Lex Anteinternet: Manifest Destiny and the Second Trump Administration. What's going on with Greenland.

Lex Anteinternet: Manifest Destiny and the Second Trump Administrati...: Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, dramatizing Manifest Destiny.   Over the weekend, the real imperialist thinking behind Trump...

Manifest Destiny and the Second Trump Administration. What's going on with Greenland.

Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, dramatizing Manifest Destiny.

 

Over the weekend, the real imperialist thinking behind Trump's avarice for Greenland was revealed, and not by Trump, but by Ted Cruz.

Look, the whole history of America has been a history of acquiring new lands and new territories, whether you go back to Thomas Jefferson making the Louisiana purchase — about half of the United States of America today — or you go back to America purchasing Alaska from Russia. You want to talk about — at the time they called it ‘Seward’s Folly’ — It turned out to, to be an extraordinarily consequential purchase, Greenland has massive rare earth minerals and critical minerals. There are enormous economic benefits to America, but like Alaska, it is located on the Arctic which is a major theater for major military conflict with either Russia or China,

In short, it's a naked imperial land grab whose intellectual justification dates back to the 19th Century.  The age of alliances and of the United States representing hope and freedom is over. The age of grabbing lands to exploit because we can is back. 

It's deeply immoral, but Donald Trump is a profoundly immoral man.

He probably also didn't come u pwith this idea, but it was a natural for him.  He's not smart enough, or learned enough, to know of manifest destiny.

We've never covered the concept of Manifest Destiny here before, although we've covered some of the latter stages of the exercise of it.  We probably should have, as we've mentioned the Indian Wars fairly frequently, which are tied to it.  Having said all of that, it's worth nothing that there was never a time at which the concept had anywhere near universal American approval, and it was often hotly contested.

Manifest Destiny had its origins to some degree in the earliest history of the Republic, but less than is sometimes imagined.  The term itself was coined in 1845 in an editorial by later Confederate propagandist John L. O'Sullivan, although an earlier editorial by the adventersome Jane Cazneau entitled Annexation is credited by some with being the first work backing it.  That advocated for the annexation of Cuba and was penned about the same time.   O'Sullivan had used the term "divine destiny" as early as 1839.  O'Sullivan entered the scene advocating for the annexation of Texas, and then in an editorial about the Oregon Boundary Dispute wrote:

And that claim is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.

The entire concept is patently absurd, but it had a strong pull on people as an excuse for aggressive expanding.  God, the concept holds, made the United States unique and it the country was charged with a divine mission that included expanding its territorial control.  It had opposition right from the beginning.  None other than U.S. Grant stated:

I was bitterly opposed to the measure [to annex Texas], and to this day regard the war [with Mexico] which resulted as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation. It was an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies, in not considering justice in their desire to acquire additional territory... The Southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican war. Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times.

An obvious problem with the concept is that once the United States reached the Pacific, the expansion should have been over.  It was used to justify everything about the worst of American expansionism up until that point.  Thomas Jefferson had seen the acquisition of Louisiana as a 1,000 year long preservation of agrarianism, but everything the country could do to exploit the West and its resources started nearly immediately.  The expansion not only left room for yeoman farmers to expand into, the country forces the native inhabitants into reservations and began destructive extraction of minerals nearly immediately.  The mixed legacy of expansion can be seen in contemporary illustrations, such as the often seen painting Manifest Destiny, showing a barely clad angelic woman pointing the way west, while in the shadows a Native American family (with fully topless Indian women) look back as they're pushed off the land.  Wyoming's state seal has a cowboy and a miner.  Colorado's features mountains and a the phrase, Nil sine Numine, Nothing without Providence.

By the time the Frontier closed in 1890, the entire concept was really losing its appeal.  The Battle of Wounded Knee that same year raised questions about the morality of Western Expansion in a new bloody way, although the questions has always been there.  A sort of national angst set in with nowhere to expand to.  That soon found the concepts old backers urging war with Spain.

Supposedly the Spanish American War was over Cuban freedoms and dissatisfaction over Spain's reaction to the explosion on the USS Maine.  In reality, McKinley was forced into it, or at least ended up going along, as it looked like the US could grab Cuba and add it as a new territory.  Opposition in Congress, however, . . . which affords us a roadmap now, statutorily kept that from happening.

What was wholly unanticipated, however, is that the US would brilliantly deploy its Navy to position it to take the Philippines.

Painting depicting Dewey in the Battle of Manilla Bay. Why, exactly, did we want the Philippines anyway?

Congress hadn't precluded the US from adding the Philippines, or Gaum, as U.S. territories.  The Philippines had a long running independence movement and a well educated class that thought of the American arrival as guaranteeing their immediate independence, which they were quickly disabused of.  The U.S. ended up fighting to keep the Philippines as a colony, although the war was deeply unpopular and lead to Theodore Roosevelt simply declaring that the US had won it, when in fact it had not. Some part of the Philippines contested for independence all the way into December 1941, when they then took up the cause against Japan.  Indeed, some other elements of the movement to gain independence, which by that time had been promised by the U.S., welcomed the Japanese as liberators and collaborated with them, something that was not held against them by the Philippine people later.

Up until the end of the 19th Century the US had been hostile to Great Britain for historical reasons.  The UK, however, immediately saw what was occuring, and was in its high colonial phase.  The reality of what the US was doing was portrayed in Kipling's poem, The White Man's Burden.

Most Americans had a strong distaste for colonialism, and had it before the Spanish American War.  The population bought off on the concept that we need to "Remember the Maine", but that didn't mean owning Cuba.  The war did bring the US into the Caribbean like never before, and for four decades the US fought an endless series of Banana Wars, often to secure the interests of American business, that has made us hated in Central America to this day.

The US intervention in Venezuela was a page right out of that book.  The US intervened in a foreign nation that really isn't a problem country for us, and now the Administration is busy trying to figure out how to profit from its oil.

Greenland is the same sort of thing.

The justification routeinly features the same sort of rationalization that was used to shove Native Americans off their land.  They'd be "better off" with the kind entrepreneurial American hand guiding them, and they would "get rich" with their country more efficiently exploited, never mind if they didn't' want to get rich and they didn't want to exploit their land.  In Greenland's case, it's now bitterly clear that part of real estate developer Donald Trump's desire to steal the country is so that rich American enterprises can exploit its mineral wealth.

What if they don't want it exploited?

That though never enters the minds of a certain branch of American capitalism.  Maybe most people don't want endless economic exploitation.  Maybe we don't want to mine everything.  Maybe we don't want endless business growth.

By World War One the US had moved very much away from colonialism.  The country started a series of "good neighbor" policies with countries to our south.  At the end of the Great War we favored self determination for nations.  World War Two's results emphasized this even more, with the US now favoring collective security against nations that were fundamentally opposed to democracy.

Trump has thrown that all in the trash.

People, myself included, have been struggling to figure out what on Earth Trump is thinking, and if he's being paid to destroy the US position in the world.  Nobody really knows, but all this does point back to the lunacy of National Conservatism, which looks back on a world that never was.  National Conservative thinkers see the US in much the same way the members of the New Apostolic Reformation do, and both forces are at work here.  National Conservatives want the US to crawl into the Western Hemisphere, making it solidly Christian, and shut the door behind us. They figure Europe will do the same, if its not too late, in their view, with many looking at authoritarian regimes like those of Orbán and Putin as Eastern European models.  Putin, they imagine, will advance Orthodoxy, although there's no reason to believe that his alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church is anything other than convenience.  Orbán is supposed to do the same with old world values in Hungary and Eastern Europe.  Immigrants to Europe and foreign influences are to be exterminated and tossed out.

That's what's going on in the minds of the National Conservatives, and that's partially what's going on with Greenland.

At this point, I frankly feel that its nearly inevitable that the US is in fact going to invade Greenland.  Europe can't really stop us from doing it, although it'll result in bloodshed.   It'll destroy the post war order completely. The Trump Administration will set about trying to exploit the minerals of Greenland immediately.

But that won't be the end of the story.  It's taken this along, amazingly, for people to get a concept of how horrible Donald Trump and his backers really are, but it's finally occuring.  Americans don't want to invade Greenland. They didn't want to invade the Philippines.  If, and I feel its a when, we do this, it'll be followed by several realities.

The first will be that exploiting a nation takes time, and those backing this move do not have it.  The House will flip in November, even though Trump will in fact take a run at suspending the election.  The Senate might flip in November as well, although that's doubtful, but Senate Republicans, their own careers on the line, will begin to back away from Trump.  In 2028 a disgusted populace will elect Democrats into office.

The US will leave Greenland, and in a big hurry.  It'll be independent.  The Trump legacy will be the pile of shit it deserves to be.  The US will begin the process of rebuilding itself, but as a much, much, weaker country than before.  That will be Trump's legacy.

May God grant that I'm wrong on all of this, and that somebody intervenes to stop this insanity before it's too late.

This again.  It never occurs to many that the mines and cities aren't really everyone's dream.  It particularly doesn't occur to a rich real estate developer who isn't smart and whose values are shallow.

Lex Anteinternet: Really Missing The Point

Lex Anteinternet: Really Missing The Point: 

Really Missing The Point

Annaba, Algeria, late 19th Century.  Why?  Well, read below.

We must be clear that the modernization of the Church on the great anthropological questions comes through Europe. In the West, there is greater sensitivity towards certain issues such as gender or homosexuality than in Asia or Africa. Although in Europe and the United States the Church is in decline, paradoxically the young Churches that are growing in Asia or Africa are the most conservative. Western societies are moving towards a new idea of mankind, and that game is undoubtedly being played in Europe, which is why there are so many European cardinals in this consistory

Piero Schiavazzi, professor of Vatican Geopolitics at Link University in Rome.

Wow, talk about missing the point.

I don't know why the Pope picks the Cardinals that he does, but if this is the reason, it shows a real misappreciation of the evidence.

The church is on the rise in Asia and Africa, where the parishioners are conservative.

It's in decline in Europe, although that decline tends to be misunderstood and to some degree exaggerated, where contemplating "anthropological questions" is the rage.  It really isn't in decline in the US in the way that's asserted, as overall numbers remain steady, but partially due to immigration.  And not noted by Signore Schiavazzi, conservatism is on the rise in younger American Catholics.

Indeed, also in the West, a recent survey showed that amongst Australian Catholic women, younger women were noticeably more conservative than older ones. 

So appoint European Cardinals who are sensitive to the issues where the Church is failing?

Eh?

The old maxim is that nothing succeeds like success, to which we must presume that nothing fails like failure.

All over the globe, and not just in religion, the older generations that advanced the liberalism of the 70s, 80s, and 90s continue to remain in power in significant ways and don't seem to grasp that the failed legacy of that is not something that younger generations, heavily impacted by it, wish to advance further.

The impact of Cardinal appointments is much like that of Supreme Court Justices.  It's difficult to tell what they'll really do and even more difficult to tell what a Pope will do at first.  But if Signore Schiavazzi is correct, this is a bad sign.  Once again, the Papacy will not make major doctrinal changes, because it cannot, but there have been historic periods of Church failure (some involving laxity) that resulted in large departures from the Church.  History, we're told, doesn't repeat, but it rhymes.  A sort of small Counter Reformation of sorts is going on amongst the young, while at higher levels the necessity for that seems to be not only not appreciated, but perhaps not even grasped.

Also not grasped, seemingly, anywhere in the West is that the colonial era is over.  We apparently have never understood that wind the "winds of change" swept colonial powers out of Africa and Asia, it also swept the cultural balance of the world.

Europe's impact on the world was enormous culturally.  Indeed, it triumphed. But that culture was a Christian one, no matter how poorly grasped that was and no matter how poorly expressed.  Much of what we take for granted, indeed liberalism itself, about "modern culture" is Christian, and pretty much exclusively Christian, in origin.  It's no accident that cultural decay has set in, in the West, as the Christian roots have is culture have been strained by a long competing culture, that of consumerism, of which both advanced consumer society and socialism are expressions.

St. Augustine.  He was a Berber.

But Christianity itself, at least Apostolic Christianity in the form of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, has never been a European thing.  Indeed, the fundamental event of European culture was the spread of (Apostolic/Catholic) Christianity within it, which forever changed it. But Christianity didn't come out of Europe, and indeed it took the rise of Islam to cause there to be a temporary hiatus in it having a major African expression.  St. Augustine of Hippo was a Berber, not a European, and the Bishop of Hippo Regius, which is modern Annaba, Algeria.

Of course, all of the Apostles were Jews from the Middle East. The first Pope, Peter, was from modern Israel. St. Paul, who dealt with what Signore Schiavazzi calls a "new idea of mankind", as there are no new ideas really, and dismissed the conduct that we now are re contemplating as, well whatever we're re contemplating, was from Tarsus, in what is modern Turkey and which was then part of the Greco Roman world. Pope Victor I, who died in 199, was a Berber. Pope Miltiades was also a North African, as was Pope Gelasius (who was for strict Catholic orthodoxy). Pope Saint Anicetus was a Syrian as was Pope Sisinnius, Pope Constantine, and Pope Gregory III.

What ended the strong influence of North Africa, of course, was the Islamic conquest of the region, although remnant North African Catholic churches held on until the early 1400s.  Even as Christianity has spread around the world, and conquered almost all of non Arab and non Berber Africa, it's been easy to forge that its not a Eurpean religion.

That mistaken impression is about to end, and it can't end soon enough.  Trying to somehow assume that decaying European culture needs to be accommodated, if that's occurring, is a mistake.  It needs to be reformed, and it will be, and a rising Africa and Asia will be part of that.

Lex Anteinternet: The End of the Reformation II

Lex Anteinternet: The End of the Reformation II:

The End of the Reformation II

I started this thread some time ago, put it aside, and then oddly a few weeks later, heard a Parish Priest make the observation during a homily.

Synchronicity at work?

I've since linked the theme in to another post, which then ends up being published, as it were, prior to what should have been the original entry, that entry being here:

The End of the Reformation I. Christian Nationalism becomes a local debate. . .

So we return to finish our original thoughts.

St. Augustine of Hippo, in The City of God, describes the fact and the era of the collapse of the Roman Empire.

Rome, it is often noted, wasn't built in a day, and it didn't collapse in one either.  People living through the horrible experience knew things weren't going well, but they wouldn't have necessarily thought that "well, it's 450 and Rome is over".  They wouldn't have thought that in 500, or 600 for that matter.

And they might not have really noticed that a lot of old things were passing away.  Christianity was only in its third century when Augustine was born in 354 and still twenty years away from Rome's disastrous 450 when he died in 430.  All sorts of heresies and competing religions flourished in the era.  Indeed, the Council of Nicea had occurred as recently as the summer of 325 and the birth of Mohammed was only a little over a century away at the time of his death.  Looking outward, it would have been hard for Christians of the era to appreciate that many of the early heresies were about to pass away along with the European pagan religions and Christianity explode as the religion of Europe, North African and the Middle East.

Clearing out the thick weeds of the Roman era turned out to be necessary first.

Human beings, having fairly short lifespans, tend to see all developments in terms of their lifespans.  In True Grit the protagonist Maddy Ross states, "a quarter-century is a long time", but in real terms, except for our own selves, it isn't.  Things that occurred only a century ago, and I used only advisedly, didn't really happen all that long ago in terms of eras and changes, although here too we are fooled by the fact that the last century has been one of amazing technological development, which is not the human norm, with this being particularly true of the middle of the 20th Century.

I note this as the entire Western World is in turmoil right now, seemingly without any existential or metaphysical center, which explains a lot of what we're enduring in the world.  How did we get here?

There's a good argument that it's due to the end of the Reformation, or rather, it's collapse.

St. Augustine lived at the beginning of Rome's death throes.  That same era was the birth of the Catholic world, and I say that advisedly.  Some would say the Christian world, but they'd be wrong in the way they mean it.  Christianity, all of it, was Catholicism.  It would be right up until the Reformation.  Even the Great Schism, which was a schism, really only had its final act in 1453, quite close to Luther's famous apocryphal nailing on the Cathedral door in 1517.

The English-speaking world is a product of the Reformation, and while it now seemingly regrets it, the English-speaking world was the major, influencer of the world's history and cultures.  By extension, therefore, the Reformation influenced the entire globe.

That's not praise for the Reformation.  Indeed, I'd have preferred it never have had happened. That's just a fact.

The Christian Era is usually calculated to have commenced at the time of the Crucifixion of Christ, which occurred sometime in the 30s, but it might be more instructive for our purposes to look at the 200s or the 300s, but a person could go earlier. The very first council, a general gathering of Bishops of the Church, occurred in about the year 50, and is reflected in the Book of Acts.  It dealt with some issues that had come up in the very early Church, but for our purposes one of the things worth noting is that it was a Council of Bishops, which means that there were Bishops.  This shouldn't be a surprise, but due to the way the Reformation attacked the history of the Church, it might be to some.  Peter, the first Pope (that title of course wouldn't have been in use) was there.  

The Council of Jerusalem is not regarded as an ecumenical council, as Church historians would note.  The first one of those was the aforementioned Council of Nicea, which occurred in 325.  Some Protestants would date the founding of the Catholic Church to that date completely erroneously, a Reformation era lie, as it's been one that has been particularly attacked by Reformation Protestants at some point. The reasons are fairly obvious, really.  The Council gathered to address heresy, put it down, and it did.  It's noteworthy as a Council for the additional reason that it was the first to occur during the reign of a Christian Roman Emperor, Constantine the Great, who stayed out of it, as is often not appreciated either.

Indeed, going forward, that reflected much of the history of the Church.  If we date the Christian era from, let's say, 100 and go forward to 1517, generally the Church was independent of the state and defined the metaphysical.  

This is significant in that it was universally agreed that there was a metaphysical, or an existential, that was outside human beings, greater than it, independent of it, and which humans had to conform themselves to.  In other words, it was accepted that reality defined humans, and not the other way around.

Luther didn't mean to attack that core principle, but his actions set a revolution against it in motion.  Luther didn't even really mean to separate from the Church at first, but rather to criticize what he saw as abuses.  Things took off, however, mostly as German princes saw this as an opportunity to say that they could define certain things locally, rather than the Church.  After a time, Luther, who didn't find German bishops following him, claimed in essence that the clergy could independently interpret all matters theological, although he himself only attacked a limited number of principals.

Luther was a cleric, of course, and he didn't really start off to, and in fact did not, establish a Church that departed from the Catholic Church in all things.  Indeed, Lutheran services today strongly resemble Catholic ones. But following "reformers" did.  The logic was fairly inescapable.  If Martin Luther, who wasn't a bishop, could tell the bishops what doctrine ought to be, anybody could, or at least any Christian could.  More radical species of revolution, therefore, followed Luther.

In the English speaking world, the Reformation got started with King Henry VIII's desire to secure an annulment, not a divorce, from his wife.  When the Church found the marriage to be valid, he declared that it was he, not the Church, who was the supreme religious figure in England.  That was really a different position than Luther had taken, but Henry opened the door to challenging the Church, which would play out in a particularly odd form in England as various regimes teetered between radical Protestantism and Quasi Catholicism, before settling in on an uneasy truce between the two in the form of the Church of England in England.  In Scotland, which England had heavy influence over, Presbyterianism set in as a form of more radical Protestantism.  In the form of the United Kingdom, coming officially into existence in 1707, the Crown would spread both faiths around the globe, with the unwilling Irish taking Catholicism with them.  In Europe south of the Rhine, of course, Catholicism remained, so French and Spanish colonialism took Catholicism with them as well.

English-speaking colonists were often religious dissenters early on, holding to the more radical form so Protestantism, while later English colonists tended to bring in the "established" church.  In neither instance, however, was it ever the case that there was a rejection of Christianity.  The Enlgisih had, through their leaders, rejected Rome, but they hadn't rejected all variants of the faith.  Be that as it may, the concept of rejection based on independent belief was firmly established, first in 1517, and then in 1534.  The door was open.

When the United States came into being, it did so as a Protestant country.  Canada as well, in spite of a large, but marginalized Catholic population, and so too Australia and New Zealand.  Indeed, anywhere the English went, and they went everywhere, Protestantism went with them.

This is so much the case that American Christians tend to think that Catholics are simply a minority all over the globe and that "Christians", which is how many define themselves, represent the Christian Faith. 

Far from it.

Conservatively, 50.1% of the Christian population of the globe is Catholic.  Another 11.9% of Christians are Orthodox.  Given this, over 60% of Christians are Apostolic Christians who, while not united, generally recognize each other's Holy Orders as valid, and who moreover share the overwhelming majority of their tenants of their Faiths.  I've seen estimates, however, that place 80% of all practicing Christians as Catholics.  Indeed, while Protestant missionaries frequently work to convert Catholics in poor countries, calling into question really their status as real missionaries, the Catholic Church has large numbers of underground Christian members in its ranks all over the globe, and local Protestant conversions in some areas are in reality probably often conversions of convenience and not really all that deep in any form.

Protestants are estimated by Pew at 36.7% of the Earth's Christians, if the Pew figures are otherwise correct.

Maybe that's right, but as noted I've seen other figures that skew the Catholic figure upwards significantly, and the Protestant figure downward.

In the U.S., however, 48.9% of the population is Protestant and 23% are Catholic.  That makes Catholics a large minority, but a minority.  Orthodox are an even tinier minority at .4% of the population.  It's most strongly represented, not surprisingly, in Alaska.  It has been growing, however, due to what we're noting in this threat. As the Protestant faiths collapse in on themselves, some abandoning them go into Orthodoxy.

Indeed, one entire congregation in Gillette did just that.

Luther's biggest accomplishment, one that is acknowledged and celebrated today in some European countries that underwent the Reformation, was to bring about the modern world of individualism.  Reformation Day, for example, is a public holiday in five German states and even Lego put out a Lego variant of Martin Luther in 2017 to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the Reformation.  What's really being celebrated isn't so much his theology, but the concept of radical individuality.

That same individuality, however, has led to the collapse of Protestantism, or at least a massive contraction from what it once was.  This is constantly in the news, but rarely understood.  In the English-speaking world the urban British began to lose their attachment to the Church of England long ago, which after all had a strong connection with the English establishment, not the English underclass, something that was really the opposite of the oppressed Catholic Church.  Put another way, Henry VIII did not destroy the monasteries to benefit the poor, and they didn't.

Elsewhere, British imported Protestantism was strong, with this particularly being the case in North America, with this most particularly the case with the United States which had large numbers of adherents to Protestant faiths that the British Crown had oppressed.  But by the turn of the 19th/20th Century, things were very slowly changing.  The collapse of the Progressive movement, which was strongly tied to Protestantism, accelerated it as more radical reformers on the hard left pitched for social change.  This trend was strongly in place by the 1930s. 

It took the post-war economic boom to really set it in, however, even thought that, like so many other things, was not apparent at the time. Following World War Two, in fact, main line Protestant churches grew, as newly monied middle class Americans went into them.  The last gasp of Catholics converting to main line Protestant churches as they'd economically arrived occurred, something that came to an end with John F. Kennedy arrived.  By that time, however, the Baby Boom children were coming into their own.

Raised in a Protestant culture but coming into massive societal wealth, much of the Boomer ethos amounted to nothing other than being allowed to do what they wanted to without hindrance.   The table was already set for that by the increased wealth of the post-war era and the arrival of the Playboy era starting in 1953.  They took it and ran with it, rejecting anything that got in the way with license.  Protestant churches, which already had the concept of being democratic, responded by getting on board in many instances.  "Liberal" theology spring up and took root in some, followed by the widespread turning of a blind eye to many other things.  

For example, as late as the 1930s the Anglican Communion rejected divorce to the same extent that the Catholic Church does. As the Sexual Revolution came in, it started to turn a blind eye to this, and now it'd be extraordinarily difficult to find any Protestant Church that cares anything about divorce, something clearly prohibited by the New Testament, at all, save for some very conservative Protestant denominations or semi denominations.

This, in fact, provides a good example.  Christ prohibited divorce.  St. Paul condemned not only sex outside of marriage, but listed specific sex acts and behaviors.  The Anglican Communion now has bishops who engage in the very activities that St. Paul condemned.

It can't really be justified, but it's occurred as these institutions are, at the end of the day, democratic. Religion is not.  And those sitting in the pews, in their heart of hearts, know the difference. The leaders, like leaders of democratic institutions, attempt to do the obvious, which is to modify doctrine to satisfy the cravings of the electorate.

Because religion is existential by its nature, it's not working.

This has seen the massive drop-off of membership in some Protestant denominations.  I'ts also seen ruptures in others, as "conservative", by which is really meant those adherent to basic tenants of the Christian faith, split off.  At the same time it's seen the growth of "non-denominational" churches, some of which chose not to challenge the behavior of the congregants and focus instead, broadly, on the theme that everyone is going to Heaven, something that the New Testament doesn't support at all.

Naturally, as part of all of that, people have been just dropping out, with WASPs dropping out most of all. The white upper middle class, which reflects more than anything else the spirit of the 60s and the Boomers, would rather sit comfortably behind imaginary gated walls and not be bothered with having to have restrictions of any kind.  Not all of them, of course, but enough to have impacted and still be impacting the culture.

It shouldn't be imagined that Catholics have been immune from this, in European cultures.  The spirit of the age took hold to a very large extent, but not the same universal degree, in the 1970s, impacted it as well, with the stage being set, in the U.S. in the Kennedy election of 1960.  Kennedy's election heralded the end of open public prejudice, for a time, against the Catholic Church in the U.S. and Kennedy's Catholic on Sunday declaration essentially muted differences in the Faith from Protestant faiths, which were and are very real, to private ones, rather than the open and obvious public ones they had been. The spirit of the age that took hold in the late 1960s led to blisteringly poor catechesis in the 70s, and a generation, or more, of Catholics that didn't understand that there really were massive differences between Apostolic Christianity and Protestantism. The term "Cafeteria Catholic" came in, in no small part as younger Catholics weren't told they weren't in a cafeteria.  Catholics were almost informed that major tenants of the faith, including the need for Confession, and the prohibition against marrying outside the Faith, were merely options in the 70s and 80s.  Clawing the way back from that has been difficult and massive damage has been done.  Moreover, as Western Catholicism suffers from the same Baby Boomer control that so many other things do, the process of recovery has been slow as those who came up during that age have yet to yield control.

At any rate, this is where the spirit of our age comes from.  It turns out that given time, and money, people's thoughts don't go to higher things, but only to themselves.  Even people immediately around them can be a bother.  Ultimately the generation that had calimed to be for "Love" turns out to be for self love in every way describable, including to its own destruction.

Of course, as noted, people know that something is wrong and that's creating massive social disruption. The problem ultimately comes to be that reconstruction is very difficult.  People lead down the road so far, that then realize they're being led to where they don't want to go, will often just sit down and demand that the new world be built right there.  I.e., divorce was okay. . . but we'll stop here.  Or, homosexual marriage was okay, and we'll stop there.  The problem is that you really can't stop anywhere you want, as it suffers from the same intellectual deficit that going further on the road that you are on, if it's a false road, does.

Hence, as noted, the inaccurate contemplation of Susan Stubson in the NYT that we wrote about the other day.  Not realizing it, her departure from Apostolic Christianity didn't go deeper, as she believes it did, but took her on the path to where she is right now, and where's she's now uncomfortable.  Some roads get rocky.

At the end of the day, however, what this really is, is the collapse of the Reformation.  It's in its final stages.  Having attacked the existential nature of the Church in favor of clerical liberty, and then that in the name of individual theological liberty, it ultimately has to be for radical individual liberty.  But, as we don't actually exists as planetary mammals of our own description with our own universe, to which the laws of the existential must bend, that can't work.

And it isn't.

Collapses are horrific messes.  

At the time that Augustine wrote City of God, the collapse of the Roman world wasn't close to being worked out.  The long slow developments that gave rise to the Great Schism still hasn't been worked out, and it started prior to the Reformation.  The Reformation was a revolution, and looking back from a distant future, it will have been seen to only now being playing itself out.

Revolutions cause causalities. There have been many, and there will be many more to come.  The entire Western World was impacted, to some degree, by the Reformation, some of it more than others.  Its collapse is being particularly felt in the English-speaking world, and interestingly also in the Lutheran world.  This will get worse before it gets better, but as the Reformation turned out to be anti-natural in the end, or took that turn at some point, it will get better as a new Counter Reformation correct the errors now being inflicted upon us. That too is already starting.

Related Threads:

The End of the Reformation I. Christian Nationalism becomes a local debate. . .