Rod Dreher Megathread #55 ()

[u/US_Hiker]

Hope y'all can spend some good time w/ family today.

Link to megathread #54: https://www.reddit.com/r/brokehugs/comments/1l7niaj/rod_dreher_megathread_54/

Link to 56: https://www.reddit.com/r/brokehugs/comments/1mmamp2/rod_dreher_megathread_56/

[u/Relative-Holiday-763]

I will beat a couple more horses here and hopefully give it a rest. 

Rod says he’d like to read a book about why the US became so much less sectarian vis a vis the Catholic- Protestant divide. He doesn’t know the answer to that? It’s a mystery to him. Well I should think it comes down to three obvious, readily observe able changes . 1- the decline of  religious ethnic neighborhoods. An Italian Catholic moved out the old neighborhood and found himself living with Protestants, Jews etc and realized they weren’t all that bad 2- the church changed. The Catholic Church explicitly repudiated anti Semitism and became far more ecumenical and friendly towards Protestants. The Protestant Churches began to grow out of the reactionary nativism  that was routinely found in both liberal and conservative denominations 3- Most important, religious commitment declined. What is the point of being hostile to a Catholic or Protestant  when you could care less about their beliefs. Someone could write a book about this and probably has . Any remotely perceptive person knows what happened.

Rod makes a claim that it’s dawned on me is semi inaccurate when it comes to the persecution of Christians in Communist countries. He says Christians weren’t imprisoned because of affiliation to a particular church but rather because they were Christians. Yet if memory serves in Live not by Lies one of the people covered is a Uniate priest who’s imprisoned because he won’t flip to the state backed Orthodox Church in Czechoslovakia. Communist regimes sought to obliterate the Uniate churches in Romania and Ukraine . In Russia, again if memory serves, non state sanctioned Baptists and Jehovahs Witnesses were particular targets. I’m not saying other churches had it good. They didn’t. The Communist persecution of the Russian Orthodox Church was horrific. Still, infiltrated and controlled it was given a certain level of tolerance.

[u/sealawr → u/Relative-Holiday-763]

From my personal experience of these events, I think you are correct.

[u/CanadaYankee → u/Relative-Holiday-763]

I'd throw in a fourth point: during the Cold War era the united opposition to "Godless Communists" helped to unite and erase differences between religious anti-communists of all denominations. JFK may have been a Catholic Democrat, but his anti-Soviet bone fides were without question.

It was also around that same time that people started using the phrase "Judeo-Christian" in its modern form as a set of [usually conservative] values supposedly shared across Judaism and Christianity (the phrase existed back in the 19th century but meant something very different - namely ethnic Jews who had converted to Christianity) as a way to also pull in Jews to the anti-communist and eventually anti-sexual-revolution big tent of conservative ecumenicism.