Genesis
Response
August 28th, 2022
If we were to somehow crank up the religiosity knob in a country like Spain, restoring the Integralist state/church fusion, it's quite clear where we'd all end up: inside a Gothic cathedral with all the 'smells and bells' of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. In the case of many Eastern European countries, the placeholder for religiosity is the Orthodox branch of Christianity of which Rod is an adherent: so it would be icons and a weird paschal calendar for all.
We're not in Spain or Hungary or Bulgaria though, are we?
What would it look like if we somehow amped up religious practice in America, reversing decades of a secularizing trend? (Don't snicker; hipsters in New York are LARPing at being Catholic.)
Where do we find ourselves on Sunday then?
Are we speaking in tongues at a Pentecostal church church in Kentucky? Rocking out to a spectacular choir in an AME church in Detroit? In a Mormon sacrament meeting of a Provo, Utah ward? Or are we sitting in the unprogrammed silence of a Quaker meetinghouse? Is it even a Sunday? When is this state-sanctioned sabbath happening anyhow, when we ban business and alcohol sales as with the 'Blue Laws' of old? Will it be on Sunday (Christianity), on Saturday (Judaism), or on Friday (Islam)?
It's noteworthy that most of the adepts pushing for a restored state/church fusion are from churches--again, Catholic and Orthodox--whose theologies implicitly assume a universalizing pose in their thought. After all, they're the only God game in town where they came from (though definitely not the US). That the Catholic and Orthodox should come together, along with Protestants and even some Jews, to clamor for someone religious to take power and ward off the secular woke tide would be more than a bit amusing to a reborn Martin Luther (or Pope Leo X).
It almost reminds me of the quaint belief that all Hispanics are actually unified under some 'Latino' identity, papering over the differences (to not say hostilities) between the various sub-groups. In their home countries, be they Cubans and Mexicans or Catholics and Jews, none of these people would be making common cause. It's only in the US that they somehow bind (or are bound) together against a very different majority culture.
I suspect much of this debate is very moot, at least politically. While this New Right might flirt with Integralism or post-liberal nationalism, those political directions will draw about as much interest from the American electorate as the current debate around the synodality of the Tridentine mass (really hot stuff in the Catholic discourse). Much as the old Chomsky Left split from Democratic consensus and dithered in extremist irrelevance for a while, the New Right has to decide if it wants to be religiously correct (by its own lights) or actually a force in American politics and culture.
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