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It’s all le based ‘Christ is King’ memes, how many of these angry young men actually believe in Christianity? Most are no less atheist than Richard Dawkins fans in 2010, or the average /pol/ack. It’s not a genuine religious revival.
American Reformer, the publication he went after, is great, and fairly serious (fairly niche, though).
My sense is that there is genuinely some shift towards Christianity. Certainly some of those are only memeing, but not all.
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I think many of them really do. Sometimes it doesn’t look like it because they grew up in an incredibly worldly secular environment without any doctrinaire religion or teaching in the scriptures, and they are desperately trying to claw back their faith. So it sometimes looks a bit cargo-culty and hypocritical, their twitter posts alternating schizophrenically between synthwave deus vult crusader memes and anime porn.
Even if the environment itself weren’t secular, I think it would still happen for the same reason that Pride parades happen. These people want to be seen, they have a need to reclaim the idea that it’s okay to be a loud and proud Christian and to reject the implication that there’s something shameful about having an actual belief in Christ and Christianity. I don’t even think it’s about them not understanding it, it’s about being in the faces of secular culture and saying that we are Christians and we’re not ashamed of it, and we’re not going anywhere.
The reverse memes are everywhere. Christianity is seen as backwards, bigoted, and something that only uneducated rubes take seriously. You’d rarely, if ever, see the religion itself portrayed positively in media that isn’t explicitly Christian. The best you can hope for is that the media ignores religion, but often there’s a hostility to it. The Cathedral hates believing Christians, most likely because they represent a stronghold they don’t have control over. The school system (unless it’s explicitly a Christian school) teaches secular atheism at every opportunity. TV and movies do the same, with a healthy dollop of “look at how stupid Christianity is, they’re hateful bigots, they’re Christian Nationalists, they’re kind of fascist and want to force everyone to live like them.” This doesn’t happen as much to other religions. Muslims are expected to secularize a bit, but nobody will shame a Muslim for being a Muslim. Jews get a complete pass — wearing a yarmulke doesn’t really bother the Cathedral so much. Buddhists get no pushback, in fact if a white person becomes Buddhist, it’s considered a good thing, and anyway meditation is popular as stress relief.
I find myself wanting to be more loud and proud in such an environment. Maybe not on Twitter, but I find myself wanting to buy and wear Christian clothing just to sort of show that I am one and we exist whether or not the rest of you like it. I’ve return to high church Christianity, and I think I’m getting tired of everything not explicitly made by and for Christians being outright hostile towards Christianity. Is such a thing a version of a Deus Vult edit? I don’t know, but I think it’s where a lot of people are right now.
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I mean, do they believe in God? Do they believe in the literal truth that Jesus Christ is the son of God and part of God and was sent for the salvation of mankind? Do they believe that our father art in heaven? Do they believe in the resurrection? These fundamental articles of faith are central to belief in Christianity. Unlike the beginning of Genesis and other Old Testament stories they can’t be handwaved as metaphor.
I do. I can’t definitively speak for any of the others. But I think a lot of them do. Many people present their true beliefs in an ironic fashion on the internet.
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I am basically this guy. Although I was raised culturally Church of England, my parents and intellectual climate growing up were utterly atheist. After spending my formative years in an environment where real belief was both ridiculous and infra dig, I am no longer capable of genuine faith.
I can consider myself Christian intellectually, but except through a miracle I will never be able to have the true faith that others have, and my little faith will never console me or sustain me against the secular gods that I worship despite myself. So it goes. I can only try to do better for the next generation.
Well, fortunately, if you consider yourself a Christian intellectually, then miracles are possible.
Yes :) I used the phrase entirely literally.
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I get a lot of mileage out of the difference between IRL rad trads(who would, upon seeing the screen name 'tradcathgroyper1488', wonder what a groyper is that 1487 other people wanted to be one) and online tradcaths. But actual rad trads are far right enough to invite FBI surveillance and well organized enough to make the FBI stop it.
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My wife and I have been having some very deep and thoughtful conversations about becoming practicing Christians, even though we weren't raised with it, and really don't believe in it. Funnily enough, both our sets of parents actively kept us away from religion due to their bonkers Baptist upbringing, which seemed to revolve around what a piece of shit they were and that every single thought they have will send them to hell.
So why would we turn to Christianity in our 40's, after a lifetime of atheism? We are desperately seeking some sort of cultural and institutional protection from liberalism run amok. Or wokeness, or neoliberalism, or whatever you call it. We're willing to traumatize our daughter with stories of burning in hell over her being taught that she can mutilate and sterilize herself to solve all her problems in Kindergarten. It's not a choice we particularly relish, but it feels like a choice forced on us and it's an easy one to make.
But we want to find a sect of Christianity that isn't pussies. We don't want a sect of Christianity that will start inviting drag queens to teach Sunday school because they don't want anyone to feel bad, or they feel like they need to appeal to "modern audiences". This has slowly lead us to maybe trying to find an Orthodox church of some sort? Everything more Western European just feels totally pozzed these days, and we don't trust it.
And I'll be perfectly honest, something about the way Trump survived that assassination attempt just, I can't get over it. It's literally enough to make me wonder if there is a god and he saved him. Turning his head at exactly the right moment, exactly the right way, to get away with nothing but a minor flesh wound is nothing short of miraculous. Has there ever been a failed assassination that failed by such a narrow margin before? I know politicians have been shot and survived before, but not like that.
I guess my point is, what is a genuine religious revival supposed to look like?
Look into the old-style Protestant denominations. Not the mainlines, those are all got captured by the liberals, and most of the conservatives fled. And the evangelical megachurches won't have the sturdiness you're looking for. But look at an OPC, URCNA, PCA (though a bit less trad) and several others in the Reformed world, and LCMS or WELS for things in the Lutheran world. There's also ACNAs for anglicans, but my sense is that they're more hit-or-miss. (If you direct message me your area, I could look up some maps and find you some local churches.)
Why? I could get into details of theology, but I don't get the sense that that's currently the sort of thing that you care about. But the institutional Protestant denominations are certainly more American of a thing than e.g. Eastern Orthodoxy, if that matters to you at all. I imagine it's worth looking at, at least.
The publication that James Lindsay hoaxed, American Reformer, is actually pretty great. (See, for example, this recent gem.) You'll probably have trouble finding Protestant churches that are quite as based as American Reformer, but you should certainly be able to find some that are solid, if you know where to look.
Ideally, nation-scale repentance and belief, that expresses itself in reformation of life. Love of God and neighbor. Zealousness for good works. Piety. Striving to put to death the sin within us.
If you mean to ask whether your turn towards Christianity is legit, well, it sounds like you're not just doing it for the cultural benefits (you think God might exist). There's more to Christianity than the bare fact that God exists, but that's certainly a start.
I do affirm though, that our thoughts would suffice to send us to hell—Jesus is pretty clear, for example, that lusting breaks the law against adultery—but for those in Christ, his death atones for our sins.
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The Church of Christ has been good for me. It has its foibles, but it's decentralized so there's no way to skinsuit it from the top. Individual churches may not be immune to lady ministers and Rainbow politics, but they are generally quite resistant to them.
As for belief, it seems to me that the best approach for most atheists moving in this direction starts with interrogating what human beliefs are and how they actually work. The popular narrative is that beliefs are forced by evidence through a deterministic process; once people have adopted this belief, they note that contrary beliefs are not being forced by the subsequent evidence they encounter, and so conclude that the evidence for those contrary beliefs must not be very strong, and so can be safely discarded. This creates a system of self-reinforcing circular logic that is nearly impervious to contradiction so long as it is not examined too closely.
If you examine the process by which beliefs are formed and modified, though, you will clearly see that this narrative is very clearly false. Beliefs are not forced by evidence through a deterministic process, but rather very clearly chosen through an act of will. We reason from axioms, and axioms are necessarily chosen pre-rationally.
It seems to me that people who find genuine belief in God impossible are trying to believe in God in defiance of their own axioms, which is never going to work well. The solution is to confront the axioms themselves in particular and the nature of axioms generally, and to internalize that the consensus Rationalist Materialist narrative is not nearly as seamless as it presents itself. This ought, it seems to me, free them up to allow doubt to work for their faith rather than only against it.
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I am Eastern Orthodox and would be glad to recommend a church if you DM me (especially if you happen to live in the Southeastern US or the US in general - though if you feel like the walls of wokeness are really closing in I'm guessing you may live in a very blue area).
Thoughts on some of your questions/concerns:
I don't think you have to choose between wokeness and the fear of hellfire. Traditional/high church Christians in this day and age tend to be fairly sophisticated when it comes to hell (you might be more likely to encounter people who have full blown universalist tendencies, though I may be generalizing too much from my own experience). The early church fathers tended to be fairly nuanced on damnation. CS Lewis' The Great Divorce is a good example that is more modern. My point is - I don't think you have to worry too much about someone feeling the need to scare your daughter in some crude way in order to teach her Christian orthodoxy.
What is a genuine religious revival supposed to look like? I think it would look something like the strategy of the early Christians. Scott recently wrote about this, and N.S. Lyons writes about it here (he speaks of conservative strategy in the piece, but in the comment section he confirms that Christianity is a successful example).
(apologies if this is too promotional or inappropriate in some way - this is my first time posting after a year+ of lurking)
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Depending on where you are you can also trying looking for a G3/Continuing Anglican parish. They've avoiding a lot of modern insanity by breaking away from the Episcopal Church over the ordination of women.
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Some thoughts.
Over the past year, I've trained my brain to be Christian after two decades of hard materialism since age 14 or so. Miracles didn't play a role. Rather, I decided there was at least a plausible chance personal theism was true — this came from meditating on why I'm not a p-zombie, and why I have powerful aesthetic preferences which seem unmoored from selection pressures. Suspending my materialist assumptions, with great effort, I moved through life with the constant idea that (a) something was actively providing my existence, and (b) it was actively observing me.
Have I brainwashed myself? Possibly. But it feels increasingly obvious that that something is there, and it has been speaking to me for a long time.
After this 'religious revival' came the task of seeking the most plausible source of divine revelation. IMO the evidence for the legitimizing claim of Christianity is an order of magnitude above any other candidate, and its actual theology (try Mere Christianity and Problem of Pain by CS Lewis) matches what "something" was steering me towards as an atheist.
Perhaps these online anons larping "Christ is king" and parents pursuing churches for their kids will brainwash themselves to real religion, too.
I had good luck with my local Catholic parish. From what I can tell, female ordination, accepting divorce, and gay marriage initiates the pozzing death spiral in any Christian denomination, so watch out for those. Or perhaps it's that only pozzed churches can reconcile those with the scriptural evidence.
Unregulated thoughts do indeed lead to hell. "In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." Hateful, lustful, or prideful thoughts reinforce themselves in a vicious cycle towards a mind consumed by hate, lust, and/or pride — this is the death of the psuche (psyche, 'soul-life') against which God mercifully cuts short bios life to prevent a descent into infinite depravity.
Yes, it is a hard teaching, and not one for four-year-olds. No, you will not find a "non pussy" church that doesn't take the wide gate leading to hell extremely seriously.
Are you able to expand on how you achieved that? Particularly how you got from suspending materialism to (a) and (b)?
Asking as someone curious who took two months out this year for a walking pilgrimage meditating on similar themes. I didn't have much struggle suspending my materialistic worldview (after all it's a model of reality, not reality itself, and as you say there are salient aspects of experience that it doesn't currently explain), and I'm about as sure as I can be that I was genuinely open to a religious or spiritual experience. While it was extremely beneficial and enriching, if anything I felt the absence of the something you describe.
Sure!
I didn't know the word at the time, but the technique is something Catholics call "active recollection". Periodically throughout the day, I would perform a kind of rapid partial body scan, thinking 'Where does this there-ness in my hand come from?' or similar. And then I would close my eyes and ignore everything external, and "push" my mind's watchfulness inward, looking for someone looking back.
According to a prayer manual I read later, this is one method of 'putting yourself in the presence of God', which is precondition to mental prayer. Unfortunately, according to prayer theory, God initiates contact and you merely respond, so I can't promise this technique will work for anyone reading this.
I performed this mental ritual especially in the morning when waking up. The awareness, or perhaps the fear, of God continued for ten, twenty minutes, an hour afterward, and eventually started riding with me as a constant companion, like a depersonalized super-superego perched on my shoulder.
What does God feel like? It is changing as my prayer life develops, and it changes within prayer as I go deeper. God (the Father) feels like an ocean: he does not seemingly come to greet you, but you descend into Him, where it is cold and dark and you fear for your safety. And then there is what Christians call the holy spirit, which is like rain, and it washes you towards the ocean. Depending on what it wants from your prayer, it can fall on you as tears, reconciliation, and immense catharsis (this is what most people want from religion); other times it is intellectual, and ideas will arrive fully formed in your mind, accompanied with a "gentle breath" of overpowering peacefulness, often at odds with the content of its ideas. (A few months ago, the holy spirit pacifically informed me that heaven is somewhat like being tortured to death.)
Come to think of it, here's something else.
When I was age 12, I learned to masturbate. I started creating a "wall" around my mind. I would imagine a small point in the center of my mind and "push" everything out, to a 5 foot radius around me. I would put my force field up whenever I was doing the deed or having sexual thoughts. To anyone observing me, I would say they weren't allowed, they weren't allowed.
I forgot I even used to do this until a few months ago. The universe felt dead and my thoughts "alone" for twenty-odd years between then and now.
In retrospect, my early meditations were unconsciously about breaking "the wall", and allowing for things "beneath", "between", or at any rate very intimate with my thoughts. (Psalm 139 relevant: "If I ascend to the heavens, you are there; if I lie down in Sheol, there you are.") Before, I had unconsciously felt there was some "private room" I could withdraw to and consider the world freely, from an spectator's remove. Ironically, I even assumed this when meta-contemplating my own thoughts and desires from a materialist perspective. Of course, whether one accepts the framework of materialism or theism, no such room can exist.
Thanks for the detailed response, I appreciate it. I'll have a look into active recollection.
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You could try a Latin mass if you're looking for something western and consistently very conservative(although much more normie than the motte). Remember among Orthodoxy there are groups which in practice are not much more conservative than normie episcopalians and there are groups which are very conservative and they freely cross-pollinate with each other.
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Wouldn't the best option be to not do what your parents did but in reverse? They flee the bonkers traditionalism that pushed so many people away and create the woke movement, you flee the woke movement back into the arms your parents fled from.
Doesn't seem as if it is likely to go any better next time round does it? Then your daughter flees the hell and damnation you thrust upon her and becomes whatever replaces wokeness in 20 years time or whatever. Turbo-wokeness or Satanfarianism or something.
That doesn't seem as if it will actually be any better for her. Do you think your only options are risking she "mutilates" herself or "mutilating" her mentally by enforcing a fear of hell and damnation that you yourself don't even really believe? Just..don't do either. You can expose her to both points of view and educate her about the risks and rewards of each. Give her the tools to be her own person, however that turns out.
Without bragging, that was how I did with my three kids (adults now) and they all turned out to be well adjusted, either with families of their own or heading that way. You don't have to run from one extreme to the other.
And my parents story is very similar to yours for what it is worth, fleeing a restrictive religious sect (though in my parents case because this was Northern Ireland decades back they still had to take us to a Protestant church, for appearances sake), and becoming much more permissive and hating that upbringing.
If they are adults now, they weren't raised in the environment we now fear. You weren't contending with the Kindergarten curriculum including propaganda about how you can choose your own gender. Or the fact that it's being done in secret as much as possible. How do you counter lessons you don't even know are being given? Once a teacher who may spend more time with your child than you do inculcates an evil world view unopposed in a four year old's mind, it's fiat accompli.
If you are dealing with teenagers, sure, you can present both sides of an issue and maybe they can make an informed decision. This simply does not exist with 4 year olds.
To say nothing of the fact that while it may be possible, we feel atomized, afraid, and alone. We want a community that can back us up and help us not feel like we're the lone holdouts against this new state religion.
No they were raised in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and the Culture war I was trying to stop infecting them was a rather more deadly one. Hatred of Catholics was very common (given I grew up in about the most Loyalist areas there are) and many kids ended up in the paramilitaries, which was the thing I was striving to stop, that particular pernicious influence.
But I think you are wrong, you can start from a very young age to explain the things you want them to understand, kids absorb things from their surroundings and you have to get ahead of that whether it is explaining what a Taig or Fenian is, to what the word trans means (obviously very simplified) You are not going to be able to control everything they learn, so you have to make sure you are ahead of whatever they are going to get exposed to, and that means you have to start young, whatever it is you fear they are going to pick up. By 3 kids can certainly understand the concept of private areas and bad touches, by 5 to 6 they can understand much more. They can't reason through the socio-political implications of the IRA, and the UDR, but they can tell you if someone was calling the lone Catholic boy in the school a Fenian, or talking about how their Daddy has a baseball bat with nails in for Catholics, or if someone tries to talk to them about their body not feeling like their own or what have you.
Community is valuable, but if part of the point of a community is to raise your kids better, one that drove your own family away with (in your own words) bonkers behaviours may not be the one to pick. We must learn from the histories of our forebears after all. I could have gone back to the Plymouth Brethren sect my Dad left, and certainly it would have avoided the paras..because they would have had no tv, no radio, and virtually no contact with the outside world. It is a tight knit community. But it is also a very restrictive one, and I think attempting to raise my kids in a belief system I do not personally believe in is also likely to be fairly corrosive.
I sympathize, and I hope you find a good solution for you and your family.
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Unironically, have you considered Islam? Depending on how loosely you interpret "sect of Christianity" it may well satisfy that condition. You can basically guarantee it's not getting pozzed, at least not within your daughter's lifetime and regardless you can't deny that Muhammad's Arabian warlord inspired philosophy is a lot more Chad than Christian slave morality.
Unironically, it has been considered, but it's a hard sell for lots of reasons. In a world where there is not a single Christian sect that isn't fully onboard mutilating and sterilizing children as early as possible, I guess you make due with what you have. But short of that we're likely to exhaust all other options before we resort to Islam.
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In 1912, while giving a speech in Milwaukee, Theodore Roosevelt was shot in the chest. The bullet was slowed by Roosevelt’s steel eyeglass case and by a single-folded paper copy of his speech, such that Roosevelt’s injury was minor enough to allow him to deliver his scheduled speech in full, beginning with the lines, “Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot — but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.” Roosevelt also implored the crowd not to lynch the would-be assassin, and instructed the police to take him into custody without incident. (Roosevelt would carry the bullet in his chest for the remainder of his life.) Trump’s fist-pumping was undeniably badass, but I think Teddy has him beat.
As for your general question, I’ve had a similar thought process about religious conversion. I’ve found the Latter-Day Saints faith particularly appealing, particularly given my strong family connection to the church. Like you, I have no illusions about the fundamental truth claims at the heart of the religion, and I find the Christian foundation of it just as uninspiring as I found it fifteen years ago. However, while I could never credibly promise orthodoxy, I think I could manage Mormon orthopraxy — a commitment to the behavioral constraints demanded by the religion. Quitting coffee would be a massive stumbling block, although as long as they’ve got some workaround allowing me to still consume a comparable amount of caffeine I could manage it. Most of the other commandments are ones I’m already more-or-less observing, whether voluntarily or otherwise.
They seem prepared to weather the pressures of wokeness better than nearly any other Christian (or Christian-adjacent) denomination, and are also far more deeply-rooted in American culture than Orthodoxy is.
Caffeinated soda and energy drink are, as far as I know, not against the official rules.
I mean, I would have to drink a lot of caffeinated soda to match my current caffeine intake from coffee, and I’d be ingesting all of the sugar and corn syrup alongside it. Energy drinks would be a bit better, although still significantly worse for me than black coffee, and with a bunch of additives that make me jittery. Doable, but suboptimal for sure.
Energy drinks often have far higher caffeine than all coffee barring like 44oz of strong drip.
Oh I’m well aware. I switched from energy drinks to coffee for health reasons.
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Not having any real knowledge of their positions or practices, I just did a search and got a few statements from them on the topic. Seems kinda vague. They don't seem to prohibit ye olde Trumpian diet coke. Frankly, they don't seem to prohibit just literally taking caffeine pills or putting caffeine anhydrous into any regular food/beverage. There are some typical warnings about caffeine addiction being bad (and it is, btw; from the sound of it, purely from a non-religious standpoint, you might want to consider changing your consumption to improve your material life), but it sure seems like one of those issues where if you're mostly quiet about it, they probably won't give you grief or even really tell you that it's going to wreck your spiritual soul or whatever.
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This is exactly what Mormons do.
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As far as I know, caffeinated soda is seen as a viable workaround. I don’t think there is any prohibition on pre-workout type supplements, so there are definite alternatives.
As far as weathering wokeness, I wouldn’t bet money on it for long. They seem to be slower to modernize than all but tradcath and separatist sects like the Amish and Haredim, but the Mormon church has liberalized substantially over the last 30 years. The Mormon fertility rate has dropped almost to the national median. Age at marriage is going up. BYU has LGBT clubs, although though the honor code forbids sex outside of marriage.
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Our family has done this, though not Orthodox.
Congregationalist but not affiliated with any of the woke denominations.
There are no pride flags, BLM banners or lady ministers. The other men in the bible study are normal, married, most with children. One or two would help me dispose of a body if necessary.
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To be honest I have had similar thoughts from time to time. My conclusion is that I cannot be that dishonest with myself or the people around me and I could never justify it with pride to my children. I have talked to enough Mormon missionaries to know that I am not like them. They are not saying to themselves "well this is totally untrue but it's kind of based so I'll play along." If I joined them on those grounds it would be an insult to everyone involved and they wouldn't want me if I said that to them honestly. I have to believe there is a way forward that I can follow with intellectual honesty and I encourage you to do the same.
Why are you convinced it's false?
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So, my last paragraph is trying to get at, we don't feel like we are being dishonest. I have no illusions that it's not probably motivated reasoning, but my wife and I have both found ourselves increasingly drawn to a belief in god we never had before due to the state of the world.
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I don’t think it’s possible to be a Christian (or a Muslim, for that matter) and not truly believe. Judaism is a mixed bag since it’s more of an ethnotribal identity, but certainly there too belief is strongly preferable because it anchors most practice.
In previous phases of religious revival (including the rapid growth of evangelical Christianity in the US in the 1970s and 1980s, and the great revival movements of the 19th century) almost all lay revivalists already believed in God even if their practice was limited or nonexistent and even if their lives were not necessarily particularly Christian. Without that, I’m not sure if it’s possible.
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