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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 3, 2025

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My understanding is that, although the people's of Europe were divided by religion, they were still WEIRD in the modern sense. They were fighting for their own universalist religions, not for their clans. They were wars of ideas, rather than of peoples.

No true Scotsman?

I think you’d have to draw a really strange category to exclude all the deeply ethnic conflicts. There was plenty of Slav- or Jew- or Walloon- or Catalonian-hating going on.

Non-WEIRD populations fall hard for universalist religions- Islam and Communism are historically recent examples- all the time. The kind of western European identity in which the liberal urheimat can be called homogenous did exist in the high middle ages, with the identity of 'Latins'- but that idea disappeared into sectarian violence in the sixteenth century. The English king's marriage to a French Catholic during the beginning of the enlightenment was hugely controversial and hated by the people to the point of subsequently being made illegal and France withdrew the edict of toleration in the same period. These countries were ground zero for liberalism.

'Religious tolerance among Christians' is itself a liberal idea, although perhaps rooted in the protestant tendency to see themselves as on the same team despite their gigantic theological differences. Perhaps that's why you don't see serious intellectual reactionism coming without Catholic roots; the protestant classical conservatives who aligned against Napoleon put no effort into ideology and even the moderate English version of classical conservatism tends to be aligned with high church Anglicanism when it isn't outright Catholic.

Islam and Communism

That’s seriously stretching the definition of universalist. Both of those ideologies/religions draw pretty sharp distinctions between groups of people, with fairly extreme hostility

My understanding is that, although the people's of Europe were divided by religion, they were still WEIRD in the modern sense. They were fighting for their own universalist religions, not for their clans. They were wars of ideas, rather than of peoples.

The most important intra-European religious conflicts in my lifetime have been in former Yugoslavia and Northern Ireland. In both cases religion was very obviously a proxy for tribal identity, not a religious thing. Unfortunately this doesn't answer the question, because they both happened in transHajnal Europe.

It is, of course, the whole point that religious conflict in cisHajnal Europe is unheard of, except in so far as it involves immigrants from transHajnal places.