Spaulding wrote:
Jesus ain't no progressive liberal
If you drop the last syllable (or two if you enunciate well), you can sing this to "Jesus Is Just Alright with Me" and finally give those dirty hippies what-for.
The Catholic Church did pretty well under Pope Francis. It seemed like Catholicism was one of the few denominations that was growing while mainline Protestants continue to shed members. Going back to a hardliner and retreating could undo a lot of the goodwill that the Church earned with the rest of the world.
It might be helpful to look at the Mormons, another denomination that inspires some highly divisive feelings, and their recent history of leadership. From the 1950s through about 2015, the church was mostly under the control of the moderates/pragmatists. The hardliners got a quick whirl in the '70s, but even they tempered themselves a little bit: the church had spent a lot of time and energy constructing a series of busy-boxes for John Birch Society psychopath Ezra Taft Benson, sending him around the world or letting him be in Eisenhower's cabinet so that he'd leave them alone, or calling meetings without him there so they could pass the resolution to let blacks join the church, and by the time he had the seniority to be president, he was senile and the moderates were running the show again. And so through the second half of the 20th century, the church experienced a ton of growth despite being cruel and demanding and theologically batshit because they had people at the top who could sell the Mormons as your friendly neighbors who might be a little different but meant well and seemed happy and successful. That finally ended about ten years ago when people like Dallin Oaks (University of Chicago guy) were able to seize power and steer the church toward being loudly anti-LGBT, anti-abortion, anti-everything, basically, transforming the church's message from the sunny "hey let's all try to be good people" of the moderates to "everyone has to follow all the rules at all times or else," and the church appears to be suffering greatly for it.
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Molly Lambert wrote:
The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.