Newsletter for the Week of 1/5/24

A bit delayed and very brief-

News: Nothing of substance to report. Basically things are chugging along. I yo-yo between freaking out that there are only 116 (or whatever) reviews for Vol. 1 on Amazon and reminding myself that I was the one who wanted to write web serial progression fantasy, and most people reading that on kindle won’t go near the first volume of a book unless it’s from an author they know. And, ideally, is thick enough to stop a .50 cal. round at close range. Looking at you, Warformed: The Iron Prince. I have seen actual dictionaries that are shorter.

Weird Philosophy/Theology Thing: So, Slumrat Rising has now gotten a whopping two reviews on RR accusing them of being religious propaganda. They aren’t even particularly negative reviews- I’m not mad. I’m just kind of puzzled. You see, neither review says what the propaganda is for exactly, except “God.” Somehow. Which… is it? But it actually points to an interesting trend, and an alarming truth, so I’m hijacking their reviews for this post.

Wanna guess what the fastest growing religious demographic in the US is? Secular. Here is the lead from a Gallup poll, published September 22, 2023.

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Nearly half of Americans (47%) describe themselves as religious, another 33% say they are spiritual but not religious, and 2% volunteer they are “both.” Although the vast majority of U.S. adults have one of these orientations toward the nonphysical world, the 18% who say they are neither religious nor spiritual is twice the proportion Gallup measured when it first asked this question in 1999. Over the same period, the percentage identifying as religious has declined by seven percentage points.

But this also fails to tell the whole story. PPRI published an incredible paper (Linked here: https://www.prri.org/research/religion-and-congregations-in-a-time-of-social-and-political-upheaval/#:~:text=Among%20Americans%20who%20left%20a,members%20of%20non%2DChristian%20religions.) that I don’t want to cheapen by summarizing too much. Also it is too damn long to summarize quickly. But the very, very, VERY top level summary? Religion is down, secularization is up, but even more than either of those things, being unchurched is WAY up.

America has, historically, been a very religious country, but the way that religion (again, taking a long, historical perspective here) functioned was often as a tool of social cohesion. You were Episcopalian/Methodist/Catholic/Jewish/LDS and you went to your local church/temple/synagogue, did business with your fellow congregants, likely met your spouse through it and it anchored you to your community. Even if you moved, one of the most important decisions you would make after moving to a new place was finding a new church to attend. It was a social institution as much or more than a religious one.

That is now in dramatic decline. There are a lot of reasons for it. (Really, check the article at PPRI. Don’t be put off by all the graphs. It’s FASCINATING.) But the simple fact is that more and more Americans are feeling alienated from the communities they would have historically been able to connect to.

The notion of a “Job For Life” hasn’t existed in the US for at least as long as I have been alive. Libraries are being attacked for having the wrong books (“wrong” according to people who haven’t read those books.) Public Schools have been attacked for decades and home schooling is WAY up. Universities are coming under sustained attack from ideologues who just don’t like them. The media essentially no longer exists in a form that would have been recognizable forty years ago. The demographic makeup of the country is also radically changing. And so is the nation’s relationship to its churches.

Churches, temples and other places of organized religion are being roiled by controversy over abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, womens’ rights, economic injustice, racial injustice, environmental injustice (including climate change), and all that without getting to the specific doctrinal challenges these issues present to the religions themselves. To say that opinions are divided on Pope Francis would be an understatement. But also look at the Southern Baptists. They kicked out one of the nation’s most popular megachurches because of what most outside the Southern Baptists would consider a fairly minor doctrinal difference. Wasn’t minor to them.

Americans, long famous for their largely mythical individualism, are now atomized. All the former unifying institutions, the sources of community, are disintegrating. Which means that people suffering from insecurity (economic, environmental, or really of any sort) no longer have people to reach out to and rely on. In many ways, it is acutely disorienting for men. So much of what goes into patriarchal behavior is status driven, with acute social consequences for failing to conform to those behaviors.

Such as being murdered, or ostracized. Losing that privileged position. Humiliation, both public and private.

The social pressures to conform are largely still there, (See, eg. The “manosphere,” the Tate brothers, et al.) but the social structures that were supposed to reward those behaviors are largely disintegrating. Not much point in impressing the boss with your golf game if you expect to leave the job within five years. Don’t even dream about being the breadwinner if the two of you can barely keep a roof over your heads on two incomes.

I’m not defending patriarchy. Far from it. I’m saying things are intensely bad when even patriarchy has become a source of nostalgia for millions of angry, disaffected men. And there is no balance there, no source of people these angry men can look to and see healthy behavior modeled.

They find those niches online that make them feel good. Smaller and smaller communities, with ever stricter rules and their own languages, harshly punishing heterodoxy. Dangerous, poisonous… and valuable. Like a crown made from plutonium. Because, however toxic, they provide an explanation, emotional connection and support.

On some level, we all feel it. That sense of being adrift. Of being alone in increasingly stormy oceans. Knowing the situation is wrong. That it shouldn’t be this way. Knowing that there are a handful of people sitting snug in their beachfront villas, enjoying watching the storm at sea.

Anxiety, to paraphrase Master Yoda, quickly gives rise to anger and to hatred. You are all alone. Painfully, scarily alone. All the institutions and communities are untrustworthy. You just want to escape this world, if only for a little while. So if you feel like you can’t put your faith in your church any more, and you are pretty iffy about your religion, or you have plain gone off “God” altogether, and you are just looking to lose yourself in a book, theological debate is probably not going to make you happy.

I really can't be mad at the reivewers. I get it. I disagree, but I get it.

Is Slumrat Rising propaganda in favor of organized religion? My brother in webnovels, have you read the books? Are they propaganda in support of “God,” generally? No, I don’t think so. Not with this much Gnostic and pagan Greek philosophy baked in. What I think it does do, though, is dig into that isolation. That desire for togetherness with others, and the forces that make it so difficult to do that.

I am part of that demographic shift as well, one of those drifting American atoms. There is a Masonic temple five minutes walk from my house. They would be DELIGHTED to have a new member, especially one under the age of sixty. And I just can’t bring myself to do it. Because I am also one of those people arguing with God, and I don’t want to pretend to believe whatever they believe.

I, like tens of millions of others, am an atom unwilling to trust my fellow atoms, and form those strong bonds. Like Truth, I’m running around my country’s shadows, looking up and asking “Does it really have to be this way? Is this… it?” Finding it easier to shiver and wonder alone, than ask a neighbor.

Next week- Grounds for Cautious Optimism.