Heads up that I’ve been writing several pieces for external publication in order to promote the blog a bit, hence why the pace has slowed a little here recently. The first of those should hopefully be out in the next week.
Here’s another round-up of interesting reading for you.
Tech writer Antonio García Martínez writes about his personal journey to taking religion seriously. “Every society needs a metaphysics that allows it to have moral and political conversations with itself,” he says. But, “For the first time in my life, no political faction in the West has anything like a generative vision of the future.” Instead, he writes, “More and more secular modernity looks like a shaky edifice of convoluted fantasies built over an abyss, and I for one am tired of pretending to take it seriously.” But: “Those who reject the modern sham and wish to reason seriously about politics or morality must necessarily strike a pose—half-pointing, half-saluting—toward some set of sacred principles.” He chose Judaism.
Meanwhile, Katherine Dee writes about the growing presence of secular abstinence clubs on elite U.S. college campuses in the United States. Such as one at MIT where members sign a pledge “to make an effort to live a chaste lifestyle,” meaning “using the gift of my body honorably and respectably.”
Dee presents two theories for why this is happening now. First, that these provide a “place to defect from an oversaturation of sex for people who are just sick of it,” and who while generally fine with casual sex, have had enough of “the BDSM workshops being advertised in broad daylight.” Alternatively, she muses that, for those who are hearing all the time about sex but not having very much of it (i.e. quite a few people), the options are either to “turn inward and fall into a pit of despair,” or to “sacralize sex.” In other words, she asks: “What if abstinence clubs are a way to reintroduce structure into students’ lives, and combat nihilism?”
Dee has previously predicted that we are on the very edge of the cultural pendulum swinging back hard toward more conservative sexual and gender norms as younger generations react to a dating culture in which almost everyone is absolutely miserable (see her Substack on this here): “It’s not that trad LARPers will inherit the earth. It’s that they’re the canaries in the coal mine. This is a movement that’s been simmering for a long time now. The pot is about to boil over.”
Maggie Phillips’ piece in Tablet explores the rapid growth of the Catholic meditation and prayer app Hallow. Despite polling showing rapid secularization of America, many of those ostensibly secular people are apparently now using a Catholic prayer app, with the company saying they see “a pretty big hunger for spirituality.” As one of the venture capitalists now dumping money into the startup puts it:
“For a long time we’ve been, probably for 30, 40 years, we’ve been hearing from Pew Research Forum and we’ve been hearing from the media that religion is dead. And the metric that Pew uses is the ‘butts in seats’ metric, which is that on Sunday, are Catholics going to church, and what demos are going to church. And what I think Hallow is showing is that there is just this, in some ways like this desperate consumer need that is manifesting itself… they’re growing extremely fast.”
This VC’s conclusion: “she believes America is on the cusp of a religious revival as people exploring spirituality ‘realize that actually these ancient religions are good for something.’”
I’ve combined all these together because I’m starting to think over the chances of some kind of broader religious revival indeed being in the cards as a societal reaction to the pressures of liquid modernity (and as a genuine alternative to crude replacement faith structures like the New Faith of Wokeism that have sprung up so far). This would certainly be a reversal of recent trends, but I wouldn’t rule it out.
What do you think? Is this plausible? And if so, what might it looks like? Would this imply an accompanying broader conservative/reactionary turn politically, or not? I’d appreciate any thoughts you all may have on this, so leave a comment below. This is an open thread.
Writing on the Polish constitutional court’s ruling last week that some EU laws are in conflict with the country’s constitution, and that Polish sovereignty takes priority, Andrew Tettenborn predicts that this marks a sea-change for Europe:
For many years, the EU has posed as a kind of overbearing imperial leviathan, which insists its law has to prevail over that of the states that make it up. Now its bluff appears to have finally been called... Even though the makeup of the Warsaw judiciary is remote from events 700 miles away in Brussels – and highly unlikely to affect them in any noticeable way – this event has spooked the Eurocracy big-time. Until this decision, there was an agreement between Brussels and local elites that the integrity of the EU legal order had to be preserved at all costs. Now that has gone. This opens up the frightening prospect that member states generally might dare to question Brussels’ dictat; a fear aggravated by the fact that the German constitutional court has already made guarded suggestions to much the same effect.
And:
[T]his is likely to alter the relation between Brussels and the EU members irrevocably. The European Commission will be forced, through gritted teeth, to accept that the days are over when it could impose its will on member states simply by mouthing the words 'superiority of EU law'… In future, whether they like it or not, the elite in Brussels will know that any drastic attempts to interfere further in its members’ internal affairs will be subject to a de facto veto. To this extent the Warsaw court's judgment may well have changed the nature of the bloc forever.
We’ll see. Brussels is definitely hopping mad about this.
Something fascinating is happening in France: the essayist Éric Zemmour (author of such books as “Le Suicide français”) is, as one article headline put it, “eating Marine Le Pen alive.” By cannibalizing the right-wing vote, the formerly ignorable Zemmour is suddenly polling as high as 17% as a contender in the upcoming French elections, putting him in reach of challenging Macron in the first round (though he has not yet declared his candidacy). Why?
Gavin Mortimer writes in a colorful piece that Zemmour has captured an energetic wave of populist frustration in France created by the out-of-touch and condescending French elite, and that those voters are tired of Low-Energy Le Pen’s losing:
Before he appeared as a contender it was the usual worn-out figures lining up for next year’s presidential election: Marine Le Pen, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Xavier Bertrand, Valérie Pécresse and Arnaud Montebourg. None of them have anything new to say and, even if they did, the electorate have stopped listening. Same old same old. Zemmour, on the other hand, despite the fact he has yet to declare his candidacy, makes for compelling TV. He was at it again on Wednesday evening, this time calling gender conversion therapy ‘criminal’ and comparing its medical facilitators in the USA to the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. The presenter nearly fell off her chair.
…
But still they refuse to heed the lessons. Zemmour and his supporters are the new ‘deplorables’. The president of the Republicans, Christian Jacob, stated last month that his party has no common ground with Zemmour. The Socialist mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, a candidate in next year’s election, said recently that his popularity made her ‘disgusted to the point of nausea.’ Such comments help explain why Hidalgo’s campaign has so far been a disaster. The French electorate aren’t stupid. Voters know that when Hidalgo et al rage at Zemmour they are raging really at them: their lifestyle, their values, their views.
…
It’s the political class that are responsible. I’ve written before about how the French electorate have never forgiven the political establishment for ignoring their ‘no’ vote on the EU constitution in 2005. Add to that their refusal to listen to voters’ concerns about mass immigration, Islamic extremism, identity politics and violent crime and is it any wonder that they will back the first person who dares speak up for them?
In a dispatch from Sweden, Malcom Kyeyune writes that:
The West is currently undergoing a series of political and social upheavals. Attention tends to focus on America, where cancel culture and “woke” corporations are part of a process that’s pulling the country apart. From Sweden this all looks disturbingly familiar. In 2015, we experienced our own form of cultural revolution, with many of the same symptoms as its more potent sequels in America, Britain and elsewhere. Before “Trump derangement syndrome” was a thing, people in Sweden were denouncing each other, unpersoning each other for wrongthink, and having frenzied public struggle sessions.
(I’d dispute this by the way: 2015 was also the first breakout year for the cultural revolution in the USA, notably pre-Trump.)
But interestingly, he claims things calmed down quickly after a period of craziness from about 2015-2018, sparked by the 2015 European migration crisis and the birth of an “extremely familiar Western pattern” of cultural elites wanting no association with backwards Swedish “deplorables” who opposed unrestrained immigration.
How did this end? Because of the “the belated discovery [by the upper-middle class] that [the] consequences of immigration are in fact very real, and that methods of ‘shaping the narrative’ cannot really change material reality. More critically, there is the realisation that nobody — certainly not middle class progressives — wants to live with those consequences at all.”
This is essentially the same argument now being made by some in the U.S. that the negative effects of progressive policies, such as rising crime, are starting to effect some parts of the elite classes, and this will soon cause a political counter-reaction.
According to Kyeyune:
Today Sweden’s cultural revolution finds itself in an odd spot. An uneasy ceasefire prevails in Swedish society now. While the deplorables are still mocked, there is no bite to it anymore. SD voters are no longer at risk of having their careers cancelled. In 2021, an unspoken attitude of “don’t ask, don’t tell” prevails… The hard, eliminationist edge of Swedish politics is mostly gone.”
Is this true? I don’t know. I would be interested in hearing from anyone in Sweden on the state of politics there now.
That’s it for this week. If you’ve been shared this from elsewhere, don’t forget to subscribe:
I teach high school students literature and history. On Friday a most fascinating conversation grew out of Frankenstein - all I can say is something is afoot. I've been a teacher for 12 years (and it is my second career), and the conversation in that class coupled with the intense interest my freshman take in any discussion of the ancient religions of the Near East in my ancient history class, tells me that something has suddenly shifted. Other teachers are noticing it as well, our students know something is profoundly wrong and the older ones are increasingly not interested in what the entertainment-porn-social-media industrial complex is pushing on them. They are still young and who the heck knows where this goes, if it goes anywhere, but it is a sea-change in student attitudes and it has happened in the last month or so. The critiques and concerns are beginning to cut across all of the cultural and political lines that my students have knowingly or unknowingly previously embraced as well.
I am a data point of one, and an “elder millennial,” but I have found myself increasingly fascinated by religious traditions over the past year after I jarringly divorced myself from decades of wokeism. I grew up as “technically Catholic” but never took it to heart, and remain firmly agnostic when it comes to the supernatural, but I’ve been rediscovering some of the wisdom behind Christianity, and the cultural comfort of Catholicism. I think for me, I realized one day how cold and soulless the social justice movement had become, even though my investment in it had genuinely been aimed at being a good human and making the world a better place. When I began to search for alternative approaches, MLK stood out for his moral clarity rooted in Christianity.
Another straw in the wind is a series of essays on the origin and nature of our modern megamachine by the wonderful English/Irish writer Paul Kingsnorth at his relatively new substack site "Abbey of Misrule." Kingsnorth has gone through a series of transformations from militant environmentalist, to Buddhist, to Wiccan and now orthodox Christian.
For one of the more prophetic accounts of this possible turn of events see the mid-1960s analysis of the sociologist Philip Rieff "The Triumph of the Therapeutic," in which he argued, in part, that a key assumption of the counter-cultural movements of the 1960s--that innocence will be established when our characters are liberated from "thou shalt not's" or what he called sacred interdicts, was mistaken--because "behind the hippie stands the thug."
I gave up on Kingsnorth when he started giving aid and comfort to anti-vaxxers. Also, his only plan seems to be nostaglia for living in mud huts and fighting endless local wars. (He was way worked up over the French Revolution as the greatest evil ever, while ignoring the sectarian French religious wars that killed at least 10 times as many people just a couple of decades prior.)
As I mentioned in "Four Big Questions for the Counter-Revolution" (https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/four-big-questions-for-the-counter), he's on the far end of a big debate on the question of what to do about the environmental and spiritual downsides of modern liberal-capitalism. In my view that system is definitely keeping a lot of people from dying of starvation and medieval diseases, so some kind of thoughtful middle road is probably best in order (as in so many cases).
I can only speak to what’s going on in America, but this country is swimming in spiritual anxiety. I just am not convinced that it will lead to an uptick in traditional religious affiliation. What is going to realistically replace the crumbling (crumbled?) Protestant Mainline? The best book I have read on the subject—which I think really describes what is happening in America these days—is Joseph Bottum’s An Anxious Age.
America has always been a very religious country. But these days you see it on the left in wokeism (with its christalogical overtones) and in the environmental movement (with its heavy eschatology), on the right perhaps more with traditional religion. But on top of all of that, America’s predominant religion is clearly scientism (“trust the science”) and its pervasive folk religion is the cult of wellness (take a listen to the Conspirituality podcast to see how wellness and right wing culture have developed into a fascinating admixture).
People are clearly channeling their spiritual energy in a variety of ways … but I don’t see it moving toward traditional religion. I would be more inclined to believe that we are moving toward a new form of pagan society. David Roberts, on his environmentally focused substack, recently mentioned how the environmental movement has left him looking for meaning but that he wasn’t comfortable going back to his Christian roots. He was looking for new ideas for secular spirituality. I think we’ll see a lot more of that.
As far as a future political direction of a possible religious/cultural or psychological revival of some sort, I have more questions than answers. For example:
Philip Rieff has argued, from a sociological perspective, that Marxism was a conservative movement culturally (it tended to be led by an elite that believed in a particular credal doctrine) that then deteriorated into a movement with the Party as the prince. Rieff also believed that in the future all of our new elites were likely to be anti-credal and as a consequence we would be moving toward a new type of unrestrained barbarism
In 1992 Margaret Conovan argued that a problem which occupied Hannah Arendt throughout much of her life was "...if common sense morality had turned out to be a very weak barrier against totalitarianism, and religion was no help where else was it possible to turn?" Arendt seemed to place her hope in a type of philosophical thinking which overcomes the type of thoughtlessness she believes she had observed in Eichmann.
On a more psychological/religious level, Paul Kingsnorth has argued that the megamachine at
its origins represents "a tendency within all of us made concrete by power and circumstance which coalesces in a huge agglomeration of power, control and ambition."
All three of these individuals seem to put their faith in the unstated assumption or hope that there may exist a type of internal moral faculty within each of us (whether cultural, philosophical or religious in origin) which can be called upon to help each of us through dark times as well as possibly provide a foundation for establishing a new sense of limits.
Well, this is an interesting question. This is a very long running debate, to say the least. The argument of Confucius, for example, was that the only way to maintain order in society and prevent barbarism was ultimately for individuals to rigorously cultivate their internal moral faculties and discipline for right action. In opposition, the Legalist philosopher Han Fei argued that this was a fool's errand, as bad behavior by people (being inherently evil) could only be restrained by carefully constructed institutions of power. This debate has repeated over and over again in the West as well, of course. It is still repeating today.
All political discussions are actually theological. I can’t even converse with anyone who thinks a moral framework can be constructed without a religious foundation. It’s also disheartening to see other commenters disparage those who reject vaccines.
I doubt I’ll comment again solely because of that.
Is anyone else taking all this in and thinking about the eventual rise of Antichrist? A generation (or multiple generations?) of people who were not given a solid religious foundation by tepid parents, or who were given zero religious foundation because they were raised by “nones”, or who grew into adulthood in a post-Christian society, will be hugely susceptible to the sort of deception that Antichrist will perpetrate on the world. They will be looking for the very thing that previous generations (that would be us) have rejected and excised from the culture, and the result will be a…well, disaster doesn’t seem like a big enough word.
Spirituality did not avail the Right nor the Traditional religions, why does the Left think it will avail them and to what end? Personal Jesus du Left? Makes no difference to our fate Lyons, the Tribesmen of the past were quite eliminated by Christians even when they themselves were Christian converts.
Politics is Power. God has long since ceased to be a check or restraint. No King, no Bishop as it turns out, no Throne no altar.
And no easy way out, easiest is the way were on; lay down and die.
Ever the pedant, I find an overuse of the word totalitarian to the point of it becoming tautological. Scholars of totalitarianism emphasize three things: The shattering of existing institutions, the remaking of society toward some unified structure (destruction of civil society) bound to a utopian ideology, and the need for violence in order to destroy the old and refashion the new man. I despair when I see Trump, or woke college kids, defined as "totalitarian." Authoritarian they may be, but totalitarianism is a whole other animal. I'd recommend Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan to everyone interested in this. https://is.muni.cz/el/1423/podzim2016/POL501/um/Linz_-_Totalitarian_and_Authoritarian_Regimes_-_1-40.pdf
This religious revival is not only happening among the non-religious but is happening within religion denominations itself. Speaking for Catholicism, to which I am part of, this revival seeks what the Second Vatican Council upended. Specifically, it seeks a re-sanctification of the liturgy, re-introduction to classical Catholic education, exploration of traditional holy orders, revived classic Church architecture and art, the liturgization of daily life, restored family traditions and parish/diocese culture, etc. The council in effect protestantized the Church, making it vulnerable to globalist liberalization. The culmination of the council is really Pope Francis, who undoubtedly has a globalist agenda and why he cracked down so hard on traditional latin mass--which really embodies this revival. The revival is a reaction to the liberalization and loss of Catholic identity. It's a largely laity-driven revival. While I can't speak for other denominations, it seems the same may be happening among other religions. It gives some hope for the future.
American society has become culturally fractured, diverse, various, and Balkanized. Some of that is good (variety, diversity), and some is not. There is room for increasing secularization and MIT celibacy clubs (do they vow chastity for life or until marriage?). There can be drag queen story hour in Portland Oregon and religious revival in central Virginia.
Based on the recent Pew data from this past spring, I’m not optimistic for a Third Great Awakening. A few secular people may use prayer apps. But more people are not only not going to church. They are self-identifying as not interested in religion at all. Still, human beings have a fundamentally religious drive deep in their souls, so something has to take that place and perhaps a new religious revival could supplant the reign of secular religions (environmentalism, wokeism etc.).
Or maybe all the secular people (especially the environmentalists) will stop having kids entirely (to save the planet), and only Catholics and Evangelicals will have kids and that will change the dynamic. And large influxes of traditional Christian immigrants from Asia, South America, and Africa. Along with Muslims and Jews and members of other faiths.
It would sure save Washington a lot of headaches if the EU was really controlled by the State Department... If you mean that EU officials have integrated itself into the same worldview / cathedral as the American elite, then maybe I understand what you mean.
When she said Fuck The EU she knew of what she spoke.
As far as the State Dept; the closest thing we have to a “government” is the 7th floor. No American embassy is an embassy anymore than the Soviet Embassy in a Warsaw Pact nation was an Embassy. Any USA Embassy is the administrative building of the American Empire, far more than any military base.
I teach high school students literature and history. On Friday a most fascinating conversation grew out of Frankenstein - all I can say is something is afoot. I've been a teacher for 12 years (and it is my second career), and the conversation in that class coupled with the intense interest my freshman take in any discussion of the ancient religions of the Near East in my ancient history class, tells me that something has suddenly shifted. Other teachers are noticing it as well, our students know something is profoundly wrong and the older ones are increasingly not interested in what the entertainment-porn-social-media industrial complex is pushing on them. They are still young and who the heck knows where this goes, if it goes anywhere, but it is a sea-change in student attitudes and it has happened in the last month or so. The critiques and concerns are beginning to cut across all of the cultural and political lines that my students have knowingly or unknowingly previously embraced as well.
Very interesting to hear. I also sense that something may have changed in the wind, but it's hard to put a finger on it.
Keep us updated.
Please update this as you can. I find this intriguing. Maybe slightly even hopeful.
I am a data point of one, and an “elder millennial,” but I have found myself increasingly fascinated by religious traditions over the past year after I jarringly divorced myself from decades of wokeism. I grew up as “technically Catholic” but never took it to heart, and remain firmly agnostic when it comes to the supernatural, but I’ve been rediscovering some of the wisdom behind Christianity, and the cultural comfort of Catholicism. I think for me, I realized one day how cold and soulless the social justice movement had become, even though my investment in it had genuinely been aimed at being a good human and making the world a better place. When I began to search for alternative approaches, MLK stood out for his moral clarity rooted in Christianity.
Thank you for sharing that. I think you hit on the key reality that a lot of people are looking for higher meaning these days, and not finding it.
Another straw in the wind is a series of essays on the origin and nature of our modern megamachine by the wonderful English/Irish writer Paul Kingsnorth at his relatively new substack site "Abbey of Misrule." Kingsnorth has gone through a series of transformations from militant environmentalist, to Buddhist, to Wiccan and now orthodox Christian.
For one of the more prophetic accounts of this possible turn of events see the mid-1960s analysis of the sociologist Philip Rieff "The Triumph of the Therapeutic," in which he argued, in part, that a key assumption of the counter-cultural movements of the 1960s--that innocence will be established when our characters are liberated from "thou shalt not's" or what he called sacred interdicts, was mistaken--because "behind the hippie stands the thug."
Thanks, yes, I am fan of Paul's writing. Most of his Substack essays are behind a paywall, but if people are interested in his transformations you mention, he describes them here: https://www.firstthings.com/article/2021/06/the-cross-and-the-machine
Princeton professor Joshua Katz has a similar essay there as well: https://www.firstthings.com/article/2021/10/my-confessions
I gave up on Kingsnorth when he started giving aid and comfort to anti-vaxxers. Also, his only plan seems to be nostaglia for living in mud huts and fighting endless local wars. (He was way worked up over the French Revolution as the greatest evil ever, while ignoring the sectarian French religious wars that killed at least 10 times as many people just a couple of decades prior.)
As I mentioned in "Four Big Questions for the Counter-Revolution" (https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/four-big-questions-for-the-counter), he's on the far end of a big debate on the question of what to do about the environmental and spiritual downsides of modern liberal-capitalism. In my view that system is definitely keeping a lot of people from dying of starvation and medieval diseases, so some kind of thoughtful middle road is probably best in order (as in so many cases).
I can only speak to what’s going on in America, but this country is swimming in spiritual anxiety. I just am not convinced that it will lead to an uptick in traditional religious affiliation. What is going to realistically replace the crumbling (crumbled?) Protestant Mainline? The best book I have read on the subject—which I think really describes what is happening in America these days—is Joseph Bottum’s An Anxious Age.
America has always been a very religious country. But these days you see it on the left in wokeism (with its christalogical overtones) and in the environmental movement (with its heavy eschatology), on the right perhaps more with traditional religion. But on top of all of that, America’s predominant religion is clearly scientism (“trust the science”) and its pervasive folk religion is the cult of wellness (take a listen to the Conspirituality podcast to see how wellness and right wing culture have developed into a fascinating admixture).
People are clearly channeling their spiritual energy in a variety of ways … but I don’t see it moving toward traditional religion. I would be more inclined to believe that we are moving toward a new form of pagan society. David Roberts, on his environmentally focused substack, recently mentioned how the environmental movement has left him looking for meaning but that he wasn’t comfortable going back to his Christian roots. He was looking for new ideas for secular spirituality. I think we’ll see a lot more of that.
As far as a future political direction of a possible religious/cultural or psychological revival of some sort, I have more questions than answers. For example:
Philip Rieff has argued, from a sociological perspective, that Marxism was a conservative movement culturally (it tended to be led by an elite that believed in a particular credal doctrine) that then deteriorated into a movement with the Party as the prince. Rieff also believed that in the future all of our new elites were likely to be anti-credal and as a consequence we would be moving toward a new type of unrestrained barbarism
In 1992 Margaret Conovan argued that a problem which occupied Hannah Arendt throughout much of her life was "...if common sense morality had turned out to be a very weak barrier against totalitarianism, and religion was no help where else was it possible to turn?" Arendt seemed to place her hope in a type of philosophical thinking which overcomes the type of thoughtlessness she believes she had observed in Eichmann.
On a more psychological/religious level, Paul Kingsnorth has argued that the megamachine at
its origins represents "a tendency within all of us made concrete by power and circumstance which coalesces in a huge agglomeration of power, control and ambition."
All three of these individuals seem to put their faith in the unstated assumption or hope that there may exist a type of internal moral faculty within each of us (whether cultural, philosophical or religious in origin) which can be called upon to help each of us through dark times as well as possibly provide a foundation for establishing a new sense of limits.
Does history support such a hope?
Well, this is an interesting question. This is a very long running debate, to say the least. The argument of Confucius, for example, was that the only way to maintain order in society and prevent barbarism was ultimately for individuals to rigorously cultivate their internal moral faculties and discipline for right action. In opposition, the Legalist philosopher Han Fei argued that this was a fool's errand, as bad behavior by people (being inherently evil) could only be restrained by carefully constructed institutions of power. This debate has repeated over and over again in the West as well, of course. It is still repeating today.
All political discussions are actually theological. I can’t even converse with anyone who thinks a moral framework can be constructed without a religious foundation. It’s also disheartening to see other commenters disparage those who reject vaccines.
I doubt I’ll comment again solely because of that.
Is anyone else taking all this in and thinking about the eventual rise of Antichrist? A generation (or multiple generations?) of people who were not given a solid religious foundation by tepid parents, or who were given zero religious foundation because they were raised by “nones”, or who grew into adulthood in a post-Christian society, will be hugely susceptible to the sort of deception that Antichrist will perpetrate on the world. They will be looking for the very thing that previous generations (that would be us) have rejected and excised from the culture, and the result will be a…well, disaster doesn’t seem like a big enough word.
As Sweden goes so goes…
Swedes.
Spirituality did not avail the Right nor the Traditional religions, why does the Left think it will avail them and to what end? Personal Jesus du Left? Makes no difference to our fate Lyons, the Tribesmen of the past were quite eliminated by Christians even when they themselves were Christian converts.
Politics is Power. God has long since ceased to be a check or restraint. No King, no Bishop as it turns out, no Throne no altar.
And no easy way out, easiest is the way were on; lay down and die.
Ever the pedant, I find an overuse of the word totalitarian to the point of it becoming tautological. Scholars of totalitarianism emphasize three things: The shattering of existing institutions, the remaking of society toward some unified structure (destruction of civil society) bound to a utopian ideology, and the need for violence in order to destroy the old and refashion the new man. I despair when I see Trump, or woke college kids, defined as "totalitarian." Authoritarian they may be, but totalitarianism is a whole other animal. I'd recommend Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan to everyone interested in this. https://is.muni.cz/el/1423/podzim2016/POL501/um/Linz_-_Totalitarian_and_Authoritarian_Regimes_-_1-40.pdf
This religious revival is not only happening among the non-religious but is happening within religion denominations itself. Speaking for Catholicism, to which I am part of, this revival seeks what the Second Vatican Council upended. Specifically, it seeks a re-sanctification of the liturgy, re-introduction to classical Catholic education, exploration of traditional holy orders, revived classic Church architecture and art, the liturgization of daily life, restored family traditions and parish/diocese culture, etc. The council in effect protestantized the Church, making it vulnerable to globalist liberalization. The culmination of the council is really Pope Francis, who undoubtedly has a globalist agenda and why he cracked down so hard on traditional latin mass--which really embodies this revival. The revival is a reaction to the liberalization and loss of Catholic identity. It's a largely laity-driven revival. While I can't speak for other denominations, it seems the same may be happening among other religions. It gives some hope for the future.
American society has become culturally fractured, diverse, various, and Balkanized. Some of that is good (variety, diversity), and some is not. There is room for increasing secularization and MIT celibacy clubs (do they vow chastity for life or until marriage?). There can be drag queen story hour in Portland Oregon and religious revival in central Virginia.
Based on the recent Pew data from this past spring, I’m not optimistic for a Third Great Awakening. A few secular people may use prayer apps. But more people are not only not going to church. They are self-identifying as not interested in religion at all. Still, human beings have a fundamentally religious drive deep in their souls, so something has to take that place and perhaps a new religious revival could supplant the reign of secular religions (environmentalism, wokeism etc.).
Or maybe all the secular people (especially the environmentalists) will stop having kids entirely (to save the planet), and only Catholics and Evangelicals will have kids and that will change the dynamic. And large influxes of traditional Christian immigrants from Asia, South America, and Africa. Along with Muslims and Jews and members of other faiths.
Saying Brussels is like saying UN. UN= US State Department.
So Warsaw isn’t going against “Brussels “ its going against DC.
It would sure save Washington a lot of headaches if the EU was really controlled by the State Department... If you mean that EU officials have integrated itself into the same worldview / cathedral as the American elite, then maybe I understand what you mean.
I mean power, not worldview.
Other than power the worldview is $$$.
When she said Fuck The EU she knew of what she spoke.
As far as the State Dept; the closest thing we have to a “government” is the 7th floor. No American embassy is an embassy anymore than the Soviet Embassy in a Warsaw Pact nation was an Embassy. Any USA Embassy is the administrative building of the American Empire, far more than any military base.