Alongside other Luminaries like Tucker Carlson and Peter Hitchens

https://twitter.com/thelampmagazine/status/1557411084222488579

cowards deleted it

    • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
      ·
      2 years ago

      wtf is going on with all this catholic stuff lately?

      The Evangelicals are dying out. National Mormonism is still waiting to be born. Now is the time of Catholics.

      • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]
        ·
        edit-2
        2 years ago

        But Catholicism just seems deeply uncool and sterile. Anti abortion, but not in the freaky evangelical way. Into statues and symbolism, but like the most basic stuff like crucifixes and Mary. And weird communion rituals, but not really.

        Like if you're a statues and symbolism type of person, why not paganism? If you hate women's rights in the USA, or want to do weird Jesus marches, why not go evangelical? I'm struggling here.

          • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]
            ·
            edit-2
            2 years ago

            The religion that to this day campaigns against condoms and birth control, and the hedonistic New Yorkers are joining it? Lmao.

            Couldn't they have decided to try be cooler in a more obvious way, got a couple of piercings, some tattoos, a different hairstyle, gone vegan, go straight edge, all stuff that's actually cool and nice?

          • The_Walkening [none/use name]
            ·
            2 years ago

            where you’re supposed to hate yourself and have sex in the missionary position forever solely for procreation?

            You're supposed to, but you can just tell a priest about it and say a few Hail Marys

            • Frank [he/him, he/him]
              ·
              2 years ago

              Yeah catholics fuck. It's an old joke that catholics fuck but aren't allowed to and protestants are allowed to fuck but don't.

            • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]
              ·
              2 years ago

              I mean there is the whole “you can do whatever the fuck you want as long as you fess up to it all in a both with some old guy right before you die”

              Evangelical Christianity also has this, except you don't even need to go confess to a guy in a booth. You just need to say sorry to god in your heart or thoughts and it's fine.

        • frankfurt_schoolgirl [she/her]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Isnt American Catholicism just another form of Protestantism? Like none of these people care about the pope or any saints. Catholicism just has more history, so it's attractive to extreme nerds.

          • Frank [he/him, he/him]
            ·
            2 years ago

            Sort of. There are still hard core believers but a lot of Catholic identity has been lost to the all consuming calvinist capitalist cultural morass. You can still do saint's days and observe all the different rituals and stuff if you want, but it's not as normative as it was even a few decades ago.

          • Diogenes_Barrel [love/loves]
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            edit-2
            2 years ago

            are there american saints even?

            omfg there are only 13 if you really stretch it and only 2 are indigenous :data-laughing: the whole point of saints is having one for your town that you get to throw a rager about once a year. the black maw of american non-culture even extends to their religious cults

        • iwillavengeyoufather [she/her]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Into statues and symbolism, but like the most basic stuff like crucifixes and Mary.

          I’ve prayed in front of a disembodied saints heart before

        • laziestflagellant [they/them]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Maybe all the juicy catholic saints lore is just too intriguing to resist for all the kinds of people who like cataloging pop culture characters for fun

        • Dimmer06 [he/him,comrade/them]
          ·
          2 years ago

          My guess is that it's a weird elitist reactionary anti-capitalism. Protestantism is how the masses justify gorging themselves on the produce of American capitalism. It's what the hill people and the suburban psychos believe in. Catholicism is refined, has a millennium of culture behind it. They worship in great basilicae, not dirty shacks. They actually follow some rules, not arbitrarily pick and choose what they believe in. Catholics aren't so full of themselves that they think they can directly speak to god (unlike those silly prots), obviously you need a priest and some incense to talk to god.

        • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
          ·
          2 years ago

          But Catholicism just seems deeply uncool and sterile.

          I was raised Catholic down in Texas, and there really wasn't much of a difference between them and the local Lutherans or Methodists. Plenty of families with kids in the suburbs of Houston and Galveston. So the local Catholic schools and adjacent public schools had lots of young people doing young people things. The Church hosted plenty of big festivals and other community events which ranged from your annual Christmas Schmaltz to parking lot carnivals to movie night lock-ins and choir groups and generic youth mixers. All this stuff was in walking distance, in a suburb where there wasn't much else to do. So the Church actually was one of the coolest and least sterile places to hang out.

          And by the time you got to high school and sex/drugs/etc wasn't just stuff the TMNT told you not to do in movies, plenty of your Catholic peers were happy to hook up or hook you up or whatever.

          Like if you’re a statues and symbolism type of person, why not paganism?

          Because nobody else in your town does paganism (openly, anyway) and your parents didn't just kick in $10k to the local dioceses to do a big Winter Solstice Under the Stars event that all your friends are going to.

          That's not even to say my school didn't have its share of Marilyn Manson wanna-bes. But if you had to pick out the cool kids, they tended to be the ones with the big families and the nicest houses and all the money. Those people also just so happened to be Catholic.

          Go out to Utah and its the same thing with Mormons. Go down the Atlantic Coast and all the old-money extended families are Baptist or Methodist. Go out to the Midwest and I guarantee some of the coolest people in town will be Lutheran.

          • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]
            ·
            2 years ago

            Your two first paragraphs are basically my upbringing but at a protestant/evangelical church and not in the suburbs. But I couldn't imagine joining as an adult. I had to leave anyways because they were deeply homophobic and I'm bi.

            • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
              ·
              edit-2
              2 years ago

              But I couldn’t imagine joining as an adult

              Lots of PMCs find religion in order to spend more time sucking up to their bosses.

              I had to leave anyways because they were deeply homophobic and I’m bi.

              You'd be surprised how not-giving-a-shit some congregations can get, depending on the neighborhood.

        • Frank [he/him, he/him]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Paganism is all made up woo woo choose your own adventure bs. There's no rules or structure, it's just stuff hippies made up in the 70s and a bunch of misunderstood history and bits of movies and fantasy novels. Almost the complete opposite of Catholicism. If you want clear answers backed up by 2000 years of ritual and practice and theology you'd want to go with Catholicism

        • TheLepidopterists [he/him]
          ·
          2 years ago

          I'm non-religious and couldn't fake it if I wanted to because lying even about little things makes me uncomfortable, but having grown up in an evangelical household with a lot of anti-catholic bigotry I could kind of see the appeal.

          There are some progressive currents in the church right? Like liberation theology? And in my experience anti-catholicism (not opposition to Christianity in general, but like, protestant opposition to Catholics) feels tinged with anti Latin and anti non-anglo sentiment in general. My evangelical mother was convinced they were all crypto-pagans because of the whole saint thing.

          I still wouldn't join them, as mentioned above, I think it's all make believe, but at least they don't spawn prosperity gospel, snake handlers, Jerry Falwell etc etc. The downsides of the Catholic church are by and large problems with Christianity in general I feel.

          Sorry if that was a bit rambley and stream of consciousness, this isn't a topic I think about much and I think that a lot of my feelings about it are derived from seeing people who hate everything good (communism, feminism, pro-lgbt sentiment) also hating Catholicism when I was young.

          • LeninWeave [none/use name]
            ·
            edit-2
            2 years ago

            There are some progressive currents in the church right? Like liberation theology?

            Liberation theology will literally always be a fringe of the Church and everyone knows it. The Vatican is evil, its purpose is to be evil for the ruling class. Liberation theology as a means of taking over the Roman Catholic Church is like social democracy to destroy the bourgeois state.

            And in my experience anti-catholicism (not opposition to Christianity in general, but like, protestant opposition to Catholics) feels tinged with anti Latin and anti non-anglo sentiment in general.

            :100-com:

          • Frank [he/him, he/him]
            ·
            2 years ago

            Some Catholics are a lot more progressive than most evangelicals. A little more than half of US catholics support abortion in at least some cases, and their opposition to abortion is that you're only supposed to have missionary married sex to have babies. They don't think it's murder. They're also not fundamentally rooted in racism, segregation, and white supremacy the way the evangelicals are. You can pretty easily lie to yourself about what the Catholic Church is and does and try to be a progressive Catholic.

          • Frank [he/him, he/him]
            ·
            2 years ago

            Eugh. All that "Knight's Templar uwu" bullshit but they decided to do it for real. I always found it so weird when protestants identified with crusaders. Like crusaders would have killed your schismatic protestant ass! They murdered heretics all the time!

              • Frank [he/him, he/him]
                ·
                2 years ago

                Popular misconception. From what I understand at some points they would make recruits practice what to do if they were captured by the Muslims and forced to convert. Baphomet is a corruption of Muhammad. The Templars believed that captured Christians would be forced to worship Muhammad so they'd make their recruits pretend to convert and do a bunch of other hazing. Well, rumors got out and people came to believe, or pretended they believed, that the Templars were secretly worshipping an idol called Baphomet. It was used as evidence against them in their trial when the King of I think France decided to liquidate them so he could clear his debts and steal all their money.

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        National Mormonism

        Please don't lathe this in to existence I do not like the Mormons.

    • star_wraith [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      I do think there's an alt-right to catholic pipeline - chuds who want to launder their white nationalism through the not-as-obviously-racist Catholic church. "EMBRACE TRADITIØN" and all that. But the left, idk we're just talking about like 3 podcasters here not necessarily a trend.

      • Ezze [hy/hym,they/them]
        ·
        edit-2
        2 years ago

        not-as-obviously-racist Catholic church

        This is the church that sent missionaries along with colonial powers to convert the population of Africa, stole the land from the indigenous people, spread disease, and now tells African people that they will go to hell if they use the contraceptives that are proven to stop the spread of deadly diseases.

        • Frank [he/him, he/him]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Relatively speaking the Catholic Church is much less immediately, "this is literally a sundown town" racist than white evangelicals. Catholicism has a real multinational, multiracial character. They're still as racist as whatever they're communities are, but they're not literally built on racism the way a lot of evangelical churches are.