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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31624 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023

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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.

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.

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.

By contrast Christianity explicitly demands that the old pagan gods be repudiated, in those words.

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.

but progressives don’t seem to have any problem with going to a catholic or SBC or Mormon church.

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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