Amerika

In the video age, you find many people who are willing to offer up easy answers. They will tell you a simplified partial version of the situation, give you a simple thing to cheer for, and then fail to tell you that this will do nothing to help your situation.

Almost all of these are deflections from basic problems — overpopulation, diversity, pollution, ineptitude — in order to give you a false target so that you feel less helpless. Why hurt yourself by Noticing that diversity is inexorably doomed, when you rage at politicians?

The Right-wing media may be the worst for this because they have been trained to believe theirs is a lost cause, therefore the best they can do is to lose with integrity, sort of like Jesus nailed to the cross or a captain going down with the ship.

This has conditioned the Right toward self-pity and a defensive, angry outlook which rewards cheering on beating up the other guy more than moving toward a functional order.

After all, the Right is difficult because no one knows what it is. We know that it favors eternal principles, a case-by-case basis, and consequentialism, but those abstractions do not translate well into tangible things people can do.

As a result, it boils down to the flag, the cross, the sword, and the free markets. These are most accurately understood as defensive points, meaning that these are territories we defend, not the reasoning for them, but the two get confused.

However, the Right will have to face a simple fact: Christianity is leaving the West because Christianity failed to protect the West, and by replacing our cultures with religion, left us open to failure, much as its pacifistic egalitarian morality made us weaker.

It seems that church attendance is plummeting, as is religious identification with Christianity:

Nearly three in 10 American adults today identify as religiously unaffiliated — a 33% jump since 2013, according to the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI).

Around 57% of Americans today seldom or never attend religious services, a jump from 40% in 2000, per a recent Gallup survey.

An unprecedented 15,000 churches are expected to shut their doors this year, far more than the few thousand expected to open, according to denominational reports and church consultants.

Despite anecdotal and media reports about Gen Z men returning to church, there’s little evidence it’s happening beyond scattered examples to reverse the overall decline.

In other words, punctuated equilibrium marks a slow and steady decline. We knew this was going to happen because as Nietzsche said, when Christianity cast off the real world for a symbolic world, it also made that symbolic world irrelevant to everyday life.

And so Europe, followed by the USA, is departing Christianity because it has no utility. It was useful when it restrained sexual behavior, instructed children in decency and hope, and gave us a roadmap to spirituality.

The Christianity of today however is Left-leaning, atheistic, and inclined toward moral relativism and unhinged egotism, which makes it the opposite of what has utility for our people. It is behaving like a foreign conqueror trying to destroy us.

We are having trouble denying that it is foreign. It is from the middle east, concerns people from different races and cultures than our own, teaches lessons from the Greeks mixed with the Arabic mysticism of the Jews and remnants of Babylonian and Egyptian lore.

Not only do we have no need for it, we have no need for the question of its need. It is simply another rabbit-trail down irrelevant mental constructs and symbolic pathways that deliver nothing to us but distraction.

The big news is that spiritual-but-not-religious is growing as a category while people abandon churches and toss Bibles:

The Religious Landscape Study finds 62% of U.S. adults call themselves Christians. While a significant dip from 2007, when 78% of Americans identified as Christian, Pew found the Christian share of the population has remained relatively stable since 2019.

The rapid rise of the religiously unaffiliated — the so-called “ nones ” — has also reached at least a temporary plateau, according to Pew. Approximately 29% of U.S. adults identify as religiously unaffiliated, including those who are atheist (5%), agnostic (6%) or “nothing in particular” (19%).

Many Americans have a supernatural outlook, with 83% believing in God or a universal spirit and 86% believing that people have a soul or spirit. About seven in 10 Americans believe in heaven, hell or both.

Most notably, Pew found a huge age gap, with 46% of the youngest American adults identifying as Christian, compared to 80% of the oldest adults. The youngest adults are also three times more likely than the oldest group to be religiously unaffiliated.

People still believe in God/gods, but they recognize that religions are made by man, therefore you do not need a specific one in order to have God. In fact, it is best that you do not select one, since all that manmande stuff comes with lots of rules and Control structures.

Even more, religion is better without moralism. Function, beauty, and realistic thinking converge on a way of life that leads to victory; the Christian outlook presupposes defeat and aims at status posturing through elaborately demonstrated virtue in lieu of victory.

No one needs that. We have been hopeless for far too long. Plagues, foreign invasions, inter-European conflicts, and finally the Revolutions and wars for democracy have sapped us of any belief that the future will ever be better. We accepted decay because we saw nothing else.

As Europe awakens, however, we have less need for a funerary religion like Abrahamism, and more need to clarify our thinking and aim toward sane and realistic thought. Consequently, Christianity is moving to the third world as it exits the West:

“Christian” was another word for a white man, and Christendom another name for Europe. Not any more, says Philip Jenkins, who teaches religion and history at Penn State University: “The era of Western Christianity has passed within our lifetimes.” As Christianity wanes in the West, especially in Europe, primitive variants of it are flourishing in the Third-World. Prof. Jenkins argues credibly that this change — largely overlooked — could be as significant an historic development as the collapse of Communism.

In 1800, approximately one percent of all Protestants lived outside of Europe and North America. In 1900 the figure was ten percent, and now it is 65 percent, with huge increases in Latin America and Asia. Whites are a minority of believers. In Korea alone there are as many Presbyterians as in the United States.

Today, an estimated one third of the people on earth are Christians. The largest single bloc of 560 million at least nominal believers is still in Europe, but next comes Latin America with 480 million, Africa with 360 million, Asia with 313 million, and North America with 260 million. This means only 42 percent of Christians live in what we think of as the West. Prof. Jenkins projects that current birth rates alone mean that by 2050 only 20 percent of the world’s Christians will be non-Hispanic whites.

The end of Christianity will be more influential than the fall of Communism: Europe and America will no longer be conquered lands. When you worship foreign gods and use their names, you are conquered, and you will feel hopeless because conquered people have no agency.

Finally the long spiritual winter lifts, and we can look toward life as an opportunity where what is sane, healthy, wise, functional, realistic, and beautiful is also the excellence (arete) toward which we aspire.

Western Civilization was fully realized thousands of years before Christ, and it will return to that path as the judgmental and suicidal gods of the ancient Semites retreat from our shores. All hail the new dawn.

Tags: christianity, religion