Amerika

We hear a lot about religion because the Republicans have decided to make it part of their stand against decay in the West, and the Left has seized on that by attributing all conservative thought to religion and not realism, hoping the dumb Republicans would seize the bait as they have.

Bureaucrats, politicians, and middle managers take the same approach to the issues they want to debate, which involves avoiding the important stuff because it is controversial and they can fail at it, while instead looking for symbolic issues in which they can keep the fight going, because that ensures that they all have jobs.

Then we get the media hysteria in which Christians attempt to make themselves into a protected political group by claiming rising attacks on the Church as proof of discrimination against them:

The Washington, D.C.-based Family Research Council (FRC) released its annual Hostility Against Churches report last week, finding there were 436 hostile incidents against churches in 2023. This is more than double the number tracked in 2022 and more than eight times as many as the group found in 2018.

The group said it used publicly available data to track 915 acts of hostility against churches over the past six years. Most of the incidents were acts of vandalism. The report also found gun-related incidents, arson and bomb threats used against churches.

Hint: you, as any group associated with the former majority, will never achieve victimhood status, and even if you do, you will be ranked lower than minority groups who replaced the former majority. Most of these rising attacks were probably diversity warfare against what was perceived as the White Man’s Religion, but there is more to the story.

The declining strength of the Church reflects a decline in Christian religiosity in America:

As recently as the early 1990s, about 90% of U.S. adults identified as Christians. But today, about two-thirds of adults are Christians. The change in America’s religious composition is largely the result of large numbers of adults switching out of the religion in which they were raised to become religiously unaffiliated.

In other words, a steadily shrinking share of young adults who were raised Christian (in childhood) have retained their religious identity in adulthood over the past 30 years. At the same time, having no religious affiliation has become “stickier”: A declining percentage of people raised without a religion have converted or taken on a religion later in life.

Roughly 90% of people who were born in the 1960s and raised Christian were still Christian when they turned 30. Among those born in the 1970s, fewer than 85% remained Christian at 30. Among those born in the 1980s, it is about 80%.

When 90% of the population are Christian, you can claim to be a Christian nation, but as soon as the number of Others hits somewhere around the magic 20%, Christianity becomes only one of several options existing in a pluralistic state of antagonistic codependent mutual tolerance.

Of course, across the West, belief in Christianity is falling as is desire to attend church services:

According to the most recent census data, taken in 2021 and published this year, 46.2% of the English and Welsh population say they are Christian, a decline of 13.1 percentage points since the last census in 2011. Even so, Christian remained the most common response to the religion question.

“No religion” was the second most common response, increasing by 12 percentage points to 37.2% since 2011.

Europe in general has seen a decline in Christianity as the old believers pass on and people without religious affiliation, or who are Muslim, take over in the demographic charts:

Deaths outnumbered births by nearly 6 million during this brief period. In Germany alone, there were an estimated 1.4 million more Christian deaths than births from 2010 to 2015. This natural decrease in Europe’s aging Christian population was unique compared with Christians in other parts of the world and other religious groups. In fact, Muslims and the unaffiliated in Europe both experienced natural increases in their populations, with our new report estimating that there were over 2 million and 1 million more births than deaths, respectively, between 2010 and 2015.

As a perennialist, to me all religions say the same basic thing: some layer of existence comprised of thought-like forms exists that produced this one, the universe originated from this layer which approximates a divine force, the universe rewards those who act toward higher degrees of complexity, and there is some kind of afterlife.

Unlike the people with a particular religion, perennialists see all religions as vocabularies for describing the indescribable, with a few core truths and lots of stuff grafted on that reflects the needs of culture and the command structures of those societies more than any particular metaphysical knowledge.

The upside of this is that people of all religions, if they took a moment (or even a bong hit), would realize that they have more in common than not. However, their struggles are clash of civilizations oriented not theological disagreements, so not much would change.

That has a dark side too. It means that people are bonded with the idea of religion itself, not a particular religion, and they are going to go on believing the same things — some of which are divine, most of which reflect their need to justify their existence as the best possible option — in any religion.

Christianity grafts on dogma which clashes with the Western mindset, like metaphysical dualism which posits a perfect Heaven and a moral god at war with an imperfect if not evil Earth and biology, and its universal appeal makes it subversive because it is a replacement for nation and tribe, not an augmentation to them.

However its biggest problem cannot be escaped or explained away, and that is its foreign origin. If you follow a foreign religion, you are conquered. Christianity tells a story of the middle east in which Judaism is the salvation of mankind. Most of the fear of The Jew™ comes from the position of Christianity as an occupier.

In the long term, my people need a religion of themselves and for themselves. It cannot be foreign. Instead it will reflect the same beliefs in all religions, but with amoral gods and a continuity between nature and the divine. As it turns out, this is coming sooner than expected.

Tags: abrahamism, christianity, judaism, perennialism