Amerika

Republican politicians, having abandoned ethnicity and culture, now look toward substitutes for culture, namely “religion-as-ideology,” or Christianity made into a fundamentalist religion that also stands in for “traditional American culture,” something as unknown to us now as the ancient Greeks.

Unfortunately for them, religious affiliation continues to drop, not only because of our multiculture in which anything that offends another group is bad, but because of mass desertions from people who believe that religion failed to preserve culture and instead replaced it for its own advantage.

The pollsters sound this cry of warning every few years, but it seems that Christianity is fading among the American audience:

The share of Christians who disaffiliate by the time they reach 30 continues to rise with each successive generation, and rates of disaffiliation are allowed to continue rising even after Christian retention drops below 50% (i.e., no limit is imposed). As in Scenario 2, switching into Christianity among young Americans becomes less and less common.

If the pace of switching before the age of 30 were to speed up throughout the projection period without any brakes, Christians would no longer be a majority by 2045. By 2055, the unaffiliated would make up the largest group (46%), ahead of Christians (43%). In 2070, 52% of Americans would be unaffiliated, while a little more than a third (35%) would be Christian.

Not only that but the perceived partnership between Christians and Jews — the two groups that make up the “Judeo-Christian heritage” or universalist means-over-ends morality of the modern West — seems to be fading as anti-semitism rises and no one seems to want to oppose it, mainly because the diversity and “woke” Leftism are driving the backlash against Judaism:

“Antisemitism and extremism in America are at historic highs,” Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., who chaired the hearing, wrote in a text message to Yahoo News. “We are fighting the war against antisemitism from multiple directions (the right and the left) and on multiple fronts (on college campuses, on social media, and on the streets).”

Torres, who has emerged as a rare pro-Israel progressive in the House, offered blunt assessment of those efforts against hate and extremism: “So far, we are losing.”

According to the Anti-Defamation League, antisemitic incidents have spiked sharply since 2016, rising to a record high of 2,717 antisemitic incidents across the country nationwide last year. Some of those incidents included harassment of overtly religious Jews in communities like Teaneck, but there have also been deadly attacks, like the one on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, during which 11 people died.

At the root of this, we find a longstanding trend that people are not so much defecting from their religion, but see little utility in religion within a society ruled by hard egalitarianism and diversity:

However, one of the most consequential shifts in American religion has been the rise of religiously unaffiliated Americans. This trend emerged in the early 1990s. In 1991, only six percent of Americans identified their religious affiliation as “none,” and that number had not moved much since the early 1970s. By the end of the 1990s, 14% of the public claimed no religious affiliation. The rate of religious change accelerated further during the late 2000s and early 2010s, reaching 20% by 2012. Today, one-quarter (25%) of Americans claim no formal religious identity, making this group the single largest “religious group” in the U.S.

At this point, religion can only get you fired, unfriended, or called nasty names. The church or synagogue cannot protect you against the Leftist protesters and relentless deplatforming, which forms more of a riot for revenge and the salving of hurt self-esteem than any practical device.

Even more, the church offers nothing except the greater burden of being religious. It essentially preaches egalitarianism now because the committee members in charge wanted to “stay current,” which means that there is no reason to choose the church over regular Leftism.

All absolute and universal belief systems seem to decay to egalitarianism because at their core is the desire of the individual for firm and binding answers to stave off the ambiguity of events taking place in time that threatens the individual. People want simple rules that seem to control reality.

The church, by offering these in a dualistic format, elevated the symbolic above the realistic. Leftists saw an opportunity and took over, then replaced the religious portion of the church with humanism, since this is easier and therefore more popular. At that point, the church was irrelevant.

Similarly the same thing has happened to Jewish youth. Traditional Jewish morality is not universalist; it says that what is good for the tribe, even if immoral, is good (this is the message of the Old Testament and a classic statement of ends-over-means thinking; you may have to kill to save lives, in other words).

However, New Testament thinking has infiltrated Judaism, converting its idea of mitzvah from doing good for the tribe to doing good for all of humanity, another we-are-all-one exercise that is a projection of control masked as altruism. As a result, Jews today have no use for Judaism… Leftism is faster and easier.

By eradicating culture, religion rendered itself obsolete, and now all that remains is pure bureaucratic, managerial-administrative functionalism: we have a kindergarten playground ideology of accepting everyone so that we can work together, and a goal solely of increasing our wealth, which makes us manipulable.

In the end, the organic would have won out over the symbolic, but the symbolic was more effective for preserving unity and obedience in the short term. This is why the best societies looked at living forever, and the worst become sentimental and fatalistic and assume that their lives are finite.

Tags: christianity, infinity, judaism, judeo-christianity, organicism, religion, symbolism