In an effort to expand racial diversity, I have invited Irishman Keith Woods onto the panel, and joining me, as always, is perfidious Albion incarnate Ed Dutton. This week, we forgo the predictable Trump and Brexit retrospectives, and instead engage in reckless and all-but-incomprehensible metaphysical speculation about the past and the future.
00:03:52.760Being that this is the holiday edition, I wanted to take a step back and not only reflect on 2019, but really reflect on the past four years of craziness in the right.
00:04:10.860Like, this has been a period really like no other that I've at least experienced in my lifetime where we felt like we were winning.
00:06:36.620There's maybe some precursors to this, but it actually is something new and something very, very, you know, postmodern West, you could say.
00:06:52.320I mean, yeah, the Trump campaign was an interesting thing.
00:06:56.480That's around like when I kind of got red piddling, you know, got into this in a ride or whatever.
00:07:00.780But I suppose like there's the pre-election Trump and the post-election Trump.
00:07:05.780And you should probably delineate the two because what he ran on is so different from what he is now.
00:07:11.500But, yeah, you know, a lot of people picked up on this, that Trump has this postmodern aspect to him.
00:07:17.660That, like, he kind of reminds me of Greta Thunberg in a weird way.
00:07:23.020And that they're both so, they're both so outrageously, whatever they are, they're like a parody of themselves that it's kind of impossible to critique them.
00:07:34.080Because that self-awareness is already kind of latent just in their very being, if you know what I mean.
00:07:40.320So Trump was able to, like, defy all sort of conventional morality.
00:07:45.260And, you know, a lot of people thought, like, the, you know, his divorces and stuff would count against him with the Christian vote or whatever.
00:07:51.680But Trump was just so out there and so in defiance of, you know, the moral norms that were governing dialectic of Republican politics that he became totally immune from all that.
00:08:03.760But I think, you know, a lot of leftists were saying Trump is a postmodern phenomenon.
00:08:08.320But I think he's actually a sign of things to come, which is, you know, there's talk about this shift into metamodernism where the, you know, the dominant irony of postmodernism.
00:08:20.080You know, you have Generation Z now that have been completely raised, just steeped in irony, you know, raised on, you know, 4chan and YouTube and all this.
00:08:28.700And, like, what happens is, you know, irony is wholly negative.
00:08:35.740But we're in a situation now where there's nothing left to deconstruct really.
00:08:40.160Like, there is no metanarrative beyond sort of this, you know, nihilistic, solipsistic individualism.
00:08:46.520And so, you know, after the deconstruction comes reconstruction in a certain sense.
00:08:51.800And the trend, it hasn't been discussed much, but the trend in metamodernism seems to be that the reconstruction takes the form of a kind of a self-aware return to tradition.
00:09:02.060You get what's called ironic sincerity, which is a kind of self-aware sincerity.
00:09:05.380And that's what I saw in the Trump campaign, because he's very self-aware.
00:09:13.160But at the end of the day, the reason he appealed was there was a sincerity there, which was a return to a kind of more industrial era, more morally wholesome United States.
00:09:25.460And it's interesting even in, like, the, you know, the aesthetics that flourished in the alt-right, like, kind of fasciae of aesthetics,
00:09:33.240where it's just, like, marriage of forms from a bygone time with kind of a hyper-modern aesthetics.
00:09:41.300So you get, you know, retrofuturism was very popular because, like, the 80s was another time where, you know, people were looking at optimism to the future.
00:09:49.780So you get this interest in marriage of, you know, people were sharing a lot of, like, sort of Soviet retrofuturism, where you have, like, a very traditional form, like a nuclear family.
00:10:02.100But, you know, they're living on marriage.
00:10:04.080So it's this clash of, like, the sincere return to simpler time of moral wholesomeness or whatever with the progress of modernism.
00:10:14.480And that's what metamodernism seems to be taking the form of.
00:10:17.400Yeah, I think it's interesting because I was just thinking about the generational aspect of it.
00:10:26.180Speaking as a Gen Xer, and I guess Ed is, I'm a little bit older than Ed, but he is more or less a Gen Xer, more of a Gen Xer than a millennial.
00:10:35.220We can remember the 80s, and we can remember a time that, you know, it was certainly hopeful.
00:10:43.840That was the, you know, age of, you know, staying up until 6 a.m. on high on Coke and, you know, wagering all your money on some stock junk fund or whatever.
00:10:55.400But it was actually an era of American hopefulness and American power and arrogance even.
00:11:04.960This kind of ended with the fall of the Soviet Union where, you know, we won.
00:11:10.640And then the 90s was actually a bit of a different decade.
00:11:13.660It was almost kind of a hangover from that.
00:11:16.100And I think the, you know, one of the reasons why the boomers are attacked is that they seem to have a kind of meta-narrative to them.
00:11:24.060They, you know, it was, we destroyed racism.
00:11:32.200And we created the greatest economy ever and, you know, and so on.
00:11:36.500And I think the zoomers are almost interesting in their just kind of lack of a meta-narrative at all.
00:11:44.360It's not so much the kind of black-pilled meta-narrative that distinguishes Gen X where we were like, you know, all that stuff you talk about, civil rights, spreading democracy to the world.
00:35:48.980But the polarization has almost become a race in modern America.
00:35:55.220And I don't know if this is occurring in Britain as well.
00:35:57.940But if you- because, you know, everyone at least overtly is PC and post-racial and colorblind or whatever.
00:36:04.980But when you drill down on some of these, say, polling or any kind of empirical evidence for polarization, the political party has almost become a race.
00:36:17.020It's not so much that you disagree with the liberals, that they're spending too much money on welfare or something.
00:36:23.580It's that you don't want your children to marry a liberal.
00:36:27.240And you think the liberals are inherently bad people.
00:36:31.460Whereas on the reverse side, it's conservatives are utter buffoons and racist and they just want a billionaire Nazi in charge and all this kind of stuff.
00:36:42.640And so this- this, you know, a system is going to break down, but it has to break down along current fault lines.
00:36:50.300And I think it's very sad in many ways that it's breaking down on these party polarized fault lines.
00:36:59.240But that's what parties- parties would be manifestations of fault lines.
00:37:12.400Then as you move on to the fundamental breakdown of British politics and, by extension, American politics, is are you Whig, i.e. more pro-parliament, or Tory, i.e. more pro-king?
00:37:22.520As I understand it with Irish politics, the division was over the civil war.
00:37:26.140If there's a civil war, and that division will go on for a very- Fianna Gael or Fianna Foyle.
00:37:32.040And that division will go on for a very, very, very long time indeed.
00:38:13.940And also the height, Jonathan Haidt's moral foundations, and the finding was that there's these five moral foundations, and there's a degree to which right-wing people have all five of them.
00:38:26.280And there's a degree to which the left only have basically two of them.
00:38:29.640So they're not very strong in disgust, and they're not very strong in loyalty, whereas-
00:38:35.920They're probably not strong in disgust.
00:38:44.220But just to look at what they're- what the world they're birthing, I mean, the best argument against it is you just look at it, and you're like, this is stupid and gross and insane.
00:39:04.920I mean, this social epistates is the application model of my colleague on mutational load and what that leads to, and also Putnam and the research by Tatu Vavnen on what happens if you have a multicultural society.
00:39:20.080Well, okay, but will this, because this is a countervailing force, is that we've become- we're comfortable.
00:39:32.380There hasn't been an economic breakdown.
00:39:34.440Since 2006, I actually believe, in America, there are no new high-paying jobs.
00:39:40.980Like, the economy, the jobs that are being created under the greatest economy in our history are retail and bartending and things like that.
00:39:49.460It is not the middle-class version of this.
00:39:52.780But people are still ultimately content.
00:39:56.140They can purchase enough on their credit card.
00:39:58.840They can get- they can pay $9.99 to get Netflix and watch it all day.
00:40:04.360People- and again, I think the just obesity epidemic and other things around that are indications of this.
00:40:12.920It's hard for me to imagine there being a civil war.
00:40:17.300When I see boomer tweets about, like, you know, oh, if Trump's impeached, we're going to all rise up and take over the government.
00:40:25.420I just- I can only roll my eyes at some level.
00:40:28.100And then the other aspect of this is the fact that in, say, the American Civil War, you had actual ideologues who were prominent in government who, whatever their failings might be, could articulate what this was about.
00:40:48.240This was about perpetuating a slave system.
00:40:52.200This civil war was actually about race and not about all these, you know, the tariffs or whatever these libertarians want to tell us.
00:40:59.600No, this was actually about maintaining our order.
00:41:02.980Whereas the Republican Party, it's goofy at best.
00:41:08.520And with Donald Trump, whereas all that- that Donald Trump of 2015 and 2016, you know, retweeting Mussolini quotes and saying they're all going back home and, you know, I want Americans to dream and all this kind of stuff.
00:41:21.320This has been wiped away for this, like, half-remembered dream of Thatcherism or Reaganism, where, look at the- it's amazing, the Dow Jones went up again.
00:41:35.420Or we're going to literally, at this point, he's doing rallies where he's talking about bringing back the old light bulbs and toilets and dishwashers.
00:41:43.100How these- we're going to throw out those EPA regulations, your toilet is just going to basically create a tsunami in there, and your dishes will be washed in 30 seconds with this nuclear blast that's going to occur, you know, if our- Greta Thunberg be damned.
00:42:00.560And it's like- so what I'm saying is that we have this hatred and distrust that's undeniable, but it's being articulated in the stupidest possible manner.
00:42:12.960It's being articulated among people posting memes on Facebook or complaining about dishwashers.
00:42:21.080And it just doesn't strike me as this is going to actually lead to violence and civil war.
00:42:26.260I think America's going to go out with a whimper and not a bang.
00:42:29.460I don't think there's going to be a new civil war.
00:42:31.100I think there's going to be a meme war or something like that.
00:42:34.320Yes, I don't think it would be a civil war of the intensity of the last one, no.
00:42:40.820I wouldn't be at all- more like the fall of Rome.
00:42:43.940I wouldn't be surprised if people were less able to articulate things because, as my research, my colleagues' research has shown, we're becoming less intelligent.
00:42:51.280And the less intelligent you are, the less good you are at articulating things.
00:42:53.840I mean, you have all kinds of civil wars in African tribal societies.
00:42:57.320They're not intelligent enough to articulate what they're fighting about.
00:43:00.280What they're fighting about is their genetic interests and the genetic interests of their group.
00:43:05.140They don't articulate like that at all.
00:43:08.060And so you wouldn't expect us to be as good at articulating what's going on as Enoch Powell was, and certainly not, of people of the generation of the Civil War,
00:43:16.200which was the most intelligent generation the world has ever seen, as far as we can work out.
00:43:19.880So I'm not surprised that it's inarticulate.
00:43:23.320I think the fact that the level of comfort is so high would mean that this would be a slow – we're going to see a slow decline and a slow, low-level sort of civil war, put it like that,
00:43:34.620rather than a complete breakdown, until things get worse and worse and worse and worse and worse,
00:43:39.960until you can't rely on things you used to be able to rely on, like, electricity.
00:43:43.940Even the other day, wasn't there some bungled attempt to send a rocket to the space station?
00:44:03.940And you get what's happening in India, by the way, at the moment now, which is basically a nationalist government that's taking over the largest – or the second largest state in the world.
00:44:12.560Well, so that would be more how I would see it, yes, than a complete breakdown of civil war, because the level of comfort, as you say, is that people have things – people have something to lose.
00:44:24.280Whereas in the American Civil War, a lot of people had nothing to lose.
00:44:26.980And also in the American Civil War –
00:44:28.600Where they were willing to wager something.
00:44:30.620Yeah, you were only a generation after the industrialization.
00:44:36.560And so these people have been subject to selection, so they would have been strongly grouped, selected, and thus for them to lay down their lives in a way which is – in big numbers – in a way that is – what was it, 10% of the population that was killed?
00:45:08.320Yeah, I don't really like this narrative that a lot of people have, especially in the right, that, like, there's going to be some big collapse that's just going to have this big paradigm shift overnight.
00:45:17.880You know, the libertarians, like, oh, the fiat currency is finally going to – we're finally going to prove that fiat currency isn't real and everything's going to collapse.
00:45:26.720Or, you know, the more nationalist types that there's going to be a race for any day.
00:45:30.820And it's like it's still – it's still – it's still going to be trapped in this sort of optimistic paradigm where there's progress and then there's a collapse.
00:45:37.660Whereas, really, like, we're in the decline.
00:45:40.540I mean, if you want to know what the decline looks like, I mean, there was a study out the other day that – I know you were – I've been dying to attack you all weekend for defending Thatcher.
00:45:50.620But nine of the ten poorest regions in North Europe are in the UK.
00:45:56.200And the richest region of Europe is also in the UK, which is the city of London.
00:46:00.680So it is this, like, slow de-industrialization.
00:46:03.760You know, in the U.S., everything's getting focused in Silicon Valley and Wall Street.
00:46:07.180You know, you have these areas of Manhattan that are, like, you know, real first world, virtually no crime.
00:46:13.940And then on the other side of the city, you have places that are, like, you know, slums in Africa.
00:46:21.740The nation-state is completely losing all power to even control any of this because with things becoming so international now, it's like, you know, you get this thing.
00:46:31.000Well, if you try to raise taxes, corporations are just going to leave.
00:46:33.840So capital isn't beholden at all to nation-states now.
00:46:38.520And nations are in this weird position of having to sort of undercut each other to try and feed off the scraps of these international organizations that are just not beholden to the values of whatever nation-state they're in now.
00:46:50.680And at the same time, that gives them such power that when they do set up shop in a nation, because they have to plan long-term for their own business success, they end up making decisions that have massive social effects and shape the sort of social superstructure of whatever nation they're in.
00:47:10.680And that's now become an international rather than national.
00:47:13.740So it's affecting the sort of international ethic by a few countries that are sort of struggling away outside of that.
00:47:20.920So, I mean, yeah, the idea that there's going to be some big collapse, I mean, I don't really buy it.
00:47:24.760The system has proven itself to be so sort of anti-fragile, the way it just absorbs these shocks.
00:47:29.940I would note, though, that, yeah, in general, my feeling would be that, based on the studies I've read, that it would just be we're in the winter of civilization and it will be a slow death.
00:48:33.620So one of the things that you get is an area and foreigners start moving in.
00:48:36.700And once foreigners make up about 30 percent of the population of that area, then you get a tipping point.
00:48:41.520And the people who aren't foreign will start to leave relatively quickly, which was these perceptual abilities to kind of smell the air and understand correctly what's going to happen.
00:48:51.940And this can lead to certain things happening quite fast.
00:48:57.240I think 2008, 2009 was certainly a turning point.
00:49:00.540And in a way, the last decade since then has been a turning point.
00:49:05.460I mean, we've never we had a stock market crash and we've had a stock market bonanza recently, but there's never been an actual recovery and there's never actually been optimism.
00:49:18.140That kind of heady, positive social mood optimism that you would associate with, say, the end of the 1990s or the housing bubble era in the first seven years of the 2000s or so.
00:49:30.340And so we've had this just kind of fake economy where everyone is unhappy.
00:49:37.600I think there's actually been a markedly decline in optimism about technology, which is interesting, which I definitely did not see in, say, the late 90s.
00:50:08.940And we kind of enter a new world of politics afterwards.
00:50:11.440So I I think we've seen some clear turning points already that that really are perceived as such in the decline of of America.
00:50:20.960I mean, the Iraq war, obviously, as well.
00:50:23.820These declines have happened. These declines have happened before many times.
00:50:27.180I mean, they've happened in the ancient world. It happened by biblical time.
00:50:29.680They've watched society's rise and fall and they've noticed what happened.
00:50:33.480And that is that the society becomes wealthy and people stop having children for whatever reason.
00:50:38.940We're not quite sure why something to do with high intelligence and rationalizing everything or something to do with these studies where you are primed.
00:50:46.400Although there's a lot of criticism in psychology of this priming thing with ideas of being wealthy and it reduces your desire to have children.
00:50:54.080And then when it's the rich that stop having children, the rich more intelligent, the society goes into the decline.
00:50:59.300And that comes together with the questioning of religiousness that is part of is on the decline.
00:51:05.380The questioning of patriarchy and gender structures, all of these things, sexual licentiousness.
00:51:12.060All of these things will come together when the society goes into decline.
00:51:57.780And so we don't have any aliens or time travelers because the society is civilizations to be never got far enough at the same time that another civilization has got far enough to be able to contact each other.
00:52:12.840I would I would also add another aspect to this is, you know, Dugan has has talked about these great ideologies of the 20th century, liberalism being the first one and then communism and then fascism as a kind of reaction against communism.
00:52:32.000And in its own certain way, a degree of defending liberalism and I would, you know, put capitalism along with liberalism.
00:52:40.000But these were all you could say part of a fossil fuel age and they were an age in which every ideology offered a higher standing of living to those who adhered to it.
00:52:53.540There was no real traditionalist ideology that said, you know, vote for me and you'll be sent back into peasant drudgery.
00:53:03.640We're going to take away your television and your upward mobility and but give you the, you know, hard certitude of Catholicism or whatever.
00:53:14.840It all these ideologies that have actually worked have offered a higher standard of living and all of that has been possible.
00:53:23.600Not not simply because of the Industrial Revolution, although that certainly played a part, but because of the age of fossil fuels and that is a limited age.
00:53:33.940And, you know, it might, you know, peak oil might be overdone, but that doesn't mean that it is going to last forever.
00:53:41.140And I think someone like Greta Thunberg is kind of ridiculous as she is and worthy of criticism as she is.
00:53:50.360She she kind of is a kind of childlike Cassandra announcing a hard truth.
00:53:59.300I don't know how the world I don't know if humans, the current crop of humans are mentally prepared for declining living standards or that dream of big money and having it all is just taken away from them.
00:55:27.980That would once medicine starts to fall apart.
00:55:31.380And and that would then you'll that would be something that would happen conceivably quite fast, relatively quickly over a matter of a decade.
00:55:38.180Perhaps that there would be this collapse once once civilization has gone backwards so much that it couldn't sustain a complex medical system.
00:55:50.640Yeah, I was just going to say, you know what I find interesting, though, is even like on the left now and liberals, they all have this idea like everything's going to, you know, in 2050, sea levels rise.
00:56:01.540You know, we're all going to pay for our sins, the environment, whatever.
00:56:03.840But then on the on the right, there's also this idea that even if like they'll reject climate change or whatever, they think there's going to be a huge collapse in the next 20 years.
00:56:34.500Like, is that is this like people's guilt at the nature of the system or is it just like to feel the decline in standards?
00:56:41.420And I think people people people can look around and they can understand they can on a sort of wisdom of crowds and they can kind of understand what's happening.
00:56:49.420And what religion tends to do is it tends to take that which is evolutionarily adaptive and kind of make it into the will of God.
00:56:56.140And so under Darwinian conditions, if it would be the kind of religion that was adopted, that became popular in the 1600s was Puritanism and anti-witch hysteria as well.
00:57:08.760Those two things. And those two things would presumably have been adaptive and they would have been adaptive in a context in which there were too many.
00:57:16.940So the witch hysteria is a B, there's strong group selection and lots of wars.
00:57:22.060C, living standards are collapsing because the population is too high.
00:57:25.340Population is too high within countries and within Europe.
00:57:28.020So you get wars between European countries.
00:57:31.260Religious groups get selected for over non-religious groups because ethnocentric groups get selected for and that current being religious.
00:57:36.300And so therefore you get this apocalyptic kind of religion where the other people are absolutely evil and they have to be destroyed.
00:57:43.160Protestant v. Catholic or whatever it is put as in religious terms.
00:57:47.460But you have similar things, 100 years war, violent apocalyptic period of time.
00:57:52.120And the witches were basically poor people that were sponges off the society, sort of nasty old people that nobody liked, undermined group coherence.
00:58:01.380And it's just like weirdos with peculiar anti-patriarchal and that's anti-religious ideas.
00:58:07.240So I would say there was a period like that then and there was civil war and there have been other periods like it as well.
00:58:12.980Around that time of the plague, of course, then apocalyptic, whatever going on there.
00:58:18.180And you had similar things at the fall of Rome.
00:58:20.480You had the embracing of these mystery cults and all this sort of thing.
00:58:23.860And Christianity, which could be argued as the ultimate apocalyptic cult.
00:58:28.120So when things are in decline, this tends to happen.
00:58:32.860And even with Judaism, when you have the decline of Judah, you have this sort of thing.
00:58:37.880So it's just a mark of a civilization in decline.
00:58:41.680I actually think that there will be strong religious revivals and that the turn of the century new atheism of Dawkins and company,
00:58:52.600I think was actually kind of a head fake before a real strong revival of Christianity.
00:59:01.340I think that Christianity arose in the age of anxiety.
00:59:04.780Now, what Christianity became and how it evolved is something we can discuss.
00:59:08.900But yes, that period in the decline of Rome is known as the age of anxiety.
00:59:16.360And it unsurprisingly was ultimately dominated by an apocalyptic cult, which Christianity is fundamentally and was, I think, primarily at that point.
01:00:34.340It was the same middle class virtue signaling that you see in the apocalyptic cult of Extinction Rebellion or interrelated trends was also Christianity.
01:00:48.200It was, as I said, the dregs of the Roman Empire.
01:02:08.520I mean, she's the ultimate expression of postmodern capitalism.
01:02:12.540But they basically present themselves as broken and needing this this big other that's going to kind of subsume them and save them.
01:02:25.360They kind of accept the fact that they're in a broken world.
01:02:28.740And I think oftentimes the figure of Christianity is the fool.
01:02:33.820Christianity is heroes are not the heroes of other religions like the good ones in which you it's your God is an expression of your power and your ability to dominate.
01:02:47.600Your God is an expression of your healing of your inner brokenness and this mixture of rap, of this kind of gospel stuff, of this, you know, I'm I'm terrible, but I'm going to find some truth out there.
01:03:03.580I think actually is genuinely appealing to postmodern Americans.
01:03:08.540And so I guess my longer term prediction is is in this age of anxiety, age of delitimization of existing institutions, of the existing order, this age of of a chaotic breakdown.
01:03:20.760I think if anything can bring these people together, it is something like Christianity, but it's going to be a primitive Christianity.
01:03:29.180It's not going to be the Christianity that, you know, trad Catholics love where they, you know, they'll post, you know, images of kings and princes and castles on Facebook or whatever and talk about how this is the Christianity.
01:03:41.380It's going to be this real Christianity, the Christianity, the Christianity of its very origins.
01:03:47.100The only Christianity, the only Christianity form that hasn't cucked really is orthodoxy.
01:03:52.180Right. I totally agree. I certainly have sympathies for that, but I don't think that's going to be the dominant form of Christianity.
01:04:01.140Also, there is this kind of fetishization of the East in Western culture.
01:04:06.060I mean, even if you go back to Rome, the mystery cults and whatever, it's always from the East and the wise men came from the East.
01:04:16.800So, so, so, um, I don't know, if it were to be a form of Christianity of Christian revival, then one suspects it would be something like, like that.
01:04:26.160I don't think it would be orthodoxy and I say that I would love that to be the outcome, but I don't think that's going to be out there.
01:04:33.920So what do you think it would be if there was a Christian revival?
01:04:38.860Orthodox Christianity is the third Rome. It's connected. It has national churches. It's not going to take, um, I think it's going to be global and individualistic, which is the ultimate, you know, this is the innovation of Judeo-Christianity.
01:05:06.920But, uh, like, that's interesting what you're saying about Kanye as well, because, yeah, like, when I think about it, like, a lot of, I don't recognize, like, anything in the top 50 charts now, but it's, like, it's full of these, like, Latino women that sing auto-tuned songs and shake their ass.
01:05:23.800But there is this growth of, like, there's this weird trend of, like, like, are you, do you know who Billie Eilish is?
01:05:30.160I know, I know about her. I don't really, I've never listened to one of her albums.
01:05:33.400Yeah, there's this weird trend of, like, 17, 18-year-old singers that they're, like, they portray themselves as really authentic, and she gives interviews where she's like, oh, I'm so depressed.
01:05:43.740I'm like, what's your favorite color? Oh, it's black. And, like, they're all so broken.
01:05:47.740And it's, like, you're 18, and you've been signed to a record deal since you were 16, and, like, you're from an, yeah, and you're from an upper-middle-class background.
01:05:56.240It's, like, you grew up in a white suburb, like, well, what has you broken?
01:06:00.460It's weird. It seems to really appeal, it seems to be appealing to the Zoomer generation.
01:06:06.480But another thing I thought was surprising was that this return to religiosity, that a lot of people are returning to sort of trad Catholicism,
01:06:15.260because it seems like trad Catholicism sort of asks too much of people.
01:06:19.640I thought it would be much more kind of a New Age spirituality, where it's all about realizing yourself,
01:06:25.820and it's this very, like, bastardized, like, hyper-real version of Eastern traditions,
01:06:30.500where it's, like, positive thinking and feel-good or whatever.
01:06:33.380So I am surprised if it's taken form of Catholicism.