🔥 modern day religion
This is less “modern day” so much as “what if you grew up under an out-dated kind of Christianity and then abandoned the entire notion of god” but:
I have an instinctual distaste for a significant portion of American nondenominational Christianity. I realize that as an ex-Catholic this is the height of hypocrisy---I’m well aware! But those American churches called “Salvation” or “Crossroads” or “Life” are imo some of the most inhumanly cheerful and distinctly corporate kinds of faith I’ve ever witnessed. (If you use powerpoint during mass, you’re a goddamn liar and selling something.)
I’m not saying the Roman Catholic Church is at all a good institution—it’s definitively, unequivocally, indefensibly not—but it’s an old-world terribleness. The Catholic Church is rotted through with the same kinds of power and corruption and terror, secrecy, and violence that humanity has been lugging around since it crawled up out of the swamp. And, more significantly, that church has no idea how to be terrible in the modern day. Have you ever seen EWTN? ie, the “Eternal Word Television Network,” ie the most boring television channel ever to exist in the history of broadcast? Meanwhile, you’ve got the evangelicals retelling bible stories with animated vegetables and the Presbyterians creating bible summer camps with guitar music you can hum and megachurches out of Texas offering livestreams of their sermons.
You know what the Catholic Church of the 21st century has to offer?
Yep! The most technologically advanced thing the Catholic Church has is an illuminated manuscript minus the illuminations!!!! My horrible religion never figured out how to exist in the 21st century, how to be at all charming or persuasive post-miracle play. The Catholic Church will die within our lifetime because a) the Church is and was monstrous, and b) it couldn’t figure out how to make up for that monstrosity with 21st century marketing.
In a strange way, I think it is better for that inability. I’ll never be able to shake the sense that if you can package faith for mass consumption, you’re just a bumper sticker masquerading as a religion. It’s very confusing, I’m not proud of any of it, but that’s the most scorching take I’ve got.
