Catholicism vs Nationalism

[Peace]

1 hour ago, Anomaly said:

And if you read further along in your Catechism, it also says that man, given historical context(the Fall) also needs further revelation from God, that, theoretically, there are obstacles that prevent reason alone from that.    Read it all, not just enough to be snarky.    

It does not state that there are obstacles that prevent all men from using reason alone. Consider yourself among the dimwitted (Psalm 14:1)

1 hour ago, Anomaly said:

Your God isn't just a science experiment demonstrating an observable  chemical reaction. 

Agreed.

[Luigi]

I have any number of friends who are Democrats first and Catholics second - or at least they are as Democratic as they are Catholic. They attend Church weekly, send their children to Catholic schools, are very active in retreats, volunteer for service projects (themselves and their high school/college-aged children), pray for the Pope - the whole package. And yet they will vote for a candidate that supports abortion, tax-funded abortion, gay marriage, exporting jobs, continuing a war, and any number of other issues with which they personally disagree. Because the candidate is a Democrat, and "the Democrats are the only ones who care about the working man." They have inherited their Democratic identity from their fathers and grandfathers, who were Kennedy Democrats and Roosevelt Democrats respectively. Roosevelt's most enduring legacy is his Democratic Coalition - urban, blue collar, minority The Democratic party has changed a good deal since those days, but the identity remains the same.

Do I have any number of friends who are Republicans first and Catholics second? I think there are some, but there are many fewer of them, and they are more recent converts to Republicanism - Reagan Republicans. The identity is based more directly and more recently on particular political stances and less on inherited identity. They went looking for a political party that reflected their religious beliefs. And in all honesty, the Republican party has been more open to their input than the Democratic party has been to the input of the working man or the social conservative.

Culture always gets intertwined with religion, and vise versa. Some people make a more or less conscious decision to give priority to one over the other, but some people just consider it part of their identity, even if the parts conflict.

 

[Era Might]

The funny thing is America is so religious because it is so nationalist. It privatized religion and created a national federalist State that was purely secular. It allowed religious people to keep their fervent zeal but not to institutionalize it. The nation state is its own secular religion, but it allows different religious impulses to appropriate the nation according to their needs. So, America can claim as patriots: pacifists like the Quakers, prudes like the Baptists, and formalists like the Catholics. American Catholicism, in its heydey, was an immigrant phenomemon, a good example of a specific religious group using the nation for its own purposes (in the case of Catholicism, for international solidarity, which nativist Protestants feared under no less "patriotic" grounds). The old Christian Europe was the opposite: it had no national federalist State, instead it united each nation around one religion.

Edited March 21, 2017 by Era Might

[Pork Chop]

I have just signed up after spending an unhealthy amount of time in the Chans.

It is amazing how many people on there marry traditional Catholicism with ethno-nationalism. They kind of see Cathocism as a cultural shibboleth, but I don't know if they have super natural faith.