ultimate effect of the spending and monetary policies of the time. In other words, the Western Empire could not afford to maintain itself. One other point is that trade had steadily shifted east, so the economic base of the west was further eroded. One last thing of note was that the infighting of the early 5th century meant that the attempts to reestablish control over various parts of the empire failed due to petty attempts to seize internal power. The 3rd century doomed Rome, but it took a while for it to finally get to the logical end.
A quibble but the East was always the richer, most populous, and most economically dynamic half of the Roman Empire.
Speaking of the climate I have abone to pick with you. Some of your Florida weather got out of the yard and is making itself a nusiance up here in ohio, would you please come up here and get it! :P It's predicted to be in almost in triple didgets on Saturday! (Off topic, but I was looking for an in)
Not sure where you are in FL, but I heard the rainy season has begun down there.
Oh, but it's our Christian duty to share! We've have some spare alligators we could send too.
The really severe rains were in South Florida. Up here we got the backwash of that, and could have used more.
I'll take the aligators, but be aware I intend to eat them.
They may have the same intention toward you.
In news of the weird there was a story not that long ago about a guy who was mourning the loss of his "emotional support alligator" whom some teenage pranksters apparently kidnapped and lost. I think I'll stick with housecats.
I'm sure they would. I spent my childhood from 2 to 11 in middle Georgia and grew up 2 miles from the Ocmulgee River. I was pretty much a free range kid and hadn't ranged out that far yet (it would have happened, we had nothing but fields and forest for quite some distance behind the house) but was under strict orders not to go to the river because of the aligators.
I think I saw that story. I felt really bad for the guy.
Well, that's the Pirenne thesis, right? That the structure of the empire was in place until Islam showed up. But the research unser Wirt references says that the traditional view--that there was rapid collapse following the barbarian invasions--is much closer to the truth.
It seems that it would be more accurate to say that Rome’s weakness by the point of mass barbarian incursion made it impossible to maintain any sort of political integrity at that point.
The other thing people forget is that Rome had dealt with barbarians since its existence, and had successfully assimilated many peoples. I guess by the time of the late western empire, Rome was unable to assimilate due to various factors that worked against effective governance, and also that the barbarians themselves no longer saw much advantage to assimilating.
The male heirs of Theodosios were doofuses and they squandered the order their capable father had left them. In the East capable new emperors soon arose, but in the West there was a long succession of short-lived incompetents.
Not so much the barbarian invasions (other than in Britain) as the demographic collapse of the 6th century due to the one-two punch of famine and plague. And in Italy the severity of Justinian's attempted reconquest.
All of the above in this portion of the thread.
The Pirenne Thesis, taken as referring primarily to the persistence of patterns of trade, commerce and "wandering about," albeit on a much reduced scale after ca. 480 - a date chosen arbitrarily as the date of the murder of Julius Nepos - and then worsened by the "Justinianic Plague" of the 540s - is not incompatible with a view stressing the effects of the decay of civilizational infrastructure throughout the Latin West.
Your list of Rome's problems is large and I agree. I would add that the violent transfer of emperors in the 200s weakened the Roman system. 36 emperors and 33 who died violently.
Whether this is true or not, I can't say but it's interesting. The other day, I was speaking to a retired police officer whose son is a police officer in the Kensington section of Philadelphia. For those of you who don't know, Kensington is where the open-air drug market is with addicts shooting up on the sidewalks and frozen like zombies in fentanyl-induced trances. There are numerous videos on Youtube showing scenes there that resemble the apocalypse. The retired police officer's son told his father that the Chinese were buying up lots of properties in Kensington where rowhomes are selling for $20,000. I asked him if the Chinese were doing anything with the properties to which he replied that they were just sitting on them. Imagine that? Our competitor buying the worst properties (as of today) in the region. Seems like they are playing the long game.
It has long been my pet theory, that Chinese Maoism is the true force behind the insanity of the far left in the West. There are simply too many parallels with Maoism 1.0 to ignore, especially the way it first infects educational institutions by appealing to "social justice" and fomenting revolution through radical change, denunciations, public shaming and even political violence (antifa, BLM, etc...).
That is indeed a threat and it wouldn't surprise me if China were behind it all, in order to weaken and eventually destroy the West.
On the other hand, China and other East Asian countries are hardly better. Most urban areas in East Asia have fertility rates that are a quarter of replacement levels (It's 0.5 in Seoul, instead of 2,1, which is the minimum required for a stable population).
I lived in Singapore in the 2000s and fertility rates there have been below replacement for decades now. No amount of ideology, social policy or incentives is going to turn that around. Singapore tried in the 80s, but it made little difference. Hungary has also tried in the past decade or so, to turn things around demographically, but despite the astronomical cost, it hardly made a difference to birth rates.
Simply put, urbanites don't need or want children, as they are little more than expensive and noisy pieces of furniture. Much easier to just have a pet to channel your fatherly / motherly feelings into. In contrast rural dwellers need a lot of children as it is free labour and they have plenty of space anyway. Social relations, especially in terms of relations between men and women, are in the toilet. This is again much further gone in East Asia, where young people have stopped dating and having sex altogether, not recently, but a couple of decades ago. The West is catching up, but it's not quite there yet.
As for LGBTQ+ acceptance, it is not widely known that other parts of the world have traditionally been far more accepting, than the West. In the Islamic world, homosexual relationships between men were extremely widespread, even the norm until about WW2 and the subsequent Islamisation wave, which in itself was caused by universal literacy. In other words, people started reading the Quran and taking its desert society teachings seriously, whereas previously only Imams could read and selectively interpret scripture.
Thailand has had LGBT acceptance for thousands of years and transgenderism has been widespread there for centuries. They even have a third gender in the Thai language, which is used by trans people and this isn't a new invention, has been around for many centuries, maybe even longer. If you think LGBT folk are numerous, you haven't been to Thailand, where it is common for young people to be LGBT in some form until later in life, when they decide to get married. Even China and India, both of which claim that LGBT is a western invention, have had widespread practices of this sort going back to ancient history. In actual fact, it was Christians who came in to many Asian countries and outlawed homosexuality through sodomy laws, a British legal term that has its roots in the Bible.
Singapore and India have only recently gotten rid of their colonial-era sodomy laws, which legalised homosexuality after centuries of prohibition.
Very astute. Some years ago I read a novel set in India called Narcopolis. It deals explicitly with the tradition of eunuch prostitution and opium use. This was traditional stuff not Western imported. One might also ponder Mishima( if you haven’t seen The Black Lizard - it’s a weird treat). Back in the 19th century Europeans used to go on what amounted to sex tours in North Africa. This isn’t obscure. Read up on Flaubert. What were Paul Bowles and William Burroughs doing in Tangier? Take a look at Passolonis film of the Arabian Nights partly filmed in Yemen. So while Rock and Roll might be a Western import, Sex and Drugs and transgenderism aren’t. You nailed something about the Islamic countries . If you read Mahfouz Cairo novels and the Iranian Blind Owl which are set in the early 20th century you get a clear picture of how those societies have changed. They are far more punctilious in their observance of Islamic law than they were.Westerners seem to have forgotten that the “ Orient” was once the realm of the senses , at least in their fantasies.
Foucault took those North African sex tours to a whole 'nother level. And the starry-eyed grad students regurgitating theories of power & language couldn't care less.
Yes anyone who is familiar with Foucault knows about that and some have suggested that this is a bit problematic. Overall it’s remarkable how much of a pass he gets . I saw him speak once and found it interesting. Foucault can be of some interest when you can figure out what he’s talking about. But he was definitely an operator and more than a bit of a conman.
When you saw Foucault (that's very cool) did he obfuscate? Was he clear in any way in his speaking? I've often wondered how such a dense and miserable writer could be so influential.
It was 1979 at NYU - Richard Senett was the host. I honestly can’t remember whether a translator was used.Foucault had a great look . The bald head, the glasses. I think he might already have had AIDS. What did he talk about. I don’t remember. Foucault can be interesting, particularly when he’s at his most Nietzschean. Forget the Marxist stuff. Looking at the sociology of life ( sorry for that - but I can’t think of a better way to say it)in terms of power is useful. Of course, it’s limiting and misleading. No life and truth aren’t mere power dynamics
There was disapproval of homosexuality in China before Christians came - and after all significant numbers never converted. I am not sure but what this disapproval was the type of thought said to be typical of Greeks and many ancients - the receiving male (if adult) was doing something "bad", chiefly because it was effeminate and the female role. However, the penetrator was more or less being natural, though neglecting his duty to procreate if that was all he did. Lesbianism was more not as seriously objected to, I think. At any rate, I'm not widely read on these things, but this is my current understanding.
We know the English officially frowned on it for years, but in reality most thought it something schoolboys got over, a developmental delay that would or should right itself.
Even in old Russia there were no laws against homosexuality until Peter the Great banned it in the army and among the clergy(!) It took Stalin to make lesbanism illegal.
That was a big item in Henry VIII's goons' case against the monasteries, that they were chicken coops of--what was that word Francis used?--that.
Translation: Buggery. Interesting .I did not know they were thinking that.
Yes. The commissioners were shocked shocked to find it, but find it they did. I don't know whether it was the epidemic they said it was, but it was another charge in the docket.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buggery_Act_1533
https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/learn/histories/lgbtq-history/walter-hungerford-and-the-buggery-act/
"but find it they did"
It was a widespread Henrician propaganda meme that the monasteries were dens of idleness and buggery, but I can't think, offhand, of any monks (or even abbots) prosecuted for it in the 1530s. Most of those who were executed - abbots and monks, I mean - were charged either with speaking (usually in private) against the King's "Supreme Headship" of the Church of England (which constituted treason according to the 1534 parliamentary legislation acknowledging - not "conferring" - the king's new title) or with felonious theft (trying to keep a treasured item, say a chalice, or a book from the monastic library, from the commissioners sent to inventory a monastery's possessions). If they did "find it," they made surprisingly little legal use of what they found.
Well, I'm glad to hear it was a meme. Goebbels got up to much the same thing in the '30s.
Cities have always been demographic sinks, with death rates in excess of birth rates, sustained mainly by in-migration of rural people. That's not an option for a city-state like Singapore.
And that is my point. Highly developed East Asian countries are over 90 percent urban, hence their populations are projected to disappear within a few generations, given that each generation will be a quarter of the size of the previous one. It will probably take less than a century for East Asians to disappear into the dustbin of History. Most Western countries are on the same path as well.
Well, no. It's not legitimate to extend any trend of today indefinitely out into the future. *Stuff* happens after all, and sometimes complex trends end up negating themselves.
Not Demography. Demography is destiny, as they say and these trends are now irreversible, baked into the cake. In the opposite direction, sure, high birth rates can come down and usually do over time. However, there has not been a single recorded instance of a society reversing a collapsing birth rate. In the case of China, the one-child policy and gender-selective abortions have made the current population collapse inevitable, there just aren't enough young people, particularly women left, who can reverse the decline, even if they started having more children. But there's no sign of that. China may not have more than a few years left as a major economic power, it is already undergoing major distress as the unsustainable chickens come home to roost.
No, destiny is destiny.
And history is littered with temporary demographic trends-- in fact there's no other kind.
And yes, there certainly are examples of falling birth rates reversing and rising again. In 15th century Britain for example. Or western Europe during the 17th century. Or for that matter, given that we reference it here, the late Roman Empire too-- it's not like Mediterranean Europe was stuck with permanently low birth rates.
Re: there just aren't enough young people, particularly women left, who can reverse the decline,
Um, no. Populations everywhere were once a minor fraction of what they are today. Yet there were enough young and fertile people to reverse any all demographic disasters, the only exceptions being instances where populations were completely annihilated (including by forcible merger into other conquering populations). Hence the disappearance of the Tasmanians, the Taino, and the Beothuk.
And again: STUFF HAPPENS.
I would push back on that a bit.
The European examples you gave were after major plagues, if I'm not mistaken and after the population had already collapsed. Sure, eventually, birth rates will recover, post-collapse, but from a much lower level and the population often doesn't fully recover for decades or centuries.
I actually looked for cases online, where a birth rate collapse has been successfully reversed and the examples usually cited are all sus.
France and Sweden have higher birthrates due to mass Islamic immigration. Hungary's birthrate rise as miniscule and Russia's is simply bad reporting, it probably never happened.
Demography is not destiny. That's a conceit of the left, for certain, and Ruy Teixeira in particular. If it were destiny, Florida would be a solid blue state today, Hillary would have won in a landslide, and Japan would be irrelevant.
Look destiny isn’t even destiny because there is no such thing as. There are trends . History does not have laws.
Another advantage the Chinese have is that it is a 94% Han Chinese nation and the minorities like the Tibetans and Uighurs are marginalized. America was 85% white in 1960 and a much more confident nation. America is now about 65% white and very disunited. Adding to that is the rapid decline of Christianity in America leading to America's moral collapse. America does have advantages, however. America doesn't have the stultifying conformity of the Chinese. Americans are energetic and we take risks. Our land is unusually productive.
We also have the advantage of not having a shrinking population, a higher fertility rate, and we got rich before we got old. Oh and we are not reliant on international shipping for oil
Re: For contemporary readers, one striking aspect of the book is that Zimmerman published it in 1947
Yes, before the volcanic winter of the 6th century was known (the references in ancient documents were dismissed as fanciful exaggerations) and when many historians even doubted that the plague pandemic of the 6th century was all that big of deal.
Civilizations may be conquered by other people. Plenty of historical examples there, and that often comes down to the fortunes of war. But civilzational collapse has always required natural disaster-- maybe an abrupt one, like the volcano Thera devastating the Aegean basin and doing in the Minoans, or maybe a slower one that gradually destroys agriculture. And yes, with good old global warming we are definitely at risk. Or we could have an abrupt downfall: A strong solar flare (Carrington Event) would bring it all down, all across the planet.