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Notes -
I’ve honestly never understood the appeal. I’m seeing all kinds of Twitter stuff from tradcaths and orthodox and it’s like they’re playing a game. Like they’re arguing about very odd theological beliefs— things that honestly have little to do with the lived experience of a religion. And they’re constantly calling other people— often priests and bishops heretical. I think at least half of the tradcaths who pride themselves on attending a Latin Catholic Church they can’t understand are also convinced that pope is a heretic. It seems almost LARP to me, a love for the medieval church and a world of European Christian culture.
I can understand the sentiment of wanting to go back to a simpler life. There’s some part of me that would very much like to live in a 19th century log cabin or something or maybe the Amish. I just don’t see why you’d choose religion based on aesthetics.
Most of the online tradcaths or orthobros don't seem to actually practice the religious parts. I think they're attached to very old, based ideologies that look cool and aren't too foreign and sure, larp is probably a good description.
Actual literal rad trads exist, and are a numerically growing group which is more or less analogical to fundamentalism and tends to be a major source of human capital for right wing political movements but most are not very aware of the latest twitter spats. Whether you ascribe the growth to converts or a high fertility rate is probably a litmus test for your views on the phenomenon(and both explanations are true). For clarity's sake I tend to refer to twitterati larpers as tradcaths and people who go to Latin mass as rad trads, because these are indeed mostly separate groups of people.
My views is that maybe 5-10% of converts are sincere, about 90% are LARPING, but much of the growth is births. There’s just too much talk about the trappings to be realistic. I’ve more of less come around to believing in high church Protestant Christianity as the genuine belief, but I don’t look for things like aesthetics of the building or service so much as genuine belief and that the general idea actually makes sense.
There are not enough natal rad trads for this belief to be true.
It's entirely possible that post-covid growth is mostly births. But rad trads being common enough to take note of is a recent phenomenon. Birth rates are high by western standards but, despite the elder's desires, are not Amish or sub saharan africa tier. Mathematically there were a lot of converts in the 2010s and an enormous spike around covid, and lots of these people are very religious functionally normie but hardline religious right types who have never heard of HBD(once again, the online tradcaths are probably mostly larpers but your average rad trad does not know about them and finds stereotypes for racism or love or Hitler to be confusing. These people don't seem to ever actually go to church and it's fair to refer to these as separate groups of people with some overlap. Normie rad trads don't censor the internet beyond porn blockers the way orthodox Jews often do but most of their online media is spoonfed to them- similar to the general population. Most of my coreligionists are aware that there is antisemitism associated with their faith and think it's overblown but literally do not know about the association with extremely online far right wingers and think that anyone who worries about 'traditional Catholic extremists' or whatever is a James Martin SJ type worried about being demographically replaced within the Catholic church).
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