The church is shrinking, but it’s getting stronger as well. That is the paradox afoot on the American religious scene. The number of unchurched — “nones” and “dones” — are skyrocketing, while the remainers, the ones who stick it out, are becoming more devout — smaller but better. These young people are looking for something different, something unlike their workaday lives. It’s bad for the church — the visible, institutional church. And it’s good for the church — the hidden church, the body of Christ, the assembly of believers gathered by the gospel. The first part is easily corroborated. Study after study shows that the exodus out the church doors is profound. By now everybody has heard the news, so we can recap. The seven sisters of the mainline, as the seven traditional Protestant old-line denominations are called, have lost substantial membership in the past 20 years, some by over half. The Disciples of Christ are down 57.25 percent in membership from 2000 to 2020. In that same time period, the Presbyterian Church USA has dropped by 50.68 percent; the United Church of Christ, 43 percent; the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, 38.6 percent; the Episcopal Church, 32.42 percent; the United Methodist Church, 24.4 percent; and the American Baptist Church, 21.7 percent. (READ MORE from Tom Raabe: Biden, Trash-Talker in Chief) But the decline has hit America’s largest Christian denomination as well — the Catholic Church. According to a recent study, following the COVID pandemic only 17 percent of Catholic adults go to Mass every week — down from over 24 percent before the virus. The number for millennials is 9 percent. Many are the reasons proffered for the exodus. Some seem nonspiritual – parishioners move and don’t adopt another congregation in their new location; the services aren’t at convenient times so they stop attending; they simply get out of the habit; COVID put them on their couches for online worship and, post-virus, they never roused themselves from the cushions. Some see church as providing only community, and they can find that elsewhere — heck, every morning down at the local Cracker Barrel if community per se is all they’re after. The factors associated with a rising secularism have also taken a toll. The attack on religion, the attempt to strip religious views from the public square, the rise of scientific explanations for life’s big questions that leave no room for God have all moved people out of the pews. But there is also the redundancy factor. Catholicism is victim to the same social factors as mainline Protestantism. Many priests, as their Protestant peers, deliver sermons regaling social-justice warriors and damning conservatives as the reactionary spawn of the devil. It has been that way for decades now, and as the church becomes more progressive, more political, more social-justice-oriented, it becomes less theological. Doctrine becomes emasculated; beliefs become personal opinions, “my truths,” and no longer binding on the masses. The church in this world seems more and more unnecessary. It serves as a redundancy system — a backup network of fellow travelers who meet once a week to reinforce political and social allegiance. Sure, there are a few comforting rituals … maybe some favorite songs to sing, the familiar liturgical rubrics, empty now of meaning but still producing the warm religious fuzzies. But eventually, the whole enterprise becomes tangential. It adds a religious skin to the political pudding the attender is in reality invested in. It doesn’t provide anything more, or other, or unique or different, than the political and social networks he already accesses. And the churchgoer becomes a “done.” He doesn’t need it anymore; it’s redundant. (READ MORE: The LGBTQ Conquest of America) Unfortunately, it is just these churchgoers who have inculcated their offspring in the idea that religion is optional and requiring of no moral obligation. They passed the faith down to the next generation as not a vital and crucial — and certainly not eternally necessary — aspect of life. The result is the meteoric rise of the “nones.” These are they who do not identify with any religion; they’re atheists, agnostics, or nothing in particular, and they constitute almost 30 percent of the population. And they’re young — 65 percent are under 50 years old — and comprise a lot of millennials and Gen Z (44 percent of millennials and 45 percent of Gen Z are nones). It’s the second side of the paradox — that a stripped-down church is reclaiming a vibrant, electric faith — that is the new news. An Associated Press article by Tim Sullivan dropped a few days ago extolling just this side of the paradox. Quoting from the article: Across the U.S., the Catholic Church is undergoing an immense shift. Generations of Catholics who embraced the modernizing tide sparked in the 1960s by Vatican II are increasingly giving way to religious conservatives who believe the church has been twisted by change, with the promise of eternal salvation replaced by guitar Masses, parish food pantries and casual indifference to church doctrine. The shift, molded by plummeting church attendance, increasingly traditional priests and growing numbers of young Catholics searching for more orthodoxy, has reshaped parishes across the country, leaving them sometimes at odds with Pope Francis and much of the Catholic world. The article focuses on a resurgent conservative Catholic piety, driven by young believers enamored of what the writer calls “the old ways” — by which is meant a return to ancient, traditional music; priests donning traditional garb, like cassocks; more sermons concerned with sin and confession and church doctrine; and the Latin Mass, along with more incense and more Gregorian chants. These young people are looking for something different, something unlike their workaday lives. Said Ben Rouleau, quoted in the AP article: “We want this ethereal experience that is different from everything else in our lives.” This is one of the forgotten attractions of traditional, even liturgical, worship. It’s different. The modern church, the institution that is now obsessed with informality, wants to push on its members the same quotidian attitudes and styles they imbibe all week long. The sermon resembles a TED talk; the music is Christian Top 40; the attire is business casual, or worse, weekend casual. What those returning to orthodoxy are saying is, of the 168 hours in a week, give us one, just one, where we can remember our spiritual heritage, where we can flee the lives of the other 167 and access worship in the ancient forms. Where we can connect in worship with the saints before us, who centuries before sang the same Sanctus, the same Agnus Dei, that we sing today. (READ MORE: Courting the Vote of the ‘Nones’) Chanting the psalms responsively, to take one liturgical action, is so unlike anything we’ll encounter during the week as to be immensely attractive — and meaningful. Why do we have to sing pop ditties in church that sound like the ones streaming into our ear pods all week long? While boomers and other left-oriented cohorts rush out the church doors, the ones that remain, especially the young people, are pushing the church rightward. With the flight of their elders, they find themselves wielding more influence in their churches, and their conservative views are gaining traction. Their cause is bolstered by an influx of young conservative priests coming out of seminary, priests who, according to a report, are far more likely than their older peers to identify as conservative both theologically and politically. On theology, the report said: “More than half of the priests who were ordained since 2010 see themselves on the conservative side of the scale. No surveyed priests who were ordained after 2020 described themselves as ‘very progressive.’” Although scattered around the country, and representing only a minority of Catholics, this resurgence of serious churchmanship is encouraging amid the general decline of Christianity in America. The post Shrinking Church, Thriving Church appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

In the years just before World War II, inspired by the meteoric rise of Nazi power, antisemitism peaked in America. Historian Jonathan Sarna reported there were more than 120 organizations dedicated to promoting anti-Jewish hatred and that, in 1938, a poll found that 20 percent of Americans were in favor of driving the Jews out of America.  Charles Coughlin, whose radio audience numbered in the tens of millions, defended the Kristallnacht pogroms against German Jews as being a proper defense against what he wildly claimed was the Jewish slaughter of millions of Germans. Fritz Kuhn led a rally of his Nazi-inspired German American Bund in Madison Square Garden, replete with stormtrooper uniforms, Nazi salutes, and more than 20,000 people in attendance. Even when Hitler had swallowed Czechoslovakia and then invaded Poland, terror-bombing the civilians in its cities, Coughlin broadcast his plan to organize “an army of peace” to march on Washington to protest changing the neutrality laws —  a move that would have allowed America to aid European democracies that were soon to be scythed down by the Nazi blitzkrieg. He claimed Jews were trying to get America involved in a bloodbath. (READ MORE: Biden is Deaf to His ‘Better Angels’) America never got the chance to choose war with Hitler — Hitler declared war on us first, on Dec. 10, 1941, in solidarity with his Japanese allies. Then in January, at Wannsee, the Nazis finalized their plans for the methodical extermination of Europe’s Jews.  After three and a half years of bloody struggle, we and our allies destroyed the Nazi regime. General Eisenhower made sure that tens of thousands of American troops saw first-hand the horrors of the concentration camps with their piles of dead, unburied Jews and the skeletal survivors. Americans’ souls were seared by the utter obscenity of this and all racial hatred. Americans turned away from antisemitism and state-sponsored racial discrimination against black Americans, which had so stained their souls. This was memorable moral progress. My father grew up getting beaten up by schoolkids whose parents belonged to the German American Bund; I grew up in the ’60s when all that was a distant memory, my religious freedom was respected, and civil rights had been affirmed and enforced for all Americans. So many of us thought this was a permanent achievement. The sudden wave of antisemitism that exploded across America, exhilarated by Hamas’ orgy of murder, kidnapping, and rape has shown to a dismayed America that hate is back. It did not come from nowhere. It took a supremely skilled politician to turn around the national ethos and start to make America hate again. Americans Ignored Obama’s Ties to Antisemites When young Barack Obama was looking for his path in life, Pastor Jeremiah Wright played a major role in helping him get past the doper lifestyle. As the Guardian put it in 2008, “Wright officiated at Obama’s wedding and baptised his daughters, and was the Illinois senator’s spiritual guide for decades.” Obama even used a Wright phrase from a sermon, “the audacity of hope,” in his address to the DNC in 2004 and as the title of one of his books. That 2004 convention speech was brilliant. Obama seemed to be pointing the way toward a sane world in which America finally retired race as a leading issue in our country. Soaring language painted a picture of the America most of us dreamed of, an America united beyond hatred, fulfilling the promise of our Founders. In his first Inaugural Address, Obama seemed to understand our founding the way Abraham Lincoln had: The Fathers of this country fully expected slavery to die out as a government based on the principle of human equality established itself in the world. (READ MORE: Colleges Must Stop Admitting Foreign Students for Two Years) Obama painted himself as a uniter. Jews supported him in Illinois. But when word of Pastor Wright’s angry and racially charged rhetoric surfaced in the primary campaign of 2008, many began to doubt Obama’s real stance. It was not just that Wright called for God to damn America in one of his most infamous sermons. It was his intense anti-Israel stance and, worse, his association with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who was addicted to using vicious antisemitism as an emotional driver of his leadership. Wright publicly associated himself with Farrakhan, giving wider legitimacy to his Jew hatred in the eyes of Wright’s church and the larger black community. Now, a disciple of Wright was aspiring for the presidency, which would give unheard-of legitimacy to the Farrakhan brand of Jew hatred with which Wright had unabashedly associated himself. Obama got past this crisis not by admitting any wrong at all in his long association with the hateful Wright, or by admitting any wrong on his part. He did not ask for the forgiveness that Americans so easily give to those honest enough to admit their errors. Instead, he cast his preacher under his campaign bus and lectured Americans mildly about American racism. Because he was a good speaker, and because America wanted to have a historic figure in their midst (the figure Obama was sculpturing himself to be) – Americans dropped their suspicions.  As the title of a 2015 piece in the Atlantic put it, “Jeremiah Wright Is Still Angry at Barack Obama.” Obama showed far more loyalty to his own aspirations than to the man who mentored him and helped him forward. Hate is hateful towards its own. From Wright’s embrace of hatred as a motive force, Obama learned both a positive and a negative lesson. Positive: Hate moves people and can be used to great political advantage. Negative: When you use hate, you must disguise it much better than Jeremiah Wright did. You’ve got to introduce it by stealth. Hate Won Out During Obama’s Administration When Obama spoke to the nation in 2009 at his inauguration, he told Americans what he knew they wanted to hear. He spoke words with which almost all Americans agreed: “Because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself.” He endorsed, in broad terms, the fight against that terror that sought to impose itself on others in the Middle East and beyond. He seemed to liberal Democratic supporters of Israel such as Alan Dershowitz to be a true ally. (READ MORE: Protest Much? An Academic Reckoning Is Overdue.) But by the end of Obama’s eight years, the seemingly infinite promise of January 2009 was gone. Racial tensions were at a pitch not seen since the LA riots of the early ’90s. Instead of reconciliation, race had become a supreme category for the government and its allies in the universities and the media. It seemed to anyone not caught up in the sweeping change in the ethos wrought by the Obama crew that the only problem with American racism is that it had been that it had not been employed against the right group of people. To the horror of the older generation of Jewish liberal Democrats, a stealthy policy had emerged that, step by step, undermined the quarantine into which we had confined the terrorist mullahs of Iran. Obama took the lead in treating Israel’s prime minister with undisguised contempt, letting him into the White House only through the service entrance, like an English lord putting a tradesman in his place. He slowly but surely whittled away at the Israel alliance, bit by bit, until he enabled an understanding with Iran that guaranteed them — not forthrightly, but clearly enough — a nuclear bomb in another decade. As his last act as president, Obama directed that the U.S. allow the UN Security Council to pass a resolution proclaiming that Judaism’s holiest site, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, was an Islamic holy site to which Israel had no claim. In the wake of the exterminationist attack from Gaza on Oct. 7, those nurtured in the culture on which Obama has left this indelible mark showed the hate that seethes at its core. We could see for ourselves what all dealers in hate know: Hate is thrilling, motivating, and self-legitimating.  Obama’s more disciplined lesson of concealing hatred has not rubbed off. For that, we should be thankful. For the violent hatred suddenly on display seemingly everywhere in this country has shocked those who still have a grounding in the old America, before its ideals were used as mere plausible cover for this terrible, concealed agenda. The people see the late and half-hearted effort of the suddenly worried Biden crew to re-establish a non-threatening appearance. But Obama’s masterful ability to conceal hate is a rare talent. No one has that level of skill in the Biden bunch, who daily appear more and more empty of moral purpose or diplomatic skill. It may well be too late. Biden has been exposed as rudderless, unable to make even the most elementary moral distinction between the orgiastic butchers of Gaza and an organized and steadfast democratic ally who has maintained political freedom even in the face of 80 years of constant existential threat. (Just compare Israel to Ukraine, where elections and habeas corpus have been suspended to deal with its crisis.)  Without the Obama magic, hate stands exposed as just that — hate. Hate does not define America. Americans increasingly realize that it is up to them to make that clear. They will not shrink from the task. The post Make America Hate Again appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

There have always been idiots. I write this with a trace of nostalgia. Some of them have been illustrious, worthy of admiration. Throughout the centuries and cultures, they have played a central role in history. Sometimes they show you the path not to follow and, at other times, they drag behind them a multitude of unconditional supporters of stupidity. It is the imperfect drama of democracy. These people vote too and, following a sort of mindless tribalism, they tend to vote for other idiots. The expansive capacity of the idiot used to be limited in time. After all, as idiots, they do idiot things which nobody in their right mind pays too much attention to, apart from some who watch them with the same enthusiasm seen in zoo goers throwing peanuts at the monkeys or banging on the cage of a bored vulture in the vain hope that he will get angry, pull the keys out of his feathers, open the door and peck their eyes out. (READ MORE: Social Media After Florida and TikTok) Generally, those who follow an idiot do so out of fear that if they don’t, they may decide to act like an idiot towards those around them. Perhaps this explains how Maduro loyalists still exist. I know Nicolás thinks it is because of his beauty but I am sorry to bring the red-black vulture down from his perch: They only follow you out of fear of the Helicoide and of losing their official narco-benefits. Without Helicoide and the narco-state, Maduro would be raised alone in captivity, occasionally fed peanuts by those Central European tourists, so sensitive to the pains of the ozone layer and the hunger of animals. There is, however, a destabilizing factor in the traditional isolation of the common idiot and that is the globalization of idiocy. Networks do not filter. And the speed of our connections, so lame when downloading what is important, reaches ultrasonic heights when it comes to opening videos starring idiots. In its international expansion, among the recipients of the video, native idiots are immediately distinguishable because they jump, cell phone in hand, and give friendly elbows to coworkers while laughing their heads off. Then the monster’s ineptitude feeds on itself. Each like makes the idiot more of an idiot. It is a process that has no end, except when the idiot explodes into a thousand pieces on a live stream, thus reaping his greatest success, even if posthumous. If there are offspring, after the hangover of the post-mortem triumph, the field is fertilized for the emergence of new talents in the emerging industry of international stupidity. (READ MORE: Go Touch Some Grass) Since Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, Carlos Alberto Montaner, and Álvaro Vargas Llosa signed the Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot some time ago and I do not believe that the treaty can be amended, I will not expand on the characteristics of these subjects but will limit my warning to their reproductive capacities. The contemporary idiot is passionate about virality. If viral comes with a challenge, the passion becomes devotion. The challenge can be to eat a live cat, to throw oneself into the void with no more protection than a coffee spoon clenched between the teeth, or to hit indiscriminately in the street anyone wearing blue. The only rule is to record it so no one can doubt the authorship. The feat is accompanied by tedious recordings of the idiot in question sitting in front of the computer, detailing the challenge and proving to the world that the idiocy contains a certain messianic aspect, a proselytizing vocation. However, idiots are no longer isolated as in the past. The views on their social networks make them minor national heroes — or even international heroes — in the making, and for themselves they are the living proof that idiocy, far from being a setback, is an honest reason to live. It is true that they die devoured by lions. Almost all great idiots die devoured by a lion, quite possibly during the filming of a viral video in which they tried to prove that the lion is an ideal pet for domestic coexistence. And that’s where their deed ends. However, their legacy remains. In the intermission between their idiocy and their tragic end, another legion of the same condition has arisen by their side; they also dream of going far, kissing fame, and dying devoured by a lion. (READ MORE: Gallup’s Stats on American Happiness Are Baloney) The drama of the globalization of idiots is not the unbearable lightness of their reason for living. After all, God did create us to be free. The drama is its prescriptive character and the copycat effect it has on its audience, which does nothing but activate hundreds of sleeper-idiots left, right, and center of our screens and that bothers me even more. Because up until recently, as a good columnist, I was convinced that in matters of idiots and idiocies, I had the exclusive. Today the competition is atrocious. And viral. The post The Globalization of Idiots appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

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