Christian Kitsch and Scrupulous Moderns
Scrupulosity and its consequences (especially in the Catholic Church)
Rigid social structures are perennial and necessitated for any moral society. This has been understood for millennia. However, when a pathological obsession with this rigidity becomes the norm, groups experience purity spiral. This is the outcome of scrupulosity.
But unlike the scruples of the past like in Cromwellian England that saw the banning of dancing, prohibitionist America with banning alcohol, or the Salem witch trials, there is a kraken of scrupulosity slowly rising from an ocean of Christian revivalist kitsch that must be annihilated before it hijacks logos.
There are a few ways in modernity I will analyze today wherein scrupulosity has overtaken many cultural movements, specifically on the right, and how especially pernicious it is in its effects than in centuries previous.
Knowing Nothing
The experience of hyperreal information dissemination is a virtual nightmare. Everyone has been taken on a ride of news stories that have passed through several filters of hyperreality, yet eat it all up as if they are witnesses to the event itself. Whether it be the Jew tunnel or Tucho Fernandez’s leaked book, people are quick to make judgements on reality itself from very little and very questionable news sources.
They then can bark into their echo chambers with others who will inevitably agree with them on their conspiracy, then dig deeper into this rabbithole void as if they are about to discover a holy grail of truth. In reality, they have gone off the deep end, and are affecting their ability to reason. They act as if they know what is going on. Their individuality is hijacked, but the feeling of being right more than others is too palpable to resist.
Another way this disease of unreason has permeated our society through hyperreality is in our new way of viewing history through mostly internet sources, then applying our modern judgement to how events took place previous, which is a dangerous move. For many Christians, this becomes a ghost dance to their pet looking glass on history, and in turn, prevents their ability to be humble. For trads, they feel as if they are under attack perpetually and obsess over the fantasy of turning back time, as if they somehow get it and everyone else is just going crazy. As I will dive into further in this article, the trad movements are inseparable from their scrupulous orientation. They wouldn’t be who they are without pastiche fueled by incessant rigidity.
Catty Bitches
A growing trend is traditional Christian kitsch, either from Catholics, Orthos, or nouveau prots looking to tradify their denomination. Usually, it is the zealotry of a convert or revert that leads them down a path of resentment towards modernity. There is nothing wrong with trying to conservatively follow the Christian faith as best as one can. However, in practice, this never happens organically. It is pastiche first and takes form as mimicry. A Christian thinks they ought to do the thing that looks traditional, and goes from there. They see others not doing exactly as they should. When asked why people ought to be traditional, their ultimate answer always goes back to, “Well, that’s how it used to be!” A tired cope of someone who can only spot that things suck now and seem to have been better at some other past time.
No one except maybe a few can pretend they are truly traditional as we are all consumers of the same hyperreality. Technique reaches over the entire world to the point nobody is left out of the modern world — not even the remote North Sentinelese as they have been seen with modern tech that has washed up on their small island. But the trad movement insists on removing itself from the world, and only sees true salvific glory in their works over any other. It culminates in a perpetual revolution against the modern world; always on the offense against all human institutions, always seeking to scrutinize, always watching out for witches and demons behind every corner.
This type of attitude seems to leave them distant from the point to their convictions in the first place as they obsess with form over substance. Trads seem to be constantly blackpilled about any possibility for good unless the world moves in exact specific way they want it to — which is backwards. They are toted down a path of blackpilling clickbait YouTube talking heads who tell them we are on the cusp of institutional collapse.
And so they rot in rejection of everything as it was just a lie. This is the essence of the reactionary, which is in contradiction to Christianity. We are not here to merely react and condemn, but be charitable and to work towards what is good. A trad cannot take comfort in that however. I have seen it in protestants and Catholics alike — the world is collapsing anyway, and we should be concerned more with condemning the world rather than helping it!
Prime example (and inspiration for this article):
Credit to @schizoginger.
“A celebrity conversion/reversion to Christianity can only be negative. It means that the world actually isn’t on the brink of Armageddon. If good things happen, that means we’re wrong!”
Speaking as a Catholic, anytime some news comes out about the Pope, trads have to sound the horn and go absolutely berserk so they can insist how right they are. “No room for patience! No room for nuance! The world is on fire! Why aren’t you righteously indignant like us!?”
This is the essence of scrupulosity that stokes the fire in the heart of the trad.
Liars and Cheats
The news borders fact and fiction, just as all rumors and narratives do. We perceive reality through story. However, this need for constant dopamine fixes via sensational news headlines is a new addiction, and no one is more latched onto this addiction than doomsayers. If annihilation wasn’t just around the corner, then we would have no need to desire a need for imminent materialist utopia. That is the story written by news media (underground and above).
Living in peace from this would be too easy. The only way people will turn to a very specific form of worship and tradition is to be scared into it. Right? Or be impassioned by some catastrophic event. Perhaps it will take the form in a huge reformation of the Church or society or whatever one’s pet scruple is. Whatever it may be, advertising one’s reactionary indignation is of utmost importance! How will the world know how right you are if you don’t freak out about every news headline without any forethought?
Ironically, this is why so many are disenchanted with “organized” Christianity and instead turn to the easier forms of worship in the low churches. Why sit around and listen to a bunch of grumpy trads when you can go to a rock concert every Sunday?
This is why there is such a market for folks like Taylor Marshall, Kennedy Hall, Timothy Gordon, and that ginger guy whose name escapes me. There’s a big dollar to be made in badmouthing the very institutional religion in which one subscribes to because apparently there’s a minority who do it super well that everyone should listen to. This minority is large and caught in a captive market that they will never escape. For people like Taylor Marshall, they’re suckers. Suckers who will dole out time and money to listen to his suspiciously on-time breaking news about how the Pope did a thing and how freaked out we should be.
What I’m getting at is this form of scrupulosity that leads suckers to drink poisoned punch at Jonestown leads people to swallow down hours of content that whispers sweet nothings about how right they are and how wrong everybody else is.
Lucky Charms
Beyond everything I’ve written here, what takes the cake is this hubris that they do everything the way it ought to be done, whether it be with Catholics and Latin Mass, trad protestants and reforming their contemporary worship to be more traditional, self-aggrandizing internet converts to Eastern Orthodoxy, or anyone subscribing to materialist utopian ideologies. The common thread is this:
”If only it was done this specific way, then everything would be (near) perfect.”
And it’s always lost on them. That they are in revolution, and not the institutions they seek to destroy. Really, they just want to watch someone else destroy them. Or perhaps it’s even worse than that, they just want to watch a hyperreal simulation of the destruction process without any end product so that they can revel in their rightness. Like watching a building being demolished on a loop.
Revolution always culminates in the destruction of order and good. What scrupulous moderns do not understand is that they fan the flames of revolution in their disenchantment from the very spiritual institutions they claim to be apart of. They revel in the aesthetics of tradition, revive songs of old, restore dead superstitions, and all for what? So that they can claim to be apart of a chosen class meant for greater. They’re doing it right. Why? They have the lucky charms. They have the incantations and enchantments that make them better.
I have seen it from the lowest of charismatic protestants to the reformed to Catholics. It is a wildfire spreading throughout culture. A fixation on “tradition” that ceaselessly scolds anything modern, that has no ability to look towards the future, nor experience what is now. It is a mixture of guilt and a sense of newfound purpose that ironically is bastardized by the tools of modernity to form rigid structures of faux-traditionalism for the sake of disenchanting every person with the Church and government. And for what? Conceit? Comfort? To feel special? Perhaps it is a failed trial, but too much of it reeks of rebellion and arrogance to be tame. To me, it seems just like another child of liberalism wrapped in a vail.
Coda
In the end, this disease of scrupulosity is spreading. Whoever it clutches ahold of leads them on a course towards dismay and disappointment. All they end up hoping for is a world that is not meant to come. It perverts their understanding of goodness, truth, and beauty. In that way, it is far worse than scandal or run-of-the-mill degeneracy that is out in the open these days.
How can one even enjoy life, not life’s delights, but the good they are meant to be doing when every single step of the way is a reminder that everyone is being doomed by some world order sabotaging them? Isn’t the course of action to march on? To step forward with what we have to accomplish our mission?
The scrupulosity of the trad right is a retreat. It is throwing one’s hands up in the air and defaulting to the old thing because it looks cooler and makes you feel special. It makes you feel like maybe, just maybe, you’re totally correct, and all these paid talking heads on the internet of questionable backgrounds are just trying to save modernity from despair. It’s easier to believe that donning some trad regalia and having cool esoteric opinions will fix society. Or maybe you just seem like an arrogant prick and you’re not getting the point of what tradition is in the first place.
I can’t pretend I know what will fix society, but I am almost certain it isn’t a half-assed ghost dance to our ancestors. Actually, I do know what it is — it’s everyone kneeling to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Everything else is just middling kitsch.
Maybe the state of the Church is fine and you’re just coping. Maybe in light of mass societal issues you shouldn’t be a rebel embarking upon rabbithole misadventures to nowhere.
“Do not abandon yourselves to despair. We are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song.”
Pope John Paul II
I enjoyed reading your analysis of the trad movement. On X, and my own extended family the trad mentality has taken hold - some marrying trad girls they met at an FSSP parish. Very nice girls and faithful families but they hold to a trad Catholicism that never existed in the past but one rooted in the present state of the Church.
I am old enough to have been an altar boy in the late 50's and 60's. I remember being on the altar and seeing women and men dressed in their Sunday best attending the old Mass. However, except for having more children than our non-Catholic neighbors and scrupulously going to Mass on Sundays, Catholics conformed to the rest of society and socialized with neighbors and friends irrespective of their religion - nobody cared if a fellow Yankee fan was of the same religion!
I see the trad movement as a socio-religious movement of "Going back to the 50's." One without Elvis, rock n' roll, segregation, or hiding beneath our school desks in simulation of a nuclear attack. Sure, life was simpler back then - television was clean for the most part, high school graduates could get a good job and buy a home, pornography was sold under the counter, etc. - but that whole way of life is in the past, gone forever as the culture/society moves on into the future. I'm sure my Irish grandparents born in the 1880's in Ireland on farms without electricity and using an outhouse were not trads when they were middle-aged adults in NYC living in a warm home in the 1930's.
The new trad movement is a social construct of the mind - an imaginary past where women wore long dresses and never pants, forgoing lipstick and makeup and socializing only with fellow trads or the likeminded. This was not the past but an imaginary utopia of the mind adapted to a life with cell phones, advanced medical procedures, electric cars, on-line learning/shopping and social communication with the like-minded on social media.
Unconsciously, they will become the new Amish or Mennonites as the modern society of the 21st century advances and the world becomes smaller and even more cosmopolitan. Already several trad families I know have retreated to rural enclaves near a Latin Mass parish to raise their families in a more pure and healthy environment away from the evil environment of the world, flesh and devil. But doesn't our Lord counsel us to be the leaven in the world or in the Church - “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into about sixty pounds of flour until it worked all through the dough” (Matthew 13:33).
Once again, I enjoyed your analysis. Keep up the good work.
Blessings,
Patrick