There's only one version, the Apostolic Biblical one.
It's the post-war liberal enlightenment version where people forgot the spiritual world is real that needs to be discarded. Demons are quite real and active in this world and everyone should have been able to grasp that after Covid.
I do not see why there cannot be "real world solutions" (e.g., preventing crazy people from obtaining guns) while also acknowledging the reality of demonic forces/beings at work in the world. Also, not a single person has called, or ever will call, for exorcists to be stationed in schools to prevent school shootings. That was just a cheap shot from a (bitter?) ex-Catholic.
I agree with you, but "preventing crazy people from obtaining guns" is more complex than it should be. Depending on who is in charge at any given time, holding certain political or religious views and promoting them online could be disqualifying for gun ownership. I would like to say we should have higher standards for who can own guns, but those standards will likely change over time depending on who holds office. That could turn out very badly for us.
No argument on that point. My comment was just to say we can address the "real world" cause while simultaneously acknowledging that there may be other forces at work. It isn't an either/or question.
I don't know where you get the idea that “the religious right” is dead.
On the contrary. Faith writ large is resurgent.
The Minneapolis tragedy is a poignant illustration of the horrible downside of the demise of faith.
In a moral vacuum, the inherent evil within us can emerge and manifest in horrible atrocities. We saw this in the Holocaust.
Pace’ the secular humanists and postmodernists, there is good and evil in the world because it is within us. Faith is a necessary guardrail, which we learn when we remove it.
On a less gruesome level, take AI. The tech brk asks, “Why shouldn't I eliminate all jobs?” A Catholic would never ask that question, because of a doctrinal understanding that work is “Ad majorem dei gloria”, “for the greater glory of God”, as is human life itself.
Is this literally true? Does it really matter? At the bottom of the scientific rabbit hole are simply more and more questions without answers, other than that men are mere beasts, insignificant accidental cultures that somehow arose out of an insensate universe that is one of an infinite number of omnidimensional….
Well, you get the idea. Cosmology and particle physics make Christianity look quite plausible by comparison.
So you can buy into whatever theory that arises from the mind of man that you want. You can pick the one that gives meaning and dignity to your existence, or the one that leaves you feeling worthless and enraged enough to slaughter innocent believers and yourself to boot.
'The religious right is dead' was an objective observation based on their inability to score a single real victory in recent politics. Meanwhile your flowery, indignant comment just proves out the rest of Scott's thesis.
I agree with the spirit of your (flowery) comment, but ignoring the objective decline in popularity of the religious right is just silly. Despite its resurgence among a small group of young people online, religious conservatism is a shrinking portion of the Republican base and has been for decades. MAGA will throw it bones here and there to keep the big tent together, but it’s obviously not core to the movement.
The online resurgence among young people is interesting and perhaps promising, but it’s too soon to tell how promising, and regardless it’s completely numerically insignificant in nationwide electoral terms.
The relative diminishment of the Christian Conservative movement is a sign of triumph not tragedy from their perspective, as was the broadening of Christianity from the 12 apostles. Arguably that old moral majority base is still there. One of the many puzzles the Democrats are frustrated by is why those Bible thumpers don't reject Trump for his moral failings. What they don't realize is that you can find any number of rationales for overlooking the flaws of the king in scripture.
They also fail to ask themselves, where could they possibly go? To the den of iniquity that is the modern Democrats?
I don’t really follow this. The relative diminishment of the Christian conservative movement is a sign of the diminishment of Christianity, full stop. Catholics have declined from about 1/4 to 1/5 of the U.S. population in two decades (impressive given the substantial amount of Hispanic immigration). Protestants declined from 51% to 40% (the real picture is more dire, as a dramatic decline among whites has been counterbalanced by surging popularity of charismatic Protestantism, particularly Pentecostalism, among Hispanic immigrants). The major victory of the last five years has been that the above %’s haven’t continued to decline, but have stayed stable. But that’s small comfort given that adherence numbers among young people continue to look bleak.
Christianity is still true even if no one followed it.
"And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil." - John 3:19
The evidence that the religious right is dead: legalized abortion and weed have been winning at the ballot box (even in "red" states), no one is even trying to stop sports gambling or gay marriage anymore, attempts to moderate explicit violent and sexual content in movies and music are non-existent, weekly church attendance has remained around 30%, fertility rates continuing plummeting. Even if a growing number of people online are claiming to have faith, it's not bearing any fruit in the real world.
Roe v. Wade was struck down. Internet porn is under siege. Religious faith is on the ascendant. Trump is in the White House. Kamala is singing by the dock of the bay. These facts seem inconsistent with your hypothesis. But denial of reality is quite popular on the left these days.
1. You’ll note that Trump hardly gloated at all about Roe’s overturning in the 2024 campaign, in pretty sharp contrast to 2020. This was clearly an informed decision made with advisors given the unpopularity of restrictive abortion laws among fringe Trump voters. The most he was generally willing to say in 2024 was that abortion “is an issue for the states”
2. The porn-restriction movement is a bit of an interesting coalition, generally its most successful rhetoric for building support has been left-coded or center-coded concerns about human trafficking and child exploitation. Puritanical rhetoric about stopping adults from watching porn is still not very popular.
Otherwise, you haven’t really addressed the several accurate observations made in the comment you’re replying to. Delusional confidence does not make a political movement
Overturning Roe was one of the worst things that could have happened to the GOP politically because they lost a great fundraising and turnout driving issue, kind of like the dog chasing the car that catches it.
The potential of porn due to online age restriction implementation liability is the biggest potential victory for the moral majority in 50 years.
Note that both of these are reversals of half-century-old catastrophic defeats.
Trump is busily eradicating woke, DEI antclerical moral collapses on a daily basis.
Your closer sounds like “Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”
Great read. For me, I've been writing about the "aliens are demons" hypotheses for some time. It's interesting how it's part of even the Religious Dissident Right, though it has solid overlap with the regular Dissident Right.
This is a frustrating trend. The Minneapolis shooting is low hanging fruit that the right could use to push back against insane gender ideology. However politicians and local activists are using this to mobilize support for gun control. Chalk up another L for the right.
Mental illness is the necessary prerequisite, but a lot of recent school shooters were basically groomed into it by satanic internet groups. It’s a bit of a boy who cried wolf thing, I guess. You scream about demons in your iPhone for long enough, and nobody pays attention when a satanic panic is actually warranted
I get the instinct to stick with rational arguments — I tried that too — but decades of secular conservatism have proven it doesn’t work; nobody was persuaded and all it’s done is manage decline. What we’re seeing now is people hitting the wall of rationalism and recovering a supernatural vocabulary — calling evil what it is: demonic. That’s not weakness, that’s momentum. I’ve walked both roads: the hollow weekends of fleeting pleasure, and the fire of God where you baptize in truth, awaken the lost, and watch miracles unfold. The Right won’t win by rationalism but by crusade — persuading the nation that life is enchanted and that only God’s power can overthrow this demonic regime. Maybe that’s what people fear: not that demons aren’t real, but that they are — and if they are, then God is, and your whole life has to change.
Secular right is just crypto leftism, because it resolves to utilitarianism and moral relativism without the objectivity of the universe/world being divinely created and having objective purpose from God. So you get nihilism and despair because a dead universe spontaneously coming alive is incoherent and leads to purposelessness, distraction and short term hedonism rather than transcendent goals. Those on the right who have materialist metaphysical assumptions haven’t thought deeply enough about their common ground with leftism.
Tucker is also doing his share to get people on the Demon noticing.
The New Right forgets why people have been moving away from Christianity. Doubling down on a Medieval version of it will not revive it.
If anything, Christianity will survive as a "heretical" sect like the Mormons, or a mere public therapy session like Evangelism.
There's only one version, the Apostolic Biblical one.
It's the post-war liberal enlightenment version where people forgot the spiritual world is real that needs to be discarded. Demons are quite real and active in this world and everyone should have been able to grasp that after Covid.
I do not see why there cannot be "real world solutions" (e.g., preventing crazy people from obtaining guns) while also acknowledging the reality of demonic forces/beings at work in the world. Also, not a single person has called, or ever will call, for exorcists to be stationed in schools to prevent school shootings. That was just a cheap shot from a (bitter?) ex-Catholic.
I agree with you, but "preventing crazy people from obtaining guns" is more complex than it should be. Depending on who is in charge at any given time, holding certain political or religious views and promoting them online could be disqualifying for gun ownership. I would like to say we should have higher standards for who can own guns, but those standards will likely change over time depending on who holds office. That could turn out very badly for us.
No argument on that point. My comment was just to say we can address the "real world" cause while simultaneously acknowledging that there may be other forces at work. It isn't an either/or question.
I don't know where you get the idea that “the religious right” is dead.
On the contrary. Faith writ large is resurgent.
The Minneapolis tragedy is a poignant illustration of the horrible downside of the demise of faith.
In a moral vacuum, the inherent evil within us can emerge and manifest in horrible atrocities. We saw this in the Holocaust.
Pace’ the secular humanists and postmodernists, there is good and evil in the world because it is within us. Faith is a necessary guardrail, which we learn when we remove it.
On a less gruesome level, take AI. The tech brk asks, “Why shouldn't I eliminate all jobs?” A Catholic would never ask that question, because of a doctrinal understanding that work is “Ad majorem dei gloria”, “for the greater glory of God”, as is human life itself.
Is this literally true? Does it really matter? At the bottom of the scientific rabbit hole are simply more and more questions without answers, other than that men are mere beasts, insignificant accidental cultures that somehow arose out of an insensate universe that is one of an infinite number of omnidimensional….
Well, you get the idea. Cosmology and particle physics make Christianity look quite plausible by comparison.
So you can buy into whatever theory that arises from the mind of man that you want. You can pick the one that gives meaning and dignity to your existence, or the one that leaves you feeling worthless and enraged enough to slaughter innocent believers and yourself to boot.
I recommend the former.
'The religious right is dead' was an objective observation based on their inability to score a single real victory in recent politics. Meanwhile your flowery, indignant comment just proves out the rest of Scott's thesis.
“The Church is a perpetually defeated thing that always outlives her conquerers”
I disagree on both counts.
Now what?
I agree with the spirit of your (flowery) comment, but ignoring the objective decline in popularity of the religious right is just silly. Despite its resurgence among a small group of young people online, religious conservatism is a shrinking portion of the Republican base and has been for decades. MAGA will throw it bones here and there to keep the big tent together, but it’s obviously not core to the movement.
The online resurgence among young people is interesting and perhaps promising, but it’s too soon to tell how promising, and regardless it’s completely numerically insignificant in nationwide electoral terms.
The relative diminishment of the Christian Conservative movement is a sign of triumph not tragedy from their perspective, as was the broadening of Christianity from the 12 apostles. Arguably that old moral majority base is still there. One of the many puzzles the Democrats are frustrated by is why those Bible thumpers don't reject Trump for his moral failings. What they don't realize is that you can find any number of rationales for overlooking the flaws of the king in scripture.
They also fail to ask themselves, where could they possibly go? To the den of iniquity that is the modern Democrats?
I don’t really follow this. The relative diminishment of the Christian conservative movement is a sign of the diminishment of Christianity, full stop. Catholics have declined from about 1/4 to 1/5 of the U.S. population in two decades (impressive given the substantial amount of Hispanic immigration). Protestants declined from 51% to 40% (the real picture is more dire, as a dramatic decline among whites has been counterbalanced by surging popularity of charismatic Protestantism, particularly Pentecostalism, among Hispanic immigrants). The major victory of the last five years has been that the above %’s haven’t continued to decline, but have stayed stable. But that’s small comfort given that adherence numbers among young people continue to look bleak.
Christianity is still true even if no one followed it.
"And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil." - John 3:19
The evidence that the religious right is dead: legalized abortion and weed have been winning at the ballot box (even in "red" states), no one is even trying to stop sports gambling or gay marriage anymore, attempts to moderate explicit violent and sexual content in movies and music are non-existent, weekly church attendance has remained around 30%, fertility rates continuing plummeting. Even if a growing number of people online are claiming to have faith, it's not bearing any fruit in the real world.
Roe v. Wade was struck down. Internet porn is under siege. Religious faith is on the ascendant. Trump is in the White House. Kamala is singing by the dock of the bay. These facts seem inconsistent with your hypothesis. But denial of reality is quite popular on the left these days.
1. You’ll note that Trump hardly gloated at all about Roe’s overturning in the 2024 campaign, in pretty sharp contrast to 2020. This was clearly an informed decision made with advisors given the unpopularity of restrictive abortion laws among fringe Trump voters. The most he was generally willing to say in 2024 was that abortion “is an issue for the states”
2. The porn-restriction movement is a bit of an interesting coalition, generally its most successful rhetoric for building support has been left-coded or center-coded concerns about human trafficking and child exploitation. Puritanical rhetoric about stopping adults from watching porn is still not very popular.
Otherwise, you haven’t really addressed the several accurate observations made in the comment you’re replying to. Delusional confidence does not make a political movement
Overturning Roe was one of the worst things that could have happened to the GOP politically because they lost a great fundraising and turnout driving issue, kind of like the dog chasing the car that catches it.
The potential of porn due to online age restriction implementation liability is the biggest potential victory for the moral majority in 50 years.
Note that both of these are reversals of half-century-old catastrophic defeats.
Trump is busily eradicating woke, DEI antclerical moral collapses on a daily basis.
Your closer sounds like “Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”
The disconnect is because I'm talking about political power and influence, not church affiliation numbers.
Beautifully said
So Ted Bundy was just a very, very bad boy.
Sorry scott the commentariat here is pretty retarded
Validates hannania/karlin EHC theory
“who may or may not learn their theology from memes and Wikipedia”
This describes so so many people
Great read. For me, I've been writing about the "aliens are demons" hypotheses for some time. It's interesting how it's part of even the Religious Dissident Right, though it has solid overlap with the regular Dissident Right.
This is a frustrating trend. The Minneapolis shooting is low hanging fruit that the right could use to push back against insane gender ideology. However politicians and local activists are using this to mobilize support for gun control. Chalk up another L for the right.
There is effective rhetoric and there is truth.
There is a clear spiritual component to much of the madness we see.
Mental illness is the necessary prerequisite, but a lot of recent school shooters were basically groomed into it by satanic internet groups. It’s a bit of a boy who cried wolf thing, I guess. You scream about demons in your iPhone for long enough, and nobody pays attention when a satanic panic is actually warranted
I get the instinct to stick with rational arguments — I tried that too — but decades of secular conservatism have proven it doesn’t work; nobody was persuaded and all it’s done is manage decline. What we’re seeing now is people hitting the wall of rationalism and recovering a supernatural vocabulary — calling evil what it is: demonic. That’s not weakness, that’s momentum. I’ve walked both roads: the hollow weekends of fleeting pleasure, and the fire of God where you baptize in truth, awaken the lost, and watch miracles unfold. The Right won’t win by rationalism but by crusade — persuading the nation that life is enchanted and that only God’s power can overthrow this demonic regime. Maybe that’s what people fear: not that demons aren’t real, but that they are — and if they are, then God is, and your whole life has to change.
Secular right is just crypto leftism, because it resolves to utilitarianism and moral relativism without the objectivity of the universe/world being divinely created and having objective purpose from God. So you get nihilism and despair because a dead universe spontaneously coming alive is incoherent and leads to purposelessness, distraction and short term hedonism rather than transcendent goals. Those on the right who have materialist metaphysical assumptions haven’t thought deeply enough about their common ground with leftism.
I have noticed this trend. They seem to confuse the secular Satan game playing with real spirituality.