I'll use these three posts as jumping off points. Allow some glib restatements of things, it's tedious when there's 353953 replies and huge text boxes of replies.

Since I introduced the take here, I think I'm a bit fit to say some of the above has evolved into a strawman. Obviously threads evolve, so discuss what you'd like. From my point of view.

What My Argument Wasn't:
- "Pro-church"
- "Religion is great"
- a focus on Christianity and its benefits per se (other traditional religions are suffering attendance, less engagement across Europe, the Middle East, etc.)

What the Argument Was:
- the devolution of the American political culture is largely due to increased nihilism on the political right *and* a complete lack of purpose and engagement on the left, which speaks (to me) to a big lack of social cohesion and social segregation (e.g., we live as little atoms, not much community or communal spirit)
- traditional religions provided this for people
- social conservatives of the 1950s-1990s vintage did issue warnings that secularization of society was dangerous for this reason
- my take: the first two bullet points are true and that the big critical problem isn't that traditional religion was great and necessary, but it did important social functions, that we replaced it with nothing at all. This is not holistically true. More below wherein I play Devil's Advocate. But it's largely true and especially true in the US.

So, some of the better counter arguments:

- some social functions of traditional religion are bad: yeah sure OK, I'm certainly not arguing they are perfect. "But is religion on the whole a net benefit or a net negative for society!?" the peanut gallery insists. I'm going to take the microbet pose here and say that's quite a homework assignment and I'm not tackling that here, it's really not that relevant.

- the .Alex. kind of argument that the devolution of American political culture of prior generations is a good thing, a good phenomenon. I'd play Devil's Advocate on his behalf and say that something like we're in a transitory period and what is coming is better than what we're leaving behind, use some euphemism like the seas are frothy now but there's clearer sailing ahead. I can sort of entertain this. Maybe the glories of secular humanism are just over the horizon, we'll get there eventually, there will be some headaches and rough patches, right now is one, but in the meta, like year 1400 AD to now, we're less superstitious, more scientific, humans have flourished, that's largely because of secuarlization, gotta think long term DVaut1. Fine, OK.

- various "but what about Europe" arguments: I think this is a valid point but refuted/covered in the "don't replace something with nothing." Namely that Europe on the whole has a much more vibrant social safety net but that also Europe is not immune to what we're seeing the US. That means that I'm arguing Europe is only somewhat better than the US at the moment, and it's better because of it's social safety net. That's why academics refer to it as such; one big idea of the social safety net is sure, the human decency of it, but also that everyone benefits, including the elites. Elites learned, or should have learned, that the late 19th century to the calamitous early 20th century that clothing, feeding, giving medical care and not working the masses to death was in fact a great way to inculcate a certain amount of social stability. Europe is on the whole better than the United States at providing this to people and so their social stressors are correspondingly less. Better unions, better respect for workers/the middle class, more consumer protections. Europe could consciously tear down some of the functions of traditional religious because they had better social safety nets to act as a bulwark against deep social frustrations.

In sum, is RELIGION GOOD? Yeah I dunno. Not my thing here to argue that, let's stop talking about it, it's besides the point.

The point:

We're staring into the abyss of a President who regularly speaks in eliminationist rhetoric, his millions of voters who absolutely have bloodlust on their hearts and want him to act on this rhetoric, and a larger pool of potentially normal people who could stand up to this in the right context but do not because they themselves are adrift and have rudderless social/political lives, and dwindling few or increasingly impotent social institutions to stop any of it. If you want to know how we got here, I maintain that:

- social cohesion is at very low levels
- traditional religions provided some measure of this social-cohesion
- we have debased traditional religions with some absolute systemic intent (e.g., capitalism, leftist aggrandizement of secular humanism) and replaced its functions with nothing. I grant it as true traditional religions did this to themselves as well (e.g., Catholics systemic rapes of children and the cover ups).
- social conservatives warned this will happen

But the bolded is key! It's not that organized religion is holistically good. I'm really engaged in a bit of hippie punching / left bashing here. Not surprising in a "thing conservatives have been right about" thread.

So it's not:
- organized religion is good

It's:
- organized religion does this one good thing that perhaps society could replace and get via alternate means, but doesn't, and that's bad.

I'm laying the blame at the feet of the left who I think sort of joined in with capitalist marketer types to say religiously pious types are a bunch of superstitious dangerous old wizards, totally passe, totally uncool, that secular humanism was the way forward, burn down the churches, we don't need them...and then ABANDONED THE FIELD OF BATTLE ENTIRELY to the capitalists and marketers, just set everyone ****ing adrift and were like good luck, you're on your own, we left the university system for you, go get educated kbye.

You can't ****ing do that to people, can't do that to the masses of people, blithely sort of tear down institutions that meant a lot to them and replace it with Candy Crush and Reddit and hyper competitive capitalism, that's a dangerous game.

To lay my cards on the table, I suspect in some random mutli-verse my .Alex. doppleganger is correct that many scenarios might play out and with some edge-tinkering in the 2018 world, the world in 2200 is on the steady march toward the glories of secular humanism and they looked back on 2018 as blip, a temporary roadblock, and that we were really on the way to the End of History, liberal capitalism won and everyone is happier.

But yeah my wary side and my eyeballs and ears just look out into the 2018 world and think we might get some really dark ****, the next 10-20 years might be a lot worse than a ****ing 'blip.' Everyone is really ****ing angry with each other, that's a combustible thing for people with a lot of technology and advanced weaponry.

And one last point re: Europe/US.

The above social phenomenon I'm describing is really ****ing dangerous in the US in particular, since the US is sort of exceptional, has an immense and powerful military, a big martial ethos, religion was doing a lot of social cohesion heavy lifting in the big cultural 'melting pot' that is a bit unique to the US, we're really bad at national remembrance projects in that we've super whitewashed slavery, Jim Crow and expulsion/genocide of natives, and literally anything unsavory about ourselves. Compare to Germany's Culture of Remembrance for instance, the US has almost the opposite, a Culture of Historical Ignorance.

That is to say one side of my argument is that yeah, Europe is in a better position to rollback the social influence of religion than the US, and ALSO, the US is a REALLY ****ING DANGEROUS PLACE to try grand social experiments in hyper capitalism + secular humanism.

Like I'm asking for a few things to be granted here, but one more: .Alex. and OAFK types should consider deeply that "let's tear down traditional social structures, replace them with hyper competitive production and distribution systems, mix in an aggressively racist population deeply wedded to its military as the second best thing about themselves after its God, and let's see where this goes," insofar as you agree that was pretty deeply experimental, we chose a really ****ing dangerous test case.

Can we just generalise part of it the idea that big social changes are generaly painful to live through even if they are a change to something better

Lots of people lose their sense of themselves, their status and their meaning because it's bound up in a past that's evaporating fast. It's also worse for older people for obvious reasons that the young often struggle to grasp because they have no cognitive binding to the past.

opiates have given me a hell of a lot more joy in life than jesus has

Bolded is just entirely and absolutely false.

There are tons of collective and community led organisations and groups etc founded by the left, forming such groups is a constant activity of the left. Collective social action is a probably the core philosophy of the left.

Unions and co-operatives, youth groups, protest groups etc. They are not going to win the mass appeal war with capitalism but they are out there fighting a guerrilla action.

The problem is that such groups are not going to appeal to the right wing guy who gets moderated from a trumper to ted cruzer by the holy light of church. Those on the margins of church, who are right on the edge of attending/not attending, are not those that the left can reach. Mileage varies by country but is most true in Yankland.

Its just silly to accuse the left of not replacing such a massive historical heavyweight like church in a couple of decades.

not many can say this

they're doing it wrong

Most of the responses to DVaut's post entirely miss his point. DVaut obviously wasn't arguing for that religion was an intrinisic good.

The better question is whether DVaut's assumptions/interpretations about what it happening in the world reflect reality.

In other words, the post above goes more squarely to the real question.

Well, fine, OK. Then we should be real wary about tearing it down if we weren't ready to provide the alternate means of social support, even if we had the desire, perhaps we didn't have the practical ability.

That is, we should have all been Martin Luther King and the activists of the Civil Rights Era that tried to utilize existing social institutions like the church and bend them to progressive ends (see above: " The NCC was an important link to mainline churches for the civil rights movement and it consistently condemned segregation during the Montgomery Bus Boycott and other actions") rather than deride them and leave them exposed to ravenous capitalist interests like right-wing grifters. They could have been important allies! "We'll never reach the average deplorable" is a take, those people went to churches, you could have used the whole structure and traditions people had in place and tried to commandeer them into more progressive tracks. By deriding and ignoring their institutions, you assured you would never reach them.

No one tore down the church in the way your post implies.

Your post posits a reality where there was a church tearing down committee meeting someone maybe proposed replacing it with something and there was a vote against.

Process did not happen remotely like that obviously.

Also, again you are ignoring all the collective community organisations created by the left. Another homework project.

Dvaut,

A lot of progressives especially in America were brutalised by the church. Growing up church was about oppression, telling you how you can and can't act and who you can and can't love. I agree it was reckless to tear the whole edifice down like Sampson but it's understandable.

Yeah obviously no one person did it, there wasn't a ****ing vote, but it's a huge ahistorical joke to assert the modern left isn't (in some quarters) deeply wedded to the project of tearing down organized religion though. I mean here we (by 'we' I mean you and tomdemaine and .Alex. and whoever else) are going HAM on the idea that organized religions are parasitical authoritarian mind control camps that destroy human flourishing, don't come back and be like "oh actually we're pretty lukewarm on organized religion, there's no real mechanism by which we derided it" as you are simultaneously telling me what a hugely destructive force it is. You're obviously all creates of culture, we all are, you're all picking up the same anti-religion ideas and memes from the same repositories, that's not a slight, it's just the reality, but don't repeat the talking points then take on the raised by wolves act that you're oblivious to their origins. They come from the academy, they come from the left, they come from secular humanists, they exist and are crafted and perpetuated by people mostly on the left to do just this very thing, to create a mindspace wherein we abandon organized religions. Obviously no one ****ing person did that, I didn't say that, don't like deny the obvious cultural and political history here though, that's tedious right winger sea lion bull****.

It has been a destructive force and so would your replacement be even if Jeb Bartlett comes out of retirement to head it up.

If the terrors of organizations based on the teachings of universal love and forgiveness doesn't put you off organizations, I guess nothing will.

sigh

I'm not even sure the left played a large part in reducing the role of the church in the West, at least not as much as the flow of scientific thought beginning maybe with Copernicus and Newton through to Darwinism. Also bear in mind some strains of Christianity were strongly bonded to the left eg Methodism.

Once people worked out that they no longer needed a God to explain why things fall to earth, meteorological conditions and the appearance of humans on the planet, the writing was on the wall for the church.

This is exactly like arguing with right wingers and anarcho capitalists about systemic racism in which they goad you into either being some jack booted authoritarian government slave because you think the 13th-15th Amendments were nice, but then when you try to patiently explain how a government could do both nice and bad things, that is that yes the state can both perpetuate slavery and free slaves from plantation owners, it can do two things, incredibly, they wonder aloud if any social forces exist at all and have a wonderfully detached view of their own role in any of it. "Systemic racism you say, could you explain to me what that is? That doesn't sound like the white people I know, we barely even heard about race before!"

So you're right guys, organized religion is a destructive terrorist organization that brutalizes people and any references to either a more robust view of the world ("yes it's bad but it does also useful things") brings out the repetitive crude mantras or raised by wolves act ("oh you're saying we attack this thing, I have never, what? You're saying the left...derides this organization? Was there a vote?! My heavens, I don't remember this at all, are you sure we attack these terrorists, I don't remember any of this.")

Hmm, maybe want to talk to like the three or four posters with posts above yours that are like "brutal terrorists mind control organizations" and wonder aloud why multiple people sound awfully similar, are all saying roughly the same stuff? Strange they all arrived at the same sort of thoughts, it's almost like they originate somewhere independently of four separate people but incredibly those four people probably live like in drastically different places, it's almost like...there is...a common source for these ideas?

Huge if true.

This is really like arguing with liberatarian bros wherein literally every single one of them is like "nah dude, I'm a free thinking radical under no influence from anything in my life, I just stumbled on black phrenology underlying their criminal nature due to my research and meditation on this subject."

It might be a leap too far from "leftists are generally anti-church" to "this is why the church has declined in influence", considering how left thought only achieved popularity in the last century, after the events I listed.

Also, I think it's safe to assume that as well as being of the left, the posters you cite also believe in Evolution.

This is going to get tedious but if we trace back something like modern leftism in European culture to the French Revolution (a decent place to start?) then I think leftism was both undeniably kinda popular and undeniably anti-clerical in nature. It's tedious to have to explain this, you guys have Google and history books, this is like an almost entirely uncontroversial reading of leftist history.

I grant, and have granted, numerous times, that the decline of organized religion is *not just the responsibility of the left*. I've laid the blame at capitalism primarily and traditional religions themselves, too. The left is just part of the story. Distributed guilt is a thing.

Not gonna spend a bunch of time explaining how being anti-religion is part of the leftist tradition, it goes without saying, also not going to adjudicate just how influential the left has been vis a vis other factor in the secularization of society, the answer is "some."

Ok

mmmm, not exactly. The scientific revolution kicked off a good 400 years ago, but it's really only fairly recently we've seen this big sea change in the role religion plays in people's lives. I think the church very quickly got out of the business of trying to explain how stars and **** move around but still kept its role as a social institution and a center of civic life.

Sure. That's what the writing was the the wall referred to. The remaining, social, functions of the church became vulnerable to other groups that didn't have the baggage of having had their tracts discredited by science, eg leftist organisations.

I am glad that you mentioned specifics metrics by which we can judge the alleged decline in social cohesion. I don't have an opinion on whether those are the correct metrics. Instead of talking about a vague concept we can at least ask two questions.

1.Did this really happen?
I haven't looked at the numbers. I assume they are what you say they are. So let's get straight to number
2.Has lower church attendance caused this?
It's possible but far from obviously true. I think humans are not naturally inclined to be political. As long as they have food on the table, a roof over their head and feel generally safe they are perfectly happen to just live their live. They don't want to worry about who is facing who in a primary, what the right percentage for a capital gains tax is, if the US is providing weapons to autocrats etc.
Looking at the past ~100 years. There was WWI, women's suffrage, the great depression and WWII. Followed by Korea, Vietnam and the civil rights movement accompanied by the cold war and the constant threat of nuclear annihilation. Then from the 80s onward it gets much quieter.
People lived mostly comfortable lives and are happy to not pay attention to politics.
Bonus alternate explanation: Urbanization. People feel less connected to their neighbours in ever growing large, anonymous cities.



Cliffs: It's a human's natural state to be politically disinterested and has nothing to do with church attendance.

because what conservative were right about wasn't religion but family values. Which are still maintained strongly in continental europe. And I am not even talking about marriage per se. But having 2 adults raising children together. Not having babies at 15y old for god sake. USA is 3rd world like with teen pregnancy. And civil-war fatherless like raising children. And american adults don't meet their family or deal with it with the same intensity european do, like it is an abyss of difference.

And conservatives have like all the time mentioned this stuff as being nuclear-war level important for societal wellbeing, and the left never listened.

Family is financial and emotional welfare. Family is meaning in life. Family is support and responsibility. Family is everything it's worth living for. Conservatives get it. Even freaking trump gets it.

The left plan all along has been to substitute family with the state.

Education? Your parents are silly demented ******s, no problem the state provide schools.

Financial troubles for a time? Your family can't support you in times of trouble the way it has been for.millennia. Failing in their main role of resource safety net? No problem the state comes in.

Sick when old? Family can't provide for you after you spent a life for them, they abdicate their most basic moral duties/ no problem the state is here for you.

So what happens when the state subsidizes the worst behavior in society and the failures of bad human beings? That they spread and multiply. It's called moral hazard.

Instead of having bad practices dying (literally) out of society because inferior to others, you spend resources taken from the decent people to help the failures.

And then when failure spreads out beyond reason you go whining about society decadence.

But np 7 pages nobody mentioned family in a conservative-values thread. Standard

Again this hypothesis is utterly ridiculous.

So whilst organically creating a world view about politics and society, which yes of course fed into the rationalist culture along with numerous other strands from the academy, the left should have been super sensitive aware that in 90s onwards **** was going to happen to exactly the type of conservative nut job that was a nutjob precisely because of the culture of the church, leaving them vulnerable to an even more nutjob culture?

I dont think the left has to apologise for not being omniscient.

There is a big difference between the broad strokes of a world view and active on the ground participation in political action and you are confused about this in a huge way.

So whilst the left have contributed to what would seemingly be an inevitable process in a period of rational discovery of some of the messages of the church losing there appeal in a big way, what has it done in terms of tearing down the church in Yanklandia in terms of active praxis politics?

The important point is, actively going out of there way to somehow save church and reconfigure it because oh **** nutjobs, was never going to emerge out the broad perspectives of the left, it was always going to have to be an on the ground reaction to socio economic and political conditions.

There are so many things to unpack here but its no surprise that never happened.

Firstly the left is very active in forming other forms of social communal networks which consumes most of any energies or resources the left might have had to save the church.

Secondly, the idea that the left could rock up to conservative churches and be all hai guys we have come to reconfigure/save make good your church etc is one of the more absurd things ever posted in this forum imo.

Cmon, by what process, agency or channel could that happen?