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Within the West the left has a common circular conversation: We need to organize, we need a movement independent of liberal political parties, we need independent working class power. The common response: there's no sufficient labor movement, people are too atomized, they no longer live and work in proximity in ways that makes them easily reachable, existing platforms prevent dissemination of our message, etc.

What if the people need to come together to be reached, and what if they get what they need for their liberation, and what they are missing in their lives under capitalism such as community aid and belonging, in a church?

Consider the conditions under which Christianity arose. The older religions including Greco-Roman pantheon worship had declined. They had by no means lost their popularity completely but the awe of the primal forces of nature and the fatalistic philosophical personification and deification of aspects of human behavior no longer spoke as effectively to the increasingly urban masses where the bronze age conditions that inspired the religion in the first place were increasingly remote and abstract. Major rituals and festival were increasingly done by rote or performatively by elites for their political careers, or for the celebrations more than the meaning beneath them. Christianity filled that void, the thought of taking on the sins and failures and brutality of humanity from the top down and dying to absolve the human soul, the thought of an all encompassing and compassionate architecture to the universe and their place in it gave people more awe than witnessing a lightning storm or an earthquake.

We all know how things went since, there's more to criticize about Christianity's history than we have time to go over. But now we find ourselves once again in similar conditions for something new. Religious membership is declining in the west, the remaining membership are either increasingly secularized and bourgeois or increasingly hyper-reactionary or lumpen. These institutions are not able to speak to the problems of the day or any solution for them on a theological or material basis. If the old church was the theological logic of feudalism to come in the shadow of rome, if protestantism was the theological logic of capitalism to come in the shadow of feudalism, then something new whether christian or something distinct can be the theological logic of what is to come after capitalism and more people Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

Heads up: I’m Italian, and as such I’m genuinely fascinated by how often American leftists have an utopian view of Europe, supposedly for its egalitarian and “socialist” policies, which actually runs counter to my experience. They might as well be the EU’s strongest soldier, believing in the EU more than the average European.
Granted, I never lived in the part of “Europe“ people talk about when using the term (which usually refers to just north-west Europe), but I do think Americans’ perception of what modern European countries (particularly those west of the Berlin Wall) are very distorted. For the sake of argument, I’ll be focusing on the EU.

For starters, both world wars and the instability of the European spring of 1848 has led to a lack of development of negative rights as well as the notion to more democracy = censorship, which is why censorship is more normalised in Europe than in America which has the first amendment. The biggest example would be the ECHR’s article 10 which makes it clear that freedom of speech isn’t absolute, which is a good example of how illiberal tendencies can exist in a seemingly “liberal” land. On the top of that, inequality is high in Europe, especially in terms of the holding power of the former aristocratic classes on European politic. As an example, Britain still has appointed lords even though the nobles’ powers have diminished a long ago, and by the time the French Revolution ended most of the aristocrats assimilated themselves into France’s political machine, whilst in Scandinavia wealth inequality is high.

As for racism, I would say that Europe is worst based on both data and personal experience. Remember Shiloh Hendrix? Well, if she did the same thing she did but in any European country, no one would bat an eye. Remember, hate speech laws are just lawfare, they’re not about “protecting minorities“ as its supporters claim. But it’s not just the micro level since hiring discrimination and lack of access to meaningful resources means many immigrants that weren’t wealthy on arrival (e.g., expats) are stuck on welfare and meagre wage or none. This in contrast to America where immigrants are treated better socially in spite of the lack of fringe benefits like universal healthcare.

I mean, Denmark is robbing refugees as a deterrent policy, France is suppressing Islamic religiosity while letting tradCaths scot-free (at least from an outsiders’ POV) to enforce its concept of state secularism (Post too long. Click here to view the full text.