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These are good points, but my larger thesis here is that the method by which Christianity spread, and the political and economic model employed by those spreading it, strikingly mirrors the way that Blue ideology is colonizing and homogenizing Red countries and regions today. Furthermore, the people resisting forceful conversion to Christianity by their own local cosmopolitan elites were precisely the Reds of their day. They were salt-of-the-earth normal people, defiantly clinging to their proud ancestral traditions. They weren’t even allowed to continue to practice their religion privately; the state knew that in order to secure long-term the power and legitimacy of its new ideology, it had to stamp out any displays of the old worldview, no matter how comparatively feeble.
If Red and Blue are to have any meaning in a macro-historical context - if they refer to recurring psychological archetypes or discrete clusters which we can observe in humans of any time period, rather than simply being petty expressions of context-dependent political conflicts between modern Americans - then it’s incredibly instructive to notice these parallels, because it suggests that there is nothing inherently Red about Christianity, and I would say that it also suggests that the success of the Red project moving forward has no inherent connection to the success or failure of Christianity specifically.
Except it wasn't though. By the time of the Edict of Milan Christianity was already so prevalent in the Roman Countryside and amongst the urban working class that many modern historians posit that Emperor Constantine's conversion was in fact a cynical ploy to cut his rivals off at the knees by buying the loyalty of the plebs. It wasn't the "salt of the earth" who were resisting conversion (that phrase itself bein an explicit reference to Christ's Sermon on the Mount BTW), it was the cosmopolitan elites who were trying and failing to suppress it.
This in turn plays into my wider thesis because it's clear from these posts that you yourself are operating under the assumption that the woke's theories about culture and society are fundamentally accurate and correct. You say you're frustrated by people like me "not making the effort to evaluate our actual arguments", but what people like you don't seem to understand is that people like me don't share your moral relativism. We don't buy into your pseudo-Marxist/Hegelian framework of "colonization" and class/racial interest, we roll our eyes at "elite theory" and and other such nonsense. What is there to for us to even evaluate in light of such a core disagreement? It's not like this is our first lap around this particular track. We've already heard all of your arguments from the woke and have rejected them as invalid.
Your dismissal of red and blue tribe as mere "psychological archetypes" rather than distinct cultures with their own histories, beliefs, approaches, etc... Is simply the cherry on the sundae as it's exactly what one would expect from a disciple of the globohomo agenda. Christianity may not be inherently "red tribe" but Christianity is a major component of the red tribe's history and culture and you discard these factors at you peril.
I made it abundantly obvious in my post that I was referring to the Christianization of Western and Northern Europe, and not the initial conversion of Rome and its immediate surroundings. All of the examples I provided were clearly about the regions outside of direct Roman rule, so you bringing up Rome is either an intentional dodge - because you’re not conversant in the history of the regions and era that I’m talking about, or because you don’t have a counterargument against my interpretation of the events in question - or (once again) a failure of reading comprehension on your end.
As for everything else here, you’re correct that we have incredibly orthogonal worldviews. I’m primarily interested in questions about whether or not Red and Blue are analytical categories that can be applied to people across a wide geographical and temporal field of comparison - was Oliver Cromwell a Blue? Was Charlemagne? Whereas you are very intent on keeping the conversation about these categories firmly rooted in the specific cultural and political context of the modern United States. As a result of this fundamental difference in analytical frameworks, you’re probably correct that you and I are indeed doomed to always talk past each other.
Ultimately I would love for someone in my faction - probably not me personally, since you very obviously find my specific style very grating - to convince you that we’re not your enemy, but rather an ally of convenience, with whom you’re going to have to coexist both before and after the eventual victory of our coalition. We’re Blues, but we’re not leftists, and that means we’re not your real enemy. I truly do believe that, and I haven’t given up hope that one of us will eventually break through to people of your inclination.
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You're attributing a huge amount of capacity to early Medieval states that didn't really exist. It's generally accepted that pagan practices with a Christian gloss persisted for a long, long time after formal conversion. I've seen some historians claim that the countryside in most of Europe wasn't really converted in anything but name until AFTER the Middle Ages, more or less just in time for the Protestant Reformation.
Medieval Catholic Christianity was able to maintain such religious unity over a large area by essentially being hands off once the temples were torn down and the churches put up. Just morph your old cults into veneration of some newly discovered local Saint and you're good to carry on more or less unchanged (for example: It's entirely possible that the Irish Saint Brigid is more or less literally a religio-translation of the pre-Christian Irish goddess Brigid). All the same practices and festivals can be held in all the same places, just with a different name in the middle.
It's always easier to add the cherry on top to an already existing edifice and then claim that you made the whole thing, this certainly being how people remember it. You don't need to convert people properly, only strike at their capital, force them to do an exclusively Christian act such as undergoing a Mass, to then be able to claim that all their leftover superstitions are just variations on the Christian religion. Inverting a thing is the easiest way to prove master over it, whilst still allowing it to appear mostly as it once was. The final
Too fervent proselytizing will summon up a force to oppose it; far better to just cut off the head, as here was done through mainly inducements, there not being any strong reason for an Anglo-Saxon ruler to remain stolid in his mystic beliefs lacking both depth and expediency as they did, and then to allow the remnants to follow, trusting that there won't be any strong counter movement.
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Christianity seems to have originally been most popular among lower middle class urbanites, and to have been adopted by the elites following the discrediting of traditional Roman religion due to a series of system shocks(beating out competitors to do so; notably Manichaeism). From thence it spread by state force. This is not the work story
Christianity spread outside the Roman Empire through conversion that looks a bit more like woke, it’s true. Inasmuch as the early Middle Ages can be similar it is similar, I’ll give you that. But the analogy breaks down because woke mostly doesn’t see itself as a competitor to Christianity(except ‘fundamentalism’, whatever that means)- woke types mostly think going to a Christian church on Sunday is well, good, and even admirable. They happen to be competitors with Christianity for a dominant ideology, but progressives don’t seem to have any problem with going to a catholic or SBC or Mormon church. And there’s prominent woke individuals who go to all three, and at least the first two have woke individuals in important positions. I mean yes it’s difficult to be a good catholic or baptist or Mormon while being woke. But wokes mostly don’t believe that and have no issue with sufficiently pro-woke people who are Christian, even if they are members of quite conservative denominations(again unless those denominations get declared fundamentalist like the OPC or SSPX or the baptist Bible fellowship or one of the old calendarist groups, but that’s more of a declaring themselves to be an enemy thing).
By contrast Christianity explicitly demands that the old pagan gods be repudiated, in those words.
The primary problem with your own explanation is that wokeness is subversive by design. The woke "don't seem to have a problem" with someone going to a church if and only if the church is a woke church. You kind of hint at this but is important to be explicit about this. They are fine with people who go to a woke church because wokeness is subversive by design and they know that the primary focus of worship will be wokeness (Critical Social Justice), not God. They are then Catholic or SBC or Mormon in name only. Like you say "it's difficult to be a good Christian while being woke", I would go further and say, actually "woke Christian" is an oxymoron, you can only worship one God, and if you're a "woke Christian" it means you're not worshipping God of the Bible, which is why the woke don't care. There's not "woke Christian churches" but "woke churches which have the aesthetic trappings of Christianity". Liberation theology specifically was designed to do this. The Southern Baptist Convention is undergoing a major schism right now over this kind of thing. A major incident that lead to the schism was that in 2019 the SBC adopted "Resolution 9" which basically said that the SBC will adopt Critical Race Theory as "analytical tools" - except Critical Race Theory is a totalizing ideology (or part of an ideology) which can never accept subordination. It Is directly competing with Christianity.
In practice many nominally Christian communities were functionally pagan for centuries after their apparent conversion. Pagan rituals and worship would coexist alongside Christianity in remote Alpine villages and dense Baltic forests for many centuries after conversion.
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This only applies to people who go to church but nothing more. People who actually follow the teachings of the church are considered homophobes and misogynists who want to deny women reproductive rights
Fr James Martin SJ might be heretical, but he colors far enough inside the lines to avoid formal censure and seems to be generally well regarded among the woke. There’s similar figures among the Mormons and SBC.
And of course this ignores the total thrust of my point, which is that Christianity considers paganism’s morality or lack thereof to be a strictly secondary concern to its opposition to pagan worship itself, which the woke do not have to Christian worship, including the worship of generally quite conservative sects and the woke maintain Allies in good standing among many of these groups.
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