How do ex-Catholics vote?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

As a member of the (understandably but very unfortunately) Titanium R None->Mainline Protestant->Catholic community, the answer is almost certainly 'closer to me on most issues than my own demographic'.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

As a member of the (understandably but very unfortunately) Titanium R None->Mainline Protestant->Catholic community,

It's interesting that there would be a community as such defined by this background. What's its profile/characteristics?

There isn't really a community as such. I just didn't want to say the word 'demographic' twice in one sentence.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

My mistake Goldwater. The guy who made the graph noticed his mistake and made an updated graph with more religions.



Pink is Mormon, Green is Jewish.

This graph could be read to imply that mainlines and Catholics are facing more similar problems than either would like to acknowledge.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

My mistake Goldwater. The guy who made the graph noticed his mistake and made an updated graph with more religions.



Pink is Mormon, Green is Jewish.

This graph could be read to imply that mainlines and Catholics are facing more similar problems than either would like to acknowledge.

Not really. The mainlines are at least getting a non-neglible of converts in.

Similar retention problems, not necessarily similar problems attracting converts.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

My mistake Goldwater. The guy who made the graph noticed his mistake and made an updated graph with more religions.



Pink is Mormon, Green is Jewish.

This graph could be read to imply that mainlines and Catholics are facing more similar problems than either would like to acknowledge.

Not really. The mainlines are at least getting a non-neglible of converts in.

Similar retention problems, not necessarily similar problems attracting converts.

That graph though should show just how inane the idea that Catholics have super high retention rates on paper even if not all of them still act as Catholic is though. In fact it shows that Catholic retention isn't even better than average. That's why I saw that premise as so ridiculous, and the data backs me up.

I wasn't disagreeing. There's, starting very recently and probably too recently to do much good, been an increasing awareness within Catholicism that cultural Catholicism among white Americans can't be relied on any more and has been a bit of a paper tiger for a couple of generations now.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

How does one become an ex-Catholic.  One has to be excommunicated by the Church.  For example, if you stop going to mass, and say you don't believe in that stuff anyway, but haven't actually been excommunicated, doesn't the Catholic church still consider you a Catholic?

The Church does, yeah, but Pew doesn't.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

My mistake Goldwater. The guy who made the graph noticed his mistake and made an updated graph with more religions.



Pink is Mormon, Green is Jewish.

This graph could be read to imply that mainlines and Catholics are facing more similar problems than either would like to acknowledge.

Not really. The mainlines are at least getting a non-neglible of converts in.

Similar retention problems, not necessarily similar problems attracting converts.

That graph though should show just how inane the idea that Catholics have super high retention rates on paper even if not all of them still act as Catholic is though. In fact it shows that Catholic retention isn't even better than average. That's why I saw that premise as so ridiculous, and the data backs me up.

I wasn't disagreeing. There's, starting very recently and probably too recently to do much good, been an increasing awareness within Catholicism that cultural Catholicism among white Americans can't be relied on any more and has been a bit of a paper tiger for a couple of generations now.

Then why don't Atlas posters in general realize that?

Posters who don't realize it (including me) tend to live in places where this collapse is less advanced. We've been over this.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

How does one become an ex-Catholic.  One has to be excommunicated by the Church.  For example, if you stop going to mass, and say you don't believe in that stuff anyway, but haven't actually been excommunicated, doesn't the Catholic church still consider you a Catholic?

The Church does, yeah, but Pew doesn't.

I also recall reading that the list of excommunicable offenses includes open expression of opposition to fundamental church teaching, which would be done by anyone who is openly now a non-Christian or converts to a different denomination. The formal excommunication process obviously isn't done on almost everyone who falls into this category, but it's not really done at all anymore (excommunication was obviously designed for kings in the Middle Ages, not people in the modern day.) So essentially yes, stating that you're a non-Christian or a non-Catholic Christian does equal a de facto excommunication. My church's lead pastor for example unless he recanted and returned wouldn't be allowed to take part in any Catholic sacraments or receive a Catholic funeral. This is of course virtually never an issue because someone who has renounced the church isn't going to care.

The reason the Church still considers these people Catholic for statistical purposes is simply because it's hard to keep track and count of these things.

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Hmmm, so Minneapolis is closer to the rule than the exception?
[/quote]

As far as I know, these days yes, but don't mistake this for me conceding that that's a good thing.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

How does one become an ex-Catholic.  One has to be excommunicated by the Church.  For example, if you stop going to mass, and say you don't believe in that stuff anyway, but haven't actually been excommunicated, doesn't the Catholic church still consider you a Catholic?

The Church does, yeah, but Pew doesn't.

I also recall reading that the list of excommunicable offenses includes open expression of opposition to fundamental church teaching, which would be done by anyone who is openly now a non-Christian or converts to a different denomination. The formal excommunication process obviously isn't done on almost everyone who falls into this category, but it's not really done at all anymore (excommunication was obviously designed for kings in the Middle Ages, not people in the modern day.) So essentially yes, stating that you're a non-Christian or a non-Catholic Christian does equal a de facto excommunication. My church's lead pastor for example unless he recanted and returned wouldn't be allowed to take part in any Catholic sacraments or receive a Catholic funeral. This is of course virtually never an issue because someone who has renounced the church isn't going to care.

The reason the Church still considers these people Catholic for statistical purposes is simply because it's hard to keep track and count of these things.

But they can't keep track of them anyway. These people obviously aren't going to register with a new parish if they move or inform the church of address changes.

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Hmmm, so Minneapolis is closer to the rule than the exception?

As far as I know, these days yes, but don't mistake this for me conceding that that's a good thing.

And you know who's fault that is primarily? The Vatican, above everyone else.[/quote]

Well, it's very easy and convenient to say that, isn't it?

I originally wrote more here--including clarifying that I certainly don't think the Vatican is completely blameless--but it was beside the point. Regardless, you don't wish the Church well and appear to be doing quite well for yourself spiritually speaking in the world-as-it-is so your perception of where to place blame is probably just as biased as a geriatric devout Catholic's, merely in the opposite direction.

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Yes, we all know your thoughts on this by now.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

How does one become an ex-Catholic.  One has to be excommunicated by the Church.  For example, if you stop going to mass, and say you don't believe in that stuff anyway, but haven't actually been excommunicated, doesn't the Catholic church still consider you a Catholic?

The Church does, yeah, but Pew doesn't.

I also recall reading that the list of excommunicable offenses includes open expression of opposition to fundamental church teaching, which would be done by anyone who is openly now a non-Christian or converts to a different denomination. The formal excommunication process obviously isn't done on almost everyone who falls into this category, but it's not really done at all anymore (excommunication was obviously designed for kings in the Middle Ages, not people in the modern day.) So essentially yes, stating that you're a non-Christian or a non-Catholic Christian does equal a de facto excommunication. My church's lead pastor for example unless he recanted and returned wouldn't be allowed to take part in any Catholic sacraments or receive a Catholic funeral. This is of course virtually never an issue because someone who has renounced the church isn't going to care.

The reason the Church still considers these people Catholic for statistical purposes is simply because it's hard to keep track and count of these things.

But they can't keep track of them anyway. These people obviously aren't going to register with a new parish if they move or inform the church of address changes.

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Hmmm, so Minneapolis is closer to the rule than the exception?

As far as I know, these days yes, but don't mistake this for me conceding that that's a good thing.

And you know who's fault that is primarily? The Vatican, above everyone else.

Well, it's very easy and convenient to say that, isn't it?

I originally wrote more here--including clarifying that I certainly don't think the Vatican is completely blameless--but it was beside the point. Regardless, you don't wish the Church well and appear to be doing quite well for yourself spiritually speaking in the world-as-it-is so your perception of where to place blame is probably just as biased as a geriatric devout Catholic's, merely in the opposite direction.

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Yes, we all know your thoughts on this by now.

I mean your first bit is probably true, but I am curious who besides the Vatican is mostly to blame.[/quote]

Well, there's the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, for one thing. The Church is facing problems in a lot of countries, and some of them ARE worldwide problems, but the fact that they're not all present in all countries in the same ways means that each individual set of problems can't really be immediately assigned to the top of the hierarchy. There's also a failure of responsiveness to institutional religion in general in contemporary American society itself, for which, as I've said before, there's more than enough blame to go around--institutional religion obviously bears a lot of the responsibility for this (especially in more liberal parts of the country where it comes across as more tone-deaf to people's needs), but so do Madison Avenue, academia, entertainment and news media, et cetera.

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Religious fluidity is generally a good thing but I generally prefer that people flowing into that 'None' category, specifically, retain some kind of affective connection to where they're coming from, however tenuous; twitch upon the thread and all that. The reason I say that Catholicism and mainline Protestantism may be encountering similar problems relative to that category is that both of them have lost the sort of social glue that keeps people who believe in God, ish, but aren't necessarily super-devout or theologically adroit coming to church and identifying with Christianity rather than just sleeping in on Sunday and calling themselves 'spiritual'. In Catholicism's case this is obviously exacerbated by the Church saying things that are too different from people's outside moral and political commitments; in the case of mainline Protestantism, often what is being said isn't different enough.

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Christmas and Easter hipster Christians actually are a thing in fact.

You made some really good points in this post, but the fact that it all builds up to this sentence gives me some real bad vibes. I'm in bummed-out city.

ETA: Actually, I'll attempt to respond more substantively if you tell me what you think of Joe Strummer.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Christmas and Easter hipster Christians actually are a thing in fact.

You made some really good points in this post, but the fact that it all builds up to this sentence gives me some real bad vibes. I'm in bummed-out city.

ETA: Actually, I'll attempt to respond more substantively if you tell me what you think of Joe Strummer.

A bit overrated. It's kind of telling that the best songs by The Clash are their mainstream radio singles, and they released an objectively terrible album as well (Cut The Crap.) One of those bands were the bands they influenced were better than them, though I have to give them credit for giving the influence. I actually tend to think of music in terms of its distance of years earlier than or after 1985 and thus think of it in terms of BRS and ARS (Before and After Revolution Summer), but can't deny he was definitely one of the most important BRS musicians.

Thanks. I more or less agree with that analysis of the Clash (with the exception of Sandinista!, which I think is more solid overall than it's given credit for). The reference I was making was to a Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros song, though.

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Very possibly, yeah.

In terms of substantive response to your main point I would simply say that your description of the specifics of the Saint Paul-Minneapolis ecclesiastical province is if anything a case in point of what I was saying. It's within an individual bishop's or archbishop's choice, not the Vatican's, whether his diocese or province will be 'all ultra-conservative, all the time' or not. (It shouldn't be so, because Catholic social teaching on paper doesn't map well onto a secular left-right spectrum, but Catholicism's been susceptible to bad deals with the political right for a long time now and it's definitely something for which one can reasonably criticize the Church and a lot of people in it. Not great!)

I simply don't agree that it's for the better that somebody who'd otherwise be a Christmas and Easter Catholic, or Episcopalian, or whatever become a Christmas and Easter hipster Christian instead. This is because there are a ton of really symbolically rich, vibrant, generationally transmitted customs and, frankly, art forms expressed through the holiday services of the liturgical denominations. I don't expect you'll agree with this consideration but I hope you understand why I, as someone deeply interested and invested in art history and history of ideas, consider this relevant. In fact, differing aesthetic sensibilities and philosophies of art (and music!) probably account for a lot of the differences we have on religious issues. In my own assessment of the importance of this I'm far closer to Schleiermacher's definition of religion than Descartes's or Kant's.

If your point was that it's better to be a Christmas and Easter hipster Christian than to never go to any kind of church at all, then no argument there.

I don't see why the phenomenon of nondenominational Christians somehow disproves or detracts from what I'm saying about the Catholic->None and Mainline->None camps.

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But it doesn't have the same social cohesion effect, for the simple reason that it can be dropped like a hot potato the second someone gets uncomfortable.

Ideally both individuals and their social and religious environments should respond receptively and liberally (in the sense of the Aristotelian virtue of liberality) to each other's needs and desires--similar to William James's view that neither Great Man historiography nor historical materialism is correct, because individuals and their environments shape and mold one another in all sorts of complex ways. In contemporary America, neither do.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

But it doesn't have the same social cohesion effect, for the simple reason that it can be dropped like a hot potato the second someone gets uncomfortable.

Ideally both individuals and their social and religious environments should respond receptively and liberally (in the sense of the Aristotelian virtue of liberality) to each other's needs and desires--similar to William James's view that neither Great Man historiography nor historical materialism is correct, because individuals and their environments shape and mold one another in all sorts of complex ways. In contemporary America, neither do.

What problems does this create in the US though? I don't see any.

A great many people are very, very lonely. I've talked to a ton of people my age who pine for the stability and sense of purpose of our grandparents' generation, even though we don't want to repeat it wholesale. The fact that there's any widespread demand for something like hipster Christianity indicates an essential 'flattening' of human personality into a few traits and interests that all exist at essentially the same level of salience, which I think is an unacceptable anthropology. (I'm also thinking of somebody like Joe Republic--who actually makes a much better caricature of Modern Liberal Man than Evelyn Waugh's Lieutenant Hooper, because he manages to be both a smug urban liberal and overtly anti-intellectual at the same time--calling me 'pretentious' because I speak in different registers with different posters, as if any departure from the absolute baseline of my personality must be something I'm putting on for show.) As I said, you appear to be doing well for yourself spiritually speaking; you're probably unusually well-equipped, emotionally, for the current American spiritual and cultural environment. But I know a ton of people for whom the same cannot be said. I am someone for whom the same cannot be said.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

But it doesn't have the same social cohesion effect, for the simple reason that it can be dropped like a hot potato the second someone gets uncomfortable.

Ideally both individuals and their social and religious environments should respond receptively and liberally (in the sense of the Aristotelian virtue of liberality) to each other's needs and desires--similar to William James's view that neither Great Man historiography nor historical materialism is correct, because individuals and their environments shape and mold one another in all sorts of complex ways. In contemporary America, neither do.

What problems does this create in the US though? I don't see any.

A great many people are very, very lonely. I've talked to a ton of people my age who pine for the stability and sense of purpose of our grandparents' generation, even though we don't want to repeat it wholesale. The fact that there's any widespread demand for something like hipster Christianity indicates an essential 'flattening' of human personality into a few traits and interests that all exist at essentially the same level of salience, which I think is an unacceptable anthropology. (I'm also thinking of somebody like Joe Republic--who actually makes a much better caricature of Modern Liberal Man than Evelyn Waugh's Lieutenant Hooper, because he manages to be both a smug urban liberal and overtly anti-intellectual at the same time--calling me 'pretentious' because I speak in different registers with different posters, as if any departure from the absolute baseline of my personality must be something I'm putting on for show.) As I said, you appear to be doing well for yourself spiritually speaking; you're probably unusually well-equipped, emotionally, for the current American spiritual and cultural environment. But I know a ton of people for whom the same cannot be said. I am someone for whom the same cannot be said.

I don't see how more people simply identifying as "Catholic" instead of "none" or "non-denominational Christian" would help with that.

Well, that alone wouldn't, obviously. By the time you get to a point where terminological self-identification is the only salient cultural difference, the war's already long-lost.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

(I'm also thinking of somebody like Joe Republic--who actually makes a much better caricature of Modern Liberal Man than Evelyn Waugh's Lieutenant Hooper, because he manages to be both a smug urban liberal and overtly anti-intellectual at the same time--calling me 'pretentious' because I speak in different registers with different posters, as if any departure from the absolute baseline of my personality must be something I'm putting on for show.)

Who knew it was so easy to get underneath your skin!

You must have come looking for this post. I can't imagine a thread discussing religion in an informed and substantive manner would have caught your attention on its own. I hope it was everything you could have wished for.

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Oh. Are you quite sure that didn't get under your skin?

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Nice try, but that's not really how this works.

On second thought, you're right. Unfair attacks do have a way of getting to people a lot more than merited ones. Astute observation.

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It's very very late here, yes. Midnight oil, Wittgenstein paper, et cetera. I have a meeting in the early afternoon but don't have anything in particular that I need to do before that so I'm not too worried. Thanks for your concern!