I have a half baked theory about organized religion. The more silly the head gear the more whack the religion. Stalin made at least two mistakes. We all know the first one but imho the second one is that he did not crush the orthodox church until it was reduced to its elemental form. Hoxha did nothing wrong. When a guy like this is a shot-caller in your culture you have already failed. I loathe all organized religion but I feel like relatively speaking the roman catholics are the least bad. I consider roman catholics the ML party of christianity and the vatican is the vanguard. Sure they did a lot of evil stuff back in the day but If I look at the last 1000 years of christians I see them making incremental improvements as opposed to the orthodox wing which has slowly rotted on the vine. The current pope is arguably the best in its history.
Made this post because I just saw this:
The State Duma of the Russian Federation unanimously adopted the law aimed at prohibiting sex change.
Citizens who have already changed sex will be prohibited from adopting children, being their guardians or trustees, and their marriages will be annulled.
The law will come into force from the date of official publication. This was reported by the press service of the lower house of parliament on Friday, July 14.
The law prohibits any medical interventions, both surgical operations and the use of drugs aimed at forming primary or secondary sexual characteristics of the other sex in a person.
Assholes
As a non american looking from the outside, I think there's a lot of different things going on at the same time.
There's the sheer numbers factor, for one. The US religious peak happened under a protestant majority, so the sheer number of people who suffered abuse or just straight up had a bad experience with their religious community were mostly protestant as well.
Then there's the distance factor. It's kinda like being an upscale american buddhist. If you leave a reactionary religious context for another church or another religion altogether, you're interacting with a diaspora or minority community, which means disconnection from traditional structures of power, or political struggles which happen both in America and in their home constituencies. There are reactionary muslims and liberal muslims. But their disputes occur far away and if you're lucky the small neighborhood mosque in Small Town USA doesn't get funding from a Saudi Arabia Wealth Fund.
On one hand the institutional and universal nature of the roman catholics should diminish this effect. It's supposed to be one singular thing. In practice it isn't. There's a trillion religious orders, tendencies, and huge gulfs of class between the ranks of the regular clergy. If the first catholics you interact with are a franciscan who studied theology, that's gonna be a completely different experience from, say, 'man who was too anti semitic to accept vatican ii and founded his own ultra-catholic cult'.
That defacto schizophrenic nature of the catholic church means that if you're a foreigner (or a diaspora community within the US) your experience of catholicism changes a lot. You can be from certain central american countries where the elitism of the catholic church is on full display, as it plays the cold war book to a t. Or you can be from Brazil, a country where the catholic church rallied against Bolsonaro, who claims to be of roman catholic denomination, because the guy is aligned with the american pentecostal political projects.
And let's not forget cognitive dissonance. The Catholic Church is resolutely against contraception. Someone can be Catholic, believe the Church is completely right, and still use condoms because, after all, they are only human. At worst this is a cynical person who loves to judge other people's failings as sinful. At most, this is just a person, filled with contradictions and little cruelties. 'Well, it's true, the poors can't afford children, so they should be less naughty. My daughter needed that abortion though, she's raised well and on her way to do much good in the world by being a doctor.'
Then there's the bergoglio effect. I remember when my teachers at uni were giddy as fuck, joking about the 'anti pope crisis of the 21st century'. One of them was slightly less informed than the others and expressed disbelief. 'They put a franciscan on the papacy?', he asked. 'No, he's a jesuit. He picked francis for optics'. 'Ah, that makes more sense'. Under Francis, the Catholic Church is triangulating towards a measure of liberal centrism. And within an american context this highlights all the contradictions of american christianity in the dumbest possible way. Here comes the a catholic higher up saying shit like 'eh homosexuality is a sin but thats probably not the worst sin you know'. So the
counter that with calling the pope a communist and all sorts of racial epithets.
TL;DR reactionary religious tendencies are on the rise worldwide. The hindus are organized around explicit hindu fascism. The orthodox church in Russia fully endorses the ideological mish mash of trad larping that holds the Russian state together because, really, it's a quasi national church at the end of the day. Salafism has become so successful in the hearts and minds of people across the world that it's displaced centuries old orthodox islam and relegated it to words such as 'mysticism' and 'sufism'. Christian Dominionism has utterly succeeded in its political missionary project, and survived america's borders, reaching historic highs across Latin America and Africa. It keeps going. To be a fucking trad cath of all the options available to you is the most hipstery, dorky thing imaginable. You're basically saying the enlightened centrist pope is a step too far because he said gay people are welcome at mass or something similar politiciany.