Two Things 4/1/24
Empty pews. Pro-life Dune. Plus campus hate, institutional triage, and David's "dignity."
Coffee this Friday, April 5, at the usual time (6:30 am) and place (Loyal North).
(1) Religious glass half full: I drove to and from church Easter Sunday morning, and the streets and sidewalks seemed unusually quiet. I expected more bustle, more Christians streaming into and out of church buildings, even if many of them are only “C&E” (Christmas and Easter) types. Yet it felt different this year. Emptier. This is anecdotal, to be sure. But statistics point in the same direction. Religious participation in America continues to decline, though the effect isn’t uniform across denominations. At The Dispatch, Chris Stirewalt notes:
At the start of this century, 42 percent of U.S. adults attended religious services “weekly or nearly every week.” Now it’s 30 percent. But, again, that’s not the fault of non-believers. That’s within members of various denominations. Roman Catholics, down 12 points, and Orthodox Christians, down 9 points, saw the sharpest declines since 2000, while Protestants dipped 4 points.
Only two major sects, Judaism and Islam, saw increases over the same period, with Jews climbing 7 points and Muslims up 4 points. Mormons basically held steady.
But Stirewalt wants us to see the religious glass (chalice?) half full:
If 30 percent of Americans go to their church, mosque, synagogue, [or] temple [weekly], that’s 78 million people or so in an adult population of about 260 million. Add in the monthly worshippers, and you have more than 106 million souls gathering together on a pretty regular basis.
That’s 57 percent more than the number who bet on the Super Bowl, more than triple the number who watched this year’s State of the Union address, and more than double the number of daily active TikTok users in the U.S.
[I]t is worth saying that 106 million people is a lot of people, and that in America they can choose who, how, and where to worship. Indeed, the resilience of communal worship in the face of an onslaught of competition for our attention says something important about Americans and our faiths. After all, it could be worse. You could be in the movie theater business.
(2) Conservative politics of Dune 2: Speaking of movies, political science professor Kody W. Cooper argues at Law & Liberty that Dune: Part Two resonates with conservative themes about human dignity, faith and reason, and political faith.
As the story progresses so does Jessica’s pregnancy, and the audience sees Paul’s fully human sister develop with striking visuals inside the womb, portraying Alia from her embryonic to later stages. At one point on the threat of death, Lady Jessica is forced to ingest a poisonous substance that the Fremen call the “Water of Life,” which sends her into life-threatening convulsions. But the Fremen did not know she was pregnant. When they realize they unwittingly endangered the baby girl, they lament: What have we done!?
Rarely has the silver screen featured such a powerful, if subtle, moral condemnation of chemically-induced abortion. Dune sends a clear message that human life has dignity from the moment of conception.
On the tension between faith and reason, Cooper writes:
Paul’s love interest and teacher in the Fremen ways, Chani, takes a Machiavellian view of things. From her perspective, the [religious prophecies] are manmade lies and the tools of those interested in power. … [T]he unquestioning faith of the fundamentalist is most dangerous when it is concentrated in the savior, who then becomes their master and a despot.
Meanwhile, Paul’s mentor-turned-disciple, Stilgar represents the perspective of faith. While he has witnessed Paul’s humanity, he also sees signs of divinity or a divine mission…. [Yet Stilgar errs toward] fideism, a sort of excessive or blind faith unresponsive to reason…. Dune suggests there is a need to balance faith and reason to avoid the pitfalls of fideism and rationalism. This is a deeply conservative religious message.
Cooper concludes with a final theme, on the inadequacy of politics to sate the human desire for transcendence. This is the weakest part of the essay. There’s a half-handed swipe at Judaism as a “temporal” and “political” faith, which felt both oddly out of place and in tension with his concluding quote from the Jewish prophetic tradition. More basically, seeing in Dune 2 an embodiment of “conservative teaching” on “political moderation, prudential compromise, and incremental change” overargues the evidence. The piece is insightful nonetheless.
Other Things:
Forget nationalism. Aaron Renn says that Christians living in what he calls the “negative world” have to do “institutional triage,” adopting a “transactional mindset toward” American institutions.
Italian officials are clamping down on refrigerator magnets, souvenirs, and T-shirts featuring famous masterpieces, like Michelangelo’s David, even though they’ve been in the public domain for centuries.
Hope to see you Friday.
Do these number include video streaming attendees as participants?