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Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 15, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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

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The black church is not always viewed as positively among cultural conservatives as the evangelical church, or the white Catholic or orthodox churches. Part of that is politics but part of it is quite literally that liberal views on sexual morality are not viewed as being compatible with helping the black community fixing its broken culture, because that broken culture is viewed as being downstream of promiscuity and poor family values.

I remember my mother- red tribe leftist- saying ‘black kids don’t have dads because their churches put women as heads of household’. Liberal views about family, gender, and sexuality are probably more of a mainline Protestant thing, but their existence in the black church takes a lot of the blame for black dysfunction in the broader red tribe.

Interesting! I've never heard that critique, possibly because I'm less into the Protestant infighting.

Still, I'd contend that it's much more likely that a person who says that inner cities need more religion would still say that despite that critique of existing black churches, they would simply say they need more proper churches.

Probably, yes. And there are distinctively black socially conservative religious movements, such as NOI and the black Hebrew Israelites. For some reason these groups are no more popular with the religious right than with anyone else, despite being sociologically pretty similar. On the other hand black KJV-onlyists seem popular with their evangelical counterparts despite predictable voting differences.

I would be very interested in examinations of the outcomes of kids born in these groups.