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The religious revival is notable for only really happening among heterosexual white men. I believe this is because it’s become clear to everyone that the ruling belief system has no place for heterosexuals or white men, and they’re searching for an alternative belief system and community that values and valorizes heterosexuality instead of rejecting and demonizing it. The young straight men I know are either depressed and demoralized, or they’re religious.
Old religions have the social proof and track record to do this. They’re also attracted to personal development and ideological purity, which is why traditional Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and to a lesser extent confessional Protestantism, are the religions of choice. Evangelicals bend too far to try and appeal to the world with laser shows and electric guitars, and mainlines try too hard to appeal to the world with ideological indifference.
But the problem is it takes two to tango, and straight women are the movers and shakers of the ruling belief system. So you’re ending up with straight men crowding into Latin masses and Divine Liturgies, with the women there so crowded with male attention that it might as well be Tinder or so obsessed with a rigid sense of gender roles that no spiritually-sensitive man could ever be masculine enough for them. The one exception I’ve found is the genuinely rad-trad Catholics who are comfortable attending mass at SSPX chapels, where there do seem to be a lot of women. This certainly has a lot to do with having 7 children to a family, approximately half of which will statistically be women.
I don’t actually know if this current wave of religious revival will last, if it can’t reproduce it can’t persist. Rad trad Catholics will, but I don’t have much optimism for the future of Eastern Orthodoxy in America as I think the orthobro converts will burn themselves out, and the evangelistic and phyletistic contradictions at the heart of Orthodox ecclesiology will eventually show their ugly face.
Maybe this is just local conditions but in my (heavily convert) Orthodox parish a supermajority of people have converted as couples or families, and I've not noticed anything like the conditions you are describing among those who are/were single. If anything it's been the single young women who have been most desperate to get married -- which they are succeeding at. (Though I wouldn't read as much into that part, the sample size is pretty small.)
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Thanks for the mention!
Yeah, I have no idea how the coming years are going to shake out. Looking to political data (since that's what I know has been tracked), there's clearly a large gap between young men and women between conservatives and liberals. I know South Korea's had the same problem. People don't exactly like marrying across partisan lines, so I imagine that'll be a source of some dissatisfaction? Presumably this presidential election will have one of the largest gender splits in a while.
I wish we had better religious stats, I'd find that quite interesting.
In a lot of ways this election does seem to be the men vs. women election -- abortion, childless cat ladies, blowjob Kamala, Republicans are weird, couch fucking, horse semen. Everything's just so... sexual.
I realize we've had discussions about politicians' sex lives before, but this election is simply NSFW. Genuinely. I've heard way too much about candidates' sex organs than I would have liked to hear in a lifetime. It's like the story of our election is being written by a horny teenager. Is this just what happens when you throw off all sexual restraint and couple it with mass sexlessness?
And put it online.
Yeah. This also feels like the first real internet election in the sense that the memes are defining the campaigns. That’s why the election feels so fake.
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Rad trad Catholics have a TFR of 3.6 based off of shitty internal data. This is almost certainly being dragged down a bit by a lower than desired marriage rate. No idea if that’ll get fixed. 3.6 sounds like it should be above replacement when you account for generational apostasy, and most outside observers seem to agree that it is, but the apostasy rate isn’t really known- other than higher for men than women.
Proportionally, there are more rad trad Catholics in France- much more hostile to religious minorities- than in the USA, so there’s almost certainly some level of ability to weather hostility in place. Rad trad institution building is, however, strongly hampered by things like internal divisions.
This is news to me. What do you think is causing this?
-Actual IRL tradcaths socialize their daughters to be shy, stick close to their parents, and not party or stay out late. This makes it harder for young people to meet on their own.
-Actual IRL tradcaths expect men to be full time employed in potential provider roles before beginning to date. The geographic effects of this(young men having to move away to get good jobs) tend to distort local gender balances, and young women are socially expected to live with their parents until they marry so it can’t self-correct. There’s also some minor effects with social skills but most men figure those out quickly enough.
-Gender roles in the community can have a gender-segregating effect which combines with a cultural prejudice that the man pursues to make it harder for young people to meet organically.
-Some young people are becoming monks/priests/nuns. Worrying about whether to do so isn’t the main factor but it makes it mildly more difficult to escalate from ‘meeting’ to ‘dating’ for a population which is already a bit awkward with the opposite sex.
-Social uberconservatism can make it difficult to date by imposing lots of extra rules.
-As mentioned above, you can’t date unless that couple can have the woman stay home full time. Student loans are sometimes a factor taking women out of the marriage market for that reason- payments simply need to be bought down first.
The first two factors are definitely the big ones. If the community were better organized I suspect there would be some equivalent of shidduch independently derived but it’s not. Most influential lay community members recognize the situation as a problem but will not coordinate well enough with each other to make more than partial, patchwork progress.
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