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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   26881 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 4, 2023

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Literalist religion is not only dying, it’s exactly what gave birth to the secular West and its identity-consumerism. We have had 100 years of attempted revision because the old interpretations are insufficient. I don’t know if you read my post but “inspirational message” has nothing to do with the points I made. I do not think “inspirational messages” are something that secular culture can absorb from religion.

Literalist religion is not only dying, it’s exactly what gave birth to the secular West and its identity-consumerism

Excuse my asking, but when was this born? I recall that the heyday of the modernists being after the birth of secularism.

Literalist religion doesn’t seem like it’s dying so much as shrinking slowly, with the rate of shrinkage mostly attributable to generational effects(IIRC millennial and zoomer religious demographics are more or less identical so that could indicate that those generational effects are going away).

Is that total self identification or reported membership from church denominations?

Good question.

At least as regards Catholics and mainliners, I do remember the data I saw showed more conservative views on moral issues with the younger crowd than with their elders on average. This is probably indicative of higher religiosity with younger members than with older ones, but it might be an artifact- after all, we already know that more fundamentalist denominations have been growing at the expense of liberalizing ones in the case of mainliners, so that’s probably just an indication of the LCMS being healthier than the ELCA which we already knew(and Catholicism could be an outlier). A real problem seems to be that nobody knows how to measure absolute(as opposed to relative; everyone knows Tennessee has higher attendance than New York) church attendance rate because the three major methods(survey data, calculation from church headcounts, and cell phone data on Sunday morning) disagree with each other but are basically 100% correlated.

I can’t really answer your question because I can’t find the data I remember. But I do think it’s directionally correct- secularizing in America has largely stopped with millennials. There’s some evidence that indicates millennial and gen z Christians are more devout, and a larger quantity of evidence to indicate that they’re more conservative/literalist. I would point to this as support for my argument that literalist religion isn’t dying, it’s shrinking slowly, and that’s mostly due to generational effects.

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