"Mainstream" evangelicalism is always teetering on the edge of falling into some kind of cult movement -- local or global, big or small -- at any given moment
People outside have no fucking idea how common this actually is and people inside are disturbingly numb to it
Still remember listening to music with friends in high school who were like "Ah yeah I used to have a whole Metallica collection on vinyl before we burned it all in that bonfire three years ago"
Like that's just... a thing that happens, like bad weather
Sometimes you get in a car accident, sometimes an electrical fire breaks out in your house, sometimes a traveling preacher comes through and gets everyone all hyped up about how they need to purge all secular culture from their lives to get right with God
You get used to it
Even "normal" evangelicals talk about periodic "revivals" as a positive thing, wax lyrical about a "New Great Awakening" bringing spirituality and religious passion back to America
Even though every single one of these that happens has some element that's utterly fucking batshit
Still remember talking to my mom about this bullshit swallowing up my former church in California back in 2008
The usual fare -- glossolalia, faith healing, resurrection, massive fundraising spike, rampant sexual abuse
Dad under investigation from the FBI for insurrection threatens his own children with a gun to try to keep them from turning him in
Gets turned in
Okay so the whole "children informing on parents" stuff has become a right-wing outrage meme, and I gotta say
If you intend to call on bonds of loyalty and love to keep yourself out of trouble, you also need to not threaten lethal violence
You don't get to use both approaches
Like, I think you *shouldn't* threaten to kill your kids in general, because that's, you know, bad karma
But while some abusive dads may have completely normalized this kind of relationship with their kids, *springing* the death threats on them in a panic is just bad tactics
"Meaning" and "community" are extremely loaded terms, especially because a ton of the essence of fash ideology is bashing other people's definition of meaning and community as fake/degenerate/pathetic/childish/effeminate/gross/weird/stupid
The red-light districts of Weimar Berlin WERE a nexus of meaning and community, and the Nazis tore it all up and burned it all down because it was the WRONG KIND of meaning and community
Of course the world sucks and people are unhappy
What I am deeply suspicious of is arguments that everyone is less happy than they would've been in the Good Old Days, and gosh if we want people to be happy we should import some of those Good Old Days values into modern times
That old joke about the old Jewish guy reading Nazi newspapers because "In these papers we're always winning" resonates with me a lot these days
I get my hope from blackpilled Pepes whining about how "Joe Biden's presidency will irreversibly put us on the path to socialism"
"Sleepy Joe is just a figurehead! He's a puppet for that foreign agent KaMAla, who only pretended to be a law-and-order DA until she could get the chance to put her Marxist professor father's ideas into action!"
Yeah, that's it baby, you know just what to say, keep going
(The song is from the POV of dock workers loading the bananas for shipping, hence the subtitle "The Banana Boat Song"
So it's not technically a "sea shanty" but it's shanty-adjacent)
Seriously, one of the verses of the song is about how when you're exhausted at the end of your shift and tipsy because you've had a little nip to take the edge off is the perfect time for a tarantula to ambush you
I'm sitting here weighing the idea that you could get rid of a lot of what's toxic about the word "working-class" (as well as misleading, hypocritical, inconsistent, etc.) in ordinary discourse by just committing to saying "poor" instead
Yes I know that in Marxist theory etc. it has a specific meaning
I'm saying that meaning has been so messed up by the way people use it and bicker over it that outside of an academic context, "poor" works much better
It's just really grating hearing about "the working class" to refer to people who own giant ranch houses and huge pickup trucks and a whole arsenal and so forth, and who turn out to own businesses and have employees