The Hole in the Culture that the Church Left Behind

The Lament for the Loss of Church at the Heart of the Collective Meaning Crisis

In today's video I finished my commentary on the "4 Horsemen of Meaning" video. I thought that the last half hour of the video was probably the best.

In @jordanbpeterson and @vervaeke_john I've noticed an interesting lament for the role that church used to play, or was supposed to play in the broader culture. There is a hole in the culture that the church used to fill.

In the beginning of the United States many of the first states had "state churches" just like Protestant Europe but into the 19th century it was abandoned. A deeply Protestant country could have an invisible church at its center.

Secularism was a Protestant invention. Part of the contemporary instability seems to be the collapse of that shadow center as modernity recedes. Catholicism and Orthodoxy long acted as cultural centers for civilizations but I don't know that we can go back.

Part of the meaning crisis is individual, which I think is the aspect that @jordanbpeterson and @vervaeke_john have focused most on, but part is civic. American civil religion has always been Protestant.

The hole in the culture in America was first and it seems that in the realm of the Protestant countries the Protestant state churches followed America. In some ways the stories in Catholic and Orthodox lands have been even more cataclysmic.

.@nytdavidbrooks noted recently that China and Russia have been trying to fill the vacuum. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/09/opinion/autocracy-religion-liberalism.html

The church, like "God" was such an integral part of cultural cohesion that its patchwork replacement are regularly found wanting. It's why we keep trying to recruit new recently-invented religions. It's why our culture is in crisis.