← History 102 with WhatifAltHist's Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett
History 102 with WhatifAltHist's Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett
Explaining Protestantism's History
02:24:50
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- [00:02]
A
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Welcome to History 102, where YouTube creator Whatifalth hist Redyard lynch and Austin Padgett dive into critical moments in history and tease out patterns to help us predict the future. Let's jump right in. Hi everybody. Welcome to a new episode of History 102. And today's episode is on the history of Protestantism with me, Rudyard lynch and and our co host Austin Padgett.
- [01:03]
A
Excellent. Very fun episode for today. We love the 1600s, one of our favorite and a lot of people died, but a lot of people also survived that century. So we got a shirt according to some audience comments with the with the words I survived the age of the last men. So if you want to buy that, go to the merch store. It should be in the description.
- [01:28]
B
Thanks for the shout out. I'm going to buy that shirt today because I hope to survive the age of the last men. And when you look at the history of Protestantism, it becomes very obvious that our theory of history has not been fair to Christianity. Where Protestantism has very clearly changed the world on a scale that's so vast it's hard to even quantify. Where Protestantism has in many ways built the modern world and Protestantism has been super huge, historically decisive practically on every single continent of the world and the great powers of the last few centuries were predominantly Protestant countries. And I don't think that's entirely a coincidence. Where Protestantism was super influential in the formation of a variety of things in Max Weber's famous book on the Protestant or the Calvinist work ethic in the Calvinists are a sub variety of Protestant and the rise of capitalism or the industrial revolution and the Protestant countries were the spear tip of scientific and technological and and military and political innovation. Where if you were to map the Protestant countries from the 17th century onwards and this video is going to cover the period from the start of the 17th century until the 21st century. So it's 500 years of Protestantism or 400. And what you find is it's really remarkable that no one thinks about this where if I because I hang out in historian circles and among conservatives, a majority of whom are Christian. But very few people talk about. This is the history of Calvinism. This is why America had the certain Protestant sects it did. This is how the History of Germany vs Britain diverged according to Protestantism and what varieties they picked. But these differences matter a lot. And if you were to go back to the life of the average person over most of North European and its diaspora's histories until quite recently, Protestantism would be the most important part of their identity. And this is something that we leave out in a lot of studies of the past, of how important religion was to most people's lives into the start of the 20th century, where pre World War I, these different Protestant churches had dogmas and doctrinal differences which they saw as important and were the most foundational part of that person's identity, often more so than what nation they were. I was thinking today about how I made a term called MAP or the modern academic. Modern academic. Damn, I forget the other two. The modern academic progressive and then progressive professional paradigm or something like that. I have the acronym somewhere. I am fallible. But. But the MAP paradigm for modernity, it's really stark. And it's easy to forget that our current ruling classes raison d' etre and their reason for power is they say that they're crushing the WASP white male oligarchy. But we in fact would not have a WASP male oligarchy because if we did, we would know about these different sects of Protestantism because that would be the ruling ideology if the wasps were in charge of. And it's remarkable because it shows how much modernity won, that Protestantism in many ways built the modern world. But modernity has gained such a dominance that we don't even really know or think about Protestantism. And if you were to, there's this automatic reaction of oh, that's nerdy, that's cringe, that's old fashioned. But that reaction being so deep means that modernity has won a staggering cultural victory.
- [05:37]
A
It's funny, we spend all this time pouring over the Enlightenment philosophers and categorizing ourselves in different camps while ignoring the various religious sectarian differences that actually formed much more of the value basis that impacts the political trends that we're seeing. And even with the Northeast, like with the WASPS and everything, you could say the, the Puritans ended up winning out control of the government. But also it's nuanced in that they're not necessarily responsible for all the successes of Protestantism because they want out over the government. In a specific period of time around the Progressive Era. So it's like very nuanced and maybe you even disagree with that perspective, but we're not even analyzing that landscape at all to be able to have a thought on it.
- [06:35]
B
Yeah, those are very good points. And they bring up a few things to my mind, one of which is that Protestantism its cultural, these religious identities mattered much later than we think. And it's easy to forget how much our cultural frame was whitewashed by just the 21st century where until the 1990s and the IRA were the bloodiest terrorist group in history. And they were the Catholics attacking the Scots Irish, North Irish. And this was a multi decade war between two white British populations that ended in the 1990s. Or my father's side of the family is Catholic and my mom's side is Protestant. And it was controversial where both sides of the family were not happy when they married in the 90s because there was still real Protestant Catholic differences. When I grew up in Pennsylvania, people would make Protestant versus Catholic jokes. It was still seen as this place of antipathy because where I grew up most people went to church. And so there was this ideal of these are actual still religious identities and they fused along ethnic lines. If someone has an Italian last name, this was until 10 years ago because wokeness really shuffled up the religious folks fabric where a lot of Anglos converted to Catholicism because the mainline Protestant churches, and I'm going to talk about the mainline Protestant churches, they got too sanitized. So a lot of English people and English Americans converted to Catholicism because they kept more of the sort of historic spiritual depth, the normie Protestants. And at the same time you see a lot of people converting to Orthodoxy or paganism or whatever because the current society is fracturing the religious landscape. But for a while, if were of Italian ancestry or Gaelic Irish ancestry, you would be Catholic. And if you were English or North German or Scandinavian, you would be Protestant. So these things, these religious distinctions became ethnic singles signals for a long time. And you can see with a lot of these historic thinkers that when we look at the historic trajectory that gets us to the present, you've seen a radical stripping down of historic context where if you read books from the mid to early 20th century, they treat the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment as important because their idea was these were the creating variables for Western civilization. But then post 20th century modernity became the dominant narrative. And modernity need to develop a new historic narrative to justify their power. And they did so by using history as Little as possible. Because one of the tenets of the modernist religion is that you shouldn't use history to justify your current power. But when the current educational, academic system tries to look back into history to find people to justify its base of power, they do so with isolated intellectuals in the early modern period and then radically misunderstand what they actually meant when.
- [10:00]
A
Where.
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B
If you look at thinkers like Descartes, who was a hardcore Catholic, Isaac Newton was super into the Hermetica, same thing as Galileo and Bruno. And if you were to actually study a lot of these thinkers, they would have worldviews that we would consider to be incredibly premodern that got these conclusions that were useful for modernity. And it's not until the Enlightenment that that you see atheism and agnosticism develop as a coherent philosophy in the modernist worldview pulls almost entirely from the French Enlightenment. So it's a very small sampling of history. But if you zoom out even more, you find that these agnostic modernist thinkers were operating in frames that were highly culturally Christian. And that was. And we forget that because it was a fish and water moment where when you read Voltaire, a lot of people think Voltaire is sort of boring because all of the things he talked about were battles that were so well won that it comes across as banal. Because Voltaire believed in freedom of speech and not having titles of nobility or clerical hierarchies. And that was a battle that was won so much that those takes don't seem edgy anymore. And the reason that Voltaire was seen as a genius in an intellectual rock star of the 18th century world was all Europeans lived in an environment that was still universally Christian through the 18th century. And so these Enlightenment thinkers, they created these aristocratic bubbles of atheism and agnosticism, while the peasants and most people still had Christianity as their predominant identity. And when Nietzsche was talking about the death of God in the late 19th century, it's easy for us to look at him and not realize how brilliant it was. Because we can look at Nietzsche's writing in the 1880s. That's a generation away from World War I. In World War I is the really obvious point where the reality that we currently live in just punched Europe in the face. But. But if you were to live at Nietzsche's time, Christianity was still ubiquitous enough that Nietzsche calling for the death of God, Nietzsche saying that the death of God had already occurred, was considered madness. Because into the late 19th century, even academic philosophers were arguing from a Christian moral frame. It was a fairly standard regime universal view. Until World War I, that the Trinity of Christianity, science and liberalism was the future. Then World War I punctured that. So to have someone like Nietzsche call that out 30 years earlier was incredibly difficult. And to have some empathy for that historic time period. We are talking in 2025. If you were to send my podcast to the 1990s, people would think I was an utterly deranged, reactionary schizophrenic. And the thing is, the society of the 1990s was incorrect, and I feel comfortable saying that. But if you were to show them what would occur 30 years in the future, they would be horrified. And this is why I tell people to hold the metal stick and breathe. You can't take what your era of history says seriously, so you need to zoom out and allow yourself to take a deep breath and view these things with a greater degree of historic objectivity.
- [13:39]
A
Right. So I was going to say, so it seems like what Nisha Nietzsche predicted was the death of God trickling down from the elites. But what you're saying is that the institutions didn't even kind of, or even a lot of the elites didn't maybe share the values that he was identifying in the French philosophers that he thought would eventually take over.
- [14:00]
B
We sometimes project the way our society works onto the that time period. And so there was no singular elite back then where each country in Europe had different views, where a lot of Catholic Europe went atheist before Protestant Europe did. And so in Britain, in Germany, you had these elite populations that had made the decision, we want to stay being Christian. Infuse that with Darwinism. And something we're going to talk about later is that the Enlightenment was the thing that critically wounded Catholicism, and Darwinism did that for Protestantism. So Protestantism was able to maintain strong social dynamic force a century later than Catholicism was in Europe. And so Protestantism was this strong elite force through the end of the 19th century, which is why muscular Christianity was a big thing in both Victoria and Britain. And in. Or actually it was muscular Christianity, which is when you think of the Jesus lifting culture, it's the same deal as that. And that was big across the Protestant countries. And that was the attempt to reconcile the manly colonial warrior culture with Christianity, where Teddy Roosevelt is the most obvious embodiment of muscular Christianity. And so the elites were Christian, but they had complex views. And there were also sub elites. So the Marxists and the socialists were arising into power in every Western country, had to make some sort of negotiation with the socialists. And that dragged the Overton Window several standard deviations. Over because the socialists had a worldview that was a rejection of everyone else. So letting them into the frame basically shattered it. And then before the socialists, you had a complex Overton window of. A lot of the nobility were sort of. They, their worldview was predominantly based off the Greco Roman classics and warrior manly culture. And that was something that was generally understood that a lot of the nobility weren't super good Christians, but they maintained the society's social military functioning and they supported the Christian society in general. You had other people who were deists where they believed in a scientific God that didn't operate through miracles. You had people like Carlisle, who was a hermetic who believed in the Christian God, but he didn't believe in Christian dogma. So when you're looking at these elite cultures, you have to remember these were societies that had genuine freedom of speech, unlike today where with highly divided elites. And so if you were to go to France or even France had its own culture wars through the 19th and early 20th centuries between the right and the left, and the left eventually won, but you had a wide variety of subtle complex views which socialism and the map paradigm crushed.
- [17:07]
A
Right. So we have the basic concept of how science developed out of theological debate. And then you have the 1600s. And one of the reasons why it's so important is because it's a world where you have your, your one hand in each, in the future and the past. Right. You can actually connect and integrate that like, like Newton. So that's why it's a valuable place to look. And you could almost say that this 1800s masculinity or teddy Roosevelt is a low resolution attempt to grab something from the past and maintain that integration. But it was only like allowed on a, on a materialist lens of like strength or something.
- [17:49]
B
Yeah.
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A
It wasn't as deep as an integration as someone like Newton had between the past and the present.
- [17:56]
B
Yes. Over the course of the 19th century, due to the Industrial Revolution, you saw a mechanization of people's worldview because as people's daily lives became more industrial and less personal, it creeped into so much of people's lives that they forgot how to use the older human spiritual frame where people worked in factories. They, the science was based around these industrial principles because the science was built around how you could exploit or get certain ends as easily as possible. And a lot of modern management structure is based off the idea that. How do I articulate this? So in a centralized world where you have a handful of TV stations that moderate the entire planet's views. If those TV stations pick an overtly biased view, they will lose face trying to appeal to all of these audiences. So they have to appear scientifically objective and then push their interests under it. And that, that's not Protestantism, but it is trying to articulate how through the shift in the social structure itself, you left this religious view and after it had already occurred, people didn't know how to reintegrate it. So there was an elite attempt to reintegrate the older cultures at the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries that was thrashed by World War I. And then after the death of God, there was a genuine shame in doing this. So people tried to paper over that Christianity had built this world for them.
- [19:46]
A
And why they try and paper, paper it over. Oh, because there was a shame in, in doing what they were doing because it was unchristian. So they, this is, had to pretend
- [19:56]
B
this is a real subconscious social taboo for the West. But most people in the Western world subconsciously think that Christianity is the correct value code. And they think that on a deep, subconscious, biological level. And you know that because their moral code is the rejection of Christianity and trying to do its opposite. If they were genuinely something new, they would have picked out a different moral access like Nietzsche and warrior morality or Asian, Asian detachment or, I don't know, something like really weird and scientific. But our current moral code is the attempt to reject Christianity by saying stuff where our current moral code is we just take the Christian virtues and then invert them and then breaking those Christian virtues is good. And what that means subconsciously is the people involved are implicitly acknowledging that Christianity is morally superior to them because through rebelling against Christianity, they're acknowledging that Christianity is the central moral axis of their worldview.
- [21:03]
A
Right. Indifference would be the true death of God. And I was going to mention the same thing about the inversion of how it fits perfectly. Because they're like, hate is the inversion of love. And it's the same thing as, like with a parent, like they're putting Christianity in the position of their parent, the thing that makes them crazy if it goes wrong, where they either like they hate them because they care, it's like a loss of something that they actually value.
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I was going to say they crave Daddy Jesus. And then I had to consider whether or not that was an appropriate thing to say.
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A
Right. That would have got to your curious guilt.
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B
Yeah. So let's start with the 17th century. And the reason I'm doing that is the Protestant Reformation video set out the framework for these different Sects of Protestantism. And so I'm going to start with explaining the map of Protestant Europe in the year 1600. And I'm always glad when we make these videos where there's a previous one that sets up the historic context, because explaining how these things start is always more difficult than getting the continuity down, because we don't have to explain John Calvin or Martin Luther or Zwingli. And Europe was ravaged by centuries of religious wars where the map was messy and the conversion to Protestantism was in practically every case done by elites. Where the first generation of Protestants were about 10% of the population were which once the elites converted, everyone else beneath them did as well. And so that's what occurred in England, which was the greatest of the Protestant countries, and it was the only major one. And England was predominantly Anglican. And the Anglicans had to evolve into something that they were not when they started, because when these Protestant sects first arrived, they had the external threat of Catholicism to unify them. But when they actually had to establish their structures, they realized that they had these other sects of Protestantism. And because religion was the dominant carrying system of the society, people routed their social descent through religion in the same way they do through politics. Now, where politics now is a surrogate for class issues, for sexual issues, for ethnic issues. And religion, was that for their society? Because religion was the predominant operating system, because it was a very personal society between kings and nobility and villagers cooperating, where in highly personal societies, religion is the shared operating system for the relationships and ideologies are that for impersonal societies and.
- [24:06]
A
Yeah, yeah. So what do you make of the fact that the heat map between leftist and right movements, you know, how the left is very concentrated and then you go. And the right has a lot of intellectual diversity that seems to match pretty similarly distribution between the Catholics and then the Protestants.
- [24:23]
B
Yes, that's very true. And it's a sign of a movement on the rise where early leftism did the exact same thing, where they went through the cafe phase over the 19th century, where leftism was deeply amorphous. There was a time when classical liberals, fascists, nationalists, Marxists, socialists, delusional Christian messianics, all of these groups hung out the same cafes. Because the origin of the left in most ideological groups is just friends hanging out in the cafe. And that's how you form the political ideas. And then when a religion or ideology succeeds, it's due to an individual who establishes a coherent, logical framework that people can scale from. So Martin Luther and Calvin did that for Protestantism and the Protestants did that very early because Christianity taught people to operate by rules and logical consistency. Christianity is the vehicle through which logical consistency and rules were spread through the European mind. So they had been trained in this for centuries. So the first thing Protestants did was, was make a coherent system of rules. And then they used that against the Catholics and they fought each other over it. For the left as an ideological movement, they waited for generations because after Christianity weakened, the emphasis on logical consistency and rules had weakened. Where science and logic is dependent on Christianity in the Western world, because Christianity is the organic living worldview of the West. And so when you remove it, you also get rid of science and logical consistency on a broader social level. And individuals, individuals can combat this, but on a societal basis because Christianity creates a framework for stuff like how you relate to how you assess other people, how you assess for the sexes, how you assess for how time works, for how causation works, for equality and inequality. And so when Christianity died, our cultural operating system died with it. And so that meant that the left was operating in this weird spot of indeterminacy where it took two or three generations before Marx showed up to make the coherent worldview that was scalable.
- [26:48]
A
So when people say the truth doesn't work, or that's kind of like an Enlightenment rationalist illusion, which might be confusing things even more to bring that up, are, are they referring to maybe the fact that it's a landscape in which truth and logical constructions and connecting with like an ordered universe don't matter to people? Would those, would truth work better? Would logical arguments work better if more people had those values?
- [27:20]
B
Yes, logical consistency would work markedly better if we were an entirely Christian society, because everyone be forced to accept the principle that the world is logical. And this is. I was going to bring this up later, but there's a weird way that Americans frame religion versus everyone else. Where American concepts of Protestantism are heavily derivative of the early 20th century Protestant evangelical culture. And, and that culture was anti aristocratic and anti intellectual. It's the whole say thank you Jesus a thousand times in church, creationism is bad. And that culture was an overt rejection of modernity for practically every previous era of Christian history. Even in the depths of the Dark Ages, Christians believed very firmly in rationality, except for the very, the very first period when they did stuff like burn a lot of the Roman libraries and statues and that stuff. But once you get this, St. Augustine and Jerome and the fathers of the Church, these were people who saw no contradiction or not much between logical consistency and Christ and religion, which is why the fathers of the Church preserved the classical texts. And the classical texts from Greco Roman civilization that survived in Western civilization were by and large the ones the Church picked up. And so the Church were the people who kept that tradition alive. And a lot of the presuppositions that we have as Americans do not apply in Europe. For example, the obsession over sex as the predominant thing you will think about with Christianity, that's a 19th century thing. Beforehand, the Church didn't bat an eye at kings having concubines, the Church funded brothels. In the Middle Ages there was a tremendous amount of porn in 16th and 17th century Europe. And it wasn't treated as a huge moral crime by the churches at the time. And so obsession over sex creationism wasn't really seen as a real discourse thing until the 19th century, where the guy who calculated that the earth was made in 4000 BC, he was in the early 19th century in Britain. And he was part of this evangelical Protestant tradition because the Catholics in earlier Protestants saw this stuff more spiritually, symbolically, because their living universe was magical and mystical. So when they say God made the earth in seven days, they're perceiving it from the mind of God. A day in the mind of God is not a day in the mind of a human, because they were in a culture where mysticism was big enough that they hadn't gone that far ahead on sola scriptura. And Protestants by and large are sola scriptura or just the Bible. And that was a way to combat the Catholic Church's excesses and sort of developing new various schemes that were often corrupt that caused the Protestant Reformation. Once you get to the 19th and the 20th centuries, you have this weird modernist, autistic version of Christianity that doesn't make sense in earlier iterations of Christianity. And it's also profoundly philistine and anti aristocratic in the grand scheme of things. Evangelicals have kept America going as a society for decades, more than any other Western country. If you were to remove Protestant evangelicals, we would be Canada, we would be Australia, we would be deeply woke. And they have kept the States of America that are still happy, functional places, functional and morally good, past any other demographic. So when I'm criticizing evangelicals, I want the people listening to be aware that I am also aware of their positives. A lot of the very best human beings I have met in my life are Protestant evangelicals. However, it's also a very philistine culture where you go to a lot of their houses and they don't believe in having art. They don't believe in using logical abstractions to figure stuff out.
- [31:31]
A
And.
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B
And it's a very feminized culture in a certain way. And so a lot of the way that Americans perceive Christianity is very American or very Anglo Saxon focused. And if you were to go to continental Europe or Africa or these other places, you would find that Christianity or Protestantism is wildly different. And a lot of the things that we take for granted are specifically American.
- [31:58]
A
Right. And the rationalists get a bad rap because of the intersection of rationalism and materialism. Whereas, like, you're still connected to that Christian worldview of an ordered logical universe, but you can only apply it to things that you can see. Yeah, right. Which gets into the problem with not being able to deal with the unseen. So I think that kind of explains a lot of the nuance with that part. Yeah.
- [32:24]
B
I apologize for interrupting, but hit up against my top criticism of modern Christianity is firstly, it's a lot of modern Christianity is a way to disassociate so you can be a more efficient industrial cog. And you've also seen the removal of the spiritual divine element in exchange for basically autistic scripture focus where autistic scripture or dogma focus because the entire purpose of religion is God. And so if your church is preaching about the Word and not about God and not at the living, breathing spirit, I frankly think that's a scam. And it's. I think it's disgusting how much of Christianity has devolved into just sort of dogma and not about the Word of God or not about the sort of living breathing spirit. And also I find a lot of modern Christianity, they've totally removed the spiritual or the mystic elements, so it becomes a series of social rules and social controls. So you can be a more efficient industrial cog. And I find it gross that Christ was. He was a radical. And I don't mean that in a Marxist sense. Most people say Christ was a radical. He pushed for a society fully integrated with God and one that was not held down by the Pharisees or the money changers. And I find it gross when people push a religion as social rules and when you're socially edgy, they treat that as bad. The whole idea that being a bad Christian is being edgy. And I find that a lot.
- [34:03]
A
Right. If you remove the spiritual element, then people are going to be forced to go to Burning man to find it or something.
- [34:10]
B
Yeah.
- [34:11]
A
You have to integrate it into the positive value set.
- [34:16]
B
One of the things I dislike is that The God of the Old Testament, which is the God of the New Testament. It's the same God. It's just that Christ has a nicer interpretation of it. He's a terrifying monster. He utterly destroys people. He's deeply uncompromising, and he's like a thousand sons. I frankly find it gross that people have watered it down to this nice guy, this lukewarm bath that's here to make sure you feel loved and make you feel cared about.
- [34:45]
A
Isn't the Ethiopian version of Christ more hardcore? Not that it's like a version, but their. Their tradition of how they talk and think about Jesus, I feel like is more in line with that. I heard Mel Gibson talking about that in connection to his project, like that he maybe was taking an interpretation similar to that.
- [35:06]
B
The Ethiopians.
- [35:07]
A
Interesting.
- [35:07]
B
The Ethiopians have the Book of Enoch, which is a really schizo book that the Catholic Church wrote out and never entered the Western can. And a lot of UFO people say that the Book of Enoch has stuff that seems out of UFOs of talking to extraterrestrial entities and that stuff. I haven't dabbled that much in the Book of Enoch, but if you hang out in religious gizzo circles, it's quite common. People read it and say, oh my God, the Book of Enoch changed my life.
- [35:36]
A
Well, that's where the Holy Grail is, I think. So I'm getting something there.
- [35:39]
B
I am going to say this, though. I'm going to get back to the map of Protestantism. But the first generation of Protestants were deeply socially conservative Old Testament firebrand people. And what McNeil and Durant and these authors talk about is that the Renaissance in South Europe, which occurred a little bit before the Protestant Reformation in North Europe, the Renaissance pulled from the Greco Roman humanist Epicurean tradition. So it created these artistic masterpieces at the expense of decadence. What the Protestant Reformation did in North Europe was create a more socially conservative society. So attitudes towards life, towards sex, towards social duty, became more hard and more masculine. And Amaury Durian, of course, of the Protestant Reformation was a huge breakthrough in making Europe significantly more masculine. And when you look at the Protestant societies for centuries afterwards, these societies had higher social cohesion, they were more technologically advanced, had higher literacy, had really low corruption. And those rigid moral standards were what gave North Europe the social trust for the Industrial Revolution and science and colonialism. And we like to zoom out and not look at these variables. But the reason North Europe succeeded was because of these variables like its religion and its culture that allowed the modern world to flourish. And so Protestantism radically increased the level of social trust and the level of functioning. And so when we're looking at Protestantism today, we see it often as this liberal, highly scientific and detached religion. And that was the exact opposite of early Protestantism. Early Protestantism was like the Old Testament prophets, which were crazy people. If you look into the Old Testament, if these people live today, people would call them schizophrenics and insane and send them to mental wards, which is another thing I find gross that people don't see the disjoint between these are people in the Bible act. And this is how you're expected to act now. And so when you look at these early Protestants, they very firmly believed it. And I was reading Carlyle, who said when we. And he was writing in the early 19th century, when you belong in the early 19th century, read about John Calvin, who was the founder of the Scottish Calvinist. Sorry, John, either Calvin or Knox. No, he was talking about Calvin. Calvin was the founder of the Calvinist church. He was a Swiss Frenchman. And what Carlisle said is people 200 years ago looked at Calvin and thought, this guy's fucking nuts. What is this guy on? He believes this stuff too much. And Carlisle was talking about how the foundation of being a great man is sincerity. And that really struck to me. So ever since I read that, I've been trying to be as sincere as possible to have it compound in my character over time. Because what Carlisle said is that the degree of your sincerity is the degree to actually you actually want to attain your goals. And so when you have someone like John Calvin, he looks at the world, he thinks, I believe in Christ, I believe in this religion. I will do this as sincerely as possible as an attempt to just live my life. Because once you have struggled with being in the human condition enough, you realize you're going to die anyway, so you might as well go for it. And what Carlisle said is that if John Calvin were to hear that people 200 years later doubted him, he would just think that they were cucks and he would view them for contempt, for caring. And what Carlisle said is that in the 19th century, they did not have a frame of reference for people who believed what they said as much as John Calvin did. And he said, you have to remember you are in the world made by John Calvin, that you are living off his social capital. And there is a validity to that. But at the same time, the same thing could be said at the Taliban. And I mean, I think moral relativity is cringe where I Think the Calvinists are objectively better than the Taliban. Just look at the societies they produce. But there is this duality that religious totalitarianism is vastly, markedly better than political totalitarianism. Religious totalitarianism tends to actually make highly functional societies that enter golden ages. Well, political totalitarianism erases the society and. But I would not want to live in a Calvinist society. No chance. They were very rigid.
- [40:27]
A
Right. I mean we complained about the Calvinists all the time. And the early Calvinists versus what they morphed into versus political context. Like there's a lot of variation there. And with every sect there's like 10% that believes the opposite things. It's like it's gonna. It like if you're one sector or another, it might make you more likely to have political, certain political beliefs, but it's never 100%. And so in general it seems like a very action oriented philosophy. Like they're taking the, the expression of Jordan Peterson says seriously, where if you have a belief, then why don't you examine your actions to see if they're in line with that? Because if they aren't, then you don't actually have a belief. Like you're connecting, connecting beliefs fundamentally to action.
- [41:13]
B
You do not know how correct you are. Where this was Max Weber's entire thesis and Weber is one of the founders of the field of anthropology and he writes, Weber writes about a lot of topics. He's very impressive. And one of them was the Protestant or the Calvinist work ethic and the foundation of capitalism. And something I love to say is when Weber was writing this in late 19th century, he was looking at the Calvinist countries like the Dutch or the American north or the Scots or parts of England. And he said these countries are the industrialized ones and they industrialized from capitalism because Calvinism had the mechanism that you were describing. And he wrote it at the time because he said Germans were universally seen as more laid back and chill than the Anglo Saxons. So Germans would look at the Anglo Saxons and think how were you guys so hardworking and disciplined and organized? Because for the Germans, the Prussian total state had not yet used the school system in the military to make them the disciplined crazy ones.
- [42:23]
A
Which is interesting because it's a very, that's a very different source of discipline. And that's also very like culturally synonymous with Germany today.
- [42:32]
B
Yes. And that's something German authors or that you're like Hayek or Jung would say as well. Then you could see it sneak into Nietzsche's work where he saw that transition in action and didn't like it. And the thing with the Calvinists, and I've read, I have a fairly good comprehension of the inner psychology of early modern Calvinism from a combination of a bunch of authors. David Hackett Fisher, the Albion Seed guy, writes about what life was like for the New England Calvinists and the settlement of places like Massachusetts. And it's interesting that they have psychology, like a lot of zoomers, where they would have periodic anxiety attacks about not reaching heaven and they would have these sort of struggle sessions where they'd all talk about how the other people in their group, the other people in their group are constantly not doing enough. And I look at this and I find it very alien because this is the opposite of the culture that I'm from. Where my friend, this is a tangent, but it's an important one. Our friend Dan McKinley splits America into different psychological drives. So the former Calvinists have the drive that he calls busyness. Where I look at these people's. You look at these people's schedules, and they're constantly doing stuff and they're organizing and they're scheduling events, and it just. It makes me stressed just to look at their lives. But it fulfills a fundamental psychological need for them. They need to be busy and they need to be organized. And you and I are part of Dan McKinley's sovereignty drive that you see in the Midwest or the south. That rather than being busy and organized, your motivation is, I want to have lots of land. I want to have a place where my friends and family can exist free, independent from the society. I want to have an independent schedule where I can do what I want at what time. And the drive of sovereignty versus busyness is a huge division inside all of American history. And the third one that I invented is the therapy wellness culture that predominates in the West Coast.
- [44:33]
A
And where did that stem out of? Is that like a new one? Or can you also draw connections to the 1600s?
- [44:38]
B
The therapy, wellness culture is a 20th century thing. It stems from Freud. And I read an interesting book by Theodore Dalrymple where he argues that psychology was a net negative. And of course, I don't agree. You'll see me psychoanalyze everything. I love psychology. But he makes a pretty valid argument that I am pulling from Jungian psychology or emdr, where the psychology that I focus on is less than 10% of applied psychology. And then the 90% he's talking about is Freudianism. It pulls on the left. Freudianism is the attempt to make Rousseauian leftism An applied religion because Rousseau and the philosophers of the left say that human nature is innately good. You just need to let go of stress and that stuff. And that was an abstract idea. And what Freud did was make these priests of that called therapists. And then the therapists. Therapists assess your moral level in health based on how much you follow the leftist, the leftist code. And that's not all therapists. I've spoken very positively about emdr and the thing with the Freudian code is it's the opposite of the Jungian because the Jungian psychology stems from the hermetica that you need to conquer chaos and integrate it into yourself to grow. Where the effective psychologies like EMDR or Jung operate under the principle of this is an actual problem in your life, this is how you fix it. This is what it looks like when you level up from fixing it and this is how you integrate it into your life. What the Freudians do is they say you have a problem, you should abdicate responsibility at the problem and then poke the wound, not actually reach a conclusion or the finality and you should let go of responsibility. And so it's a sort of, I mean a lot of guys who watch this have, probably have an experiment experience where they'll be dating a girl and then she's going to a Freudian therapist and the Freudian therapist said, oh, if he's toxic you should just cut him out. Because in their perspective you should cut out harm and limitations because you need to tap into your inner soul. Where Freud was obsessed with Gnosticism, it was an undercurrent to all the, to a lot of the stuff he read. And so he's pulling from the same Gnostic thread that, that, that Marx or a lot of these leftist thinkers were right.
- [47:01]
A
It kind of re. Reversing the order of significance. Like Young is examining this complex process that results in this end result of like. And then Freud is taking like the end result like sex, which was determined by a whole bunch of complicated processes. And he's pointing to the end result as the explanatory mechanism for. It's kind of like when you, when you find like loose correlations, like evidence based materialist kind of correlations and try to explain everything through the outcome.
- [47:36]
B
I find it really dumb that people thought that sex was the entire motivator for the human condition. It's really Freud telling on himself. If you think that sex and incest are the predominant drivers of the human condition. I'm sorry, this is a you problem. This is not because that did not build Notre Dame. That did not build the Roman Empire. This was not the thing that propelled people forming families and having children for all of human history. And it speaks to how the 20th century wanted to degrade all of human. The 20th century wanted to degrade by removing evil, we also removed good. And through not judging evil, we also tried to erase heroism and virtue and the difficult goods where we allowed the passive evil goods and then we banned the hard difficult goods. And that only makes sense in Freud, where Freud is completely incomprehensible. Freud did a few things right, like creating the concept of the subconscious or he got the neurology right for the tripartite structure of the brain, but he got a lot wrong. And if you just want to say that sex in this mechanical way is the entire human condition, the only way that makes sense is if you want to rationalize degeneracy for the machine and strip down the complexity and the beauty of the human soul into something you can shove through the factory line.
- [49:10]
A
Right. I don't think Martin Luther was thinking how do I get laid? When he, you know, Martin Luther disrupted the.
- [49:19]
B
Martin Luther was super sexual, but he was married. And so we have letters of him flirting with his wife and saying how much you like derail her in the six.
- [49:27]
A
Maybe Martin Luther King would this.
- [49:30]
B
No Martin Luther. So Martin Luther. Because keep in mind, this is why I'm emphasizing that our concept of Protestantism was not the entire one where back in the 16th century People, people would have sex in front of their family. You were expected to consummate your marriage in front of your friends and family. And so Martin Luther, he was a drunk. He was very boisterous. I mean, he is an embodiment of the wodan switch of the hyper disagreeable. Your 95 theses. You can go to hell. I'm going to tap into these deeper elements of the human condition where he was a sexual whatever guy, but he was a deeply moral person. And Luther cared a lot about morality where he would often he thought every day about how the devil was trying to tempt him. So he genuinely believed this and he was a moral person. It's just the Christianity he lived in was not as weirdly sexually prude as we are.
- [50:27]
A
Right. It's a different context, but like you said, it was with his wife or whatever. And clearly he was into the theological revolution. Like that's what was make them go crazy, which is also a very like masculine thing that kind of gets erased by Freud's prescription. Because what is masculine to like to have vision. Right. And yeah, to. Yeah.
- [50:52]
B
Another thing is that Protestantism got feminized around the time of the Napoleonic wars, which is when it got obsessed with sex. The transition when Anglo Protestantism became feminized was around the era of the turn of the 19th century. And that's when the nagging impulse came into Christianity. And most anti Christian thinkers are not against Christianity, they're against nagging. Where I look at Nietzsche's, Nietzsche or a lot of these right wing thinkers criticizing Christianity and what I tell them is because my speciality is the Middle Ages, so I'm interfacing with an older Christianity. And what I tell them is if you write down every criticism you have of Christianity and you just copy and pasted the word socialism instead, that would be better. It's just the socialists have been so good at psyopping people that they're the real Christian values. But people talk about Christianity is against status hierarchies, it's against sex, it's against artistic beauty and excellence. And I'm like, no, go back to the 17th century. And none of that was true. And it annoys me that Christianity spent 2,000 years building up Western civilization and now people criticize it for the century people stopped actually following Christianity.
- [52:11]
A
And it gets extra confusing because what was that 20th century culture you mentioned that you invented the term for therapy,
- [52:19]
B
the therapy for you?
- [52:20]
A
So you have the like the Calvinist culture and then the therapy culture and they kind of intersect on, on the left wing.
- [52:29]
B
I've met that person.
- [52:33]
A
Like the modern left emphasizes social justice and the Calvinists would talk about justice and accountability. So it's like accountability is the same as judgment. So it's like they would both. And they would both describe like that discernment as being rooted in love. And it's connected to this like high anxiety nagging culture which you mentioned. But then it's also clashes with the like complete lack of standards of the therapy culture.
- [53:09]
B
Yeah, this is one of my real issues with this society, that every single social code we have is completely contradictory and hypocritical. Where the boomers will talk about hard work and they'll talk about. Because take sex as an example, and I should probably make a video just analyzing the sexual issues with our society on the main channel. But people hold these hyper Victorian prude standards in some ways and then at the same time they'll be okay with the weirdest sexual degeneracies in certain contexts. And there's no unity where if glancing at a girl or making sexual comments and polite company is completely taboo for socially functioning white men. You cannot allow WAP and rappers in the same culture. If you have a. If you watch Netflix documentaries, not Netflix doc. If you watch Netflix shows, they are so like big mouth or sex ed, often featuring children. They'll have the most sexually degenerate things possible. And in that very same society, you cannot have a mature intellectual discussion about men and women's sexual needs. And just. It's just. It's very difficult to keep up because the social code is completely contradictory and operates solely according to social approval, where the individual is given practically no sexual agency while the exploiting corporation is given. All corporations and organizations are allowed to use sex to sell stuff and to exploit it, while individuals have to operate at the schizophrenic frame.
- [54:49]
A
Right. Where you're still judged for doing an Only. Only fans. But Pepsi isn't judged for putting an equivalent display of nudity in a commercial. Yes, interesting.
- [55:03]
B
And Onlyfans, according to some leftists, including the. I was gonna say the rapper Destiny, but the streamer Destiny. Destiny said Onlyfans is more controversial than being a stay at home. Onlyfans is less controversial than being a stay at home mom.
- [55:20]
A
Right. Which is definitely not true. But it's like a perfect example of the distillation of that mentality.
- [55:28]
B
I guess it could be true in sufficiently mentally ill demographics of the population. If you talk to enough like Gen Z Blue State people, very weird things happen.
- [55:38]
A
Right, so actually this is better for you.
- [55:41]
B
No, I mean, God, man, I have stories. There's just.
- [55:46]
A
There's a lost cause.
- [55:48]
B
There is profound mental illness among Gen Z Blue State people and Protestantism. I think these tangents are useful because our comprehension of this topic is so colored by modernity's biases that I basically have to blowtorch all of this to get you to see the 17th century accurately. Because when people think of Protestantism, they think, oh, it's. It's bigoted, it's sexually controlling, it's irrational. But no, these are mental projections of this.
- [56:15]
A
I don't even know if we're on a tangent or not.
- [56:18]
B
Yes.
- [56:19]
A
Is this a tangent?
- [56:20]
B
What would the Zen monk Dogon say? Dogon would say there is no tangent. There is no tangent. There is no video. There is no Buddha. There is merely the. There is merely the moon.
- [56:32]
A
Life is one.
- [56:33]
B
Yes. And I'm going to go back to the map of Protestantism in the year 1600. So Protestantism was popular in Germanic cultures and the map is pretty strong where England is Germanic. They converted to Protestantism. The parts of Scotland that were Germanic, like the Lowlands, converted to Protestantism and they had to bloodily force the Celtic Highlands to convert away from Catholicism. The more Celtic north of England stayed Catholic and had to be forced to be Protestant. The Welsh are an exception where there were Celtic people who converted to Protestantism. And the Welsh are the only Celtic people that maintain their language because they wrote their church documents in Welsh and then the Scots wrote them in English, or Scots, which is. Scots is a dialect of English. And in Ireland, they were. They stayed Catholic. And so. And then inside Europe, inside continental Europe, German Europe half stayed Catholic, half stayed Protestant. And that broke my rule that Germans converted to Protestantism. But the mitigating variable was the Habsburgs and the French who were pushing up against the frontiers of Germany, where Protestantism was very popular in Central Europe through the 17th century, where there are periods where parts of Hungary were majority Protestant. Austria, the seat of the Habsburg Empire, was majority Protestant. Czechia was in. It was popular across Central Europe in the Habsburgs, who got their right to rule from the Catholic pope, had to actively crush Protestantism across Central Europe and make these areas Catholic. And part of the reason that Czechia is the most atheist country on earth was they were the first Protestants in the 15th century. And then the Austrians forcibly converted them to Catholicism, which made them resentful of it. And in places like Baden Wurtenberg in southwest Germany, they were an island of Protestants who lost three quarters of their population being attacked by the Catholics, while most of south and West Germany was Catholic. And in Flanders or the Dutch speaking area of modern Belgium converted to Protestantism. And then the Habsburgs that originally controlled the Netherlands crushed, that made them Catholic. Well, the Netherlands gained independence as a Protestant country and they were Calvinist. France was divided. And we're not going to talk about the French wars of religion because those were already winding down at the early 17th century. But France had an active Protestant minority, about 10% of the population concentrated in the former English colonies of the southwest. And France went through a period of brutal repression of the Protestants, a lot of them fleeing to America or Britain or the Netherlands or South Africa. And Northern Germany was Protestant. Scandinavia converted Protestantism through a series of civil wars. And Poland had a Protestant minority that were popular because Poland was one of the most tolerant countries in Europe. But then, due to the rise of serfdom, the polls became too illiterate for Protestantism to really work. Where there was a period where Protestantism was popular in the 16th century in Poland, Lithuania, nearly converted Protestantism, they in Fact threatened the Pope that they would. But what would happen is that because the Polish nobility had to form cultural coherence on top to keep the serfs down. As Poland moved from a free society to a serf society, then Catholicism got entrenched. And after Poland faced all of these external humiliations, the Catholic identity became fused with the Polish identity. And so you saw Protestantism in the 17th century crystallize around northern Germany, England, Scotland and Scandinavia.
- [60:47]
A
So Poland was at first resentful of Catholicism and then how did that switch to them being super into it?
- [60:54]
B
Poland was a frontier society that was still developing its identity. So it went through a bunch of different phases. And Poland was one of the most tolerant countries in Europe. So their nobility had a sizable Protestant segment that nearly seized power. The Polish were never able to form a unified monarchy. And so as time passed and they had to solidify their power over their serfs as well as having external threats, Catholicism became the shared glue of Poland. Once it moved out of being a frontier society.
- [61:28]
A
Right. They didn't have the advantages of other parts of western Europe where the pop. The quality of the population base was good enough to have like a market society without being dominated by something else. Yeah.
- [61:47]
B
Poland's never developed as a market society until the 19th century where because they had serfdom and the serfs weren't allowed to leave their lord's land, you didn't have an open labor market. And when Poland developed economically, they did so by exporting raw materials and goods to western Europe where the England and France had revolutions in the mid 17th century when they were cut off from Polish grain supply due to the Danes blocking off the sund that that gets the Baltic into the North Sea. And the Polish nobility never went through a capitalist process where they spent the money they got from the serfs on luxuries and partying and estates and war. And so Poland was an artificially. It was an artificially pre modern society where they had the potential to be as successful as West Europe.
- [62:46]
A
Interesting. And yeah, it's funny how fast it can change or go back and forth because Poland is really well positioned right now. They're one of the hottest countries in the. In the world for positive anticipated growth.
- [62:59]
B
Yeah, these things change a lot. And a lot of the things that we as the character traits we associate with a certain society or religion now were the opposite a few centuries ago. Now that we have the map down, I'm going to split Protestantism into the three big brackets that you had in the earlier phase, that being Lutherans, Calvinists, and the other where Lutherans predominated in Germany and in Scandinavia. And they were of course derivative of Martin Luther, they were the first group of Protestants and the Lutherans were more similar to the Catholics than the Calvinists were. Where the Calvinists perceived the Lutherans as basically honorary Catholics and the Anglicans were comparable. But what the Lutherans did as their predominant breakthrough spiritually was they moved from the Catholic Church determining doctrine to the individual reading the Bible for themselves. And this was a universal breakthrough among Protestants. Where the first countries to get near universal literacy in the world were the Protestant countries. And for centuries in places like America, practically all people in colonial America were literate. Practically all people in England from the 18th century onwards were literate. And the Protestant countries of majority literacy very early. And authors like Emmanuel Todd, if this was hugely important in these countries, dominance, because if an entire population is literate, it moves the population several tiers upwards. And when the schooling was good, the correlation between a nation's wealth and the nation's literacy was nearly total. So until the 20th century, when a population got more literate, it also got more wealthy.
- [65:02]
A
It's kind of a parallel with the property rights emerging out of the feudal structure or whatever, where the more you have a distributed ability to analyze, innovate, make decisions on the material plane, the more innovation you're going to get. And it's the same with being able to read, where the more people can actually interact with the ideas, you've just like increased your pool of innovation by 100%.
- [65:30]
B
Yes, that's true. And the thing so most of the innovation was driven by the Calvinists and the non conformers, not by the Anglicans or the Lutherans. And part of that is that although in Lutheran culture you were expected to read the Bible and make your own narrative, make your own interpretation of it, they still had established church hierarchies run by the monarchs. And as said in the Protestant Reformation video, a big motivation for the Protestant Reformation was that the kings could now govern their societies on a spiritual as well as a political basis. So across the Protestant countries, the kings then became the heads of the church. And this didn't cause Oriental spiritual despotisms, because the point that you could interpret the Bible yourself gave the populations enough intellectual freedom. But the issue on top of that was that there still were the established church structures and you were not allowed to break the dogmas where you were allowed freedom in your interpretation, as long as you didn't break the dogmas. And I think that's reasonable up to a point, because you still have to have a functioning, coherent society that operates under set rules. But the reason Martin Luther rebelled against the church was this hierarchical, was this controlled. And like every new religion or ideology, that they ended up having to establish their own structure that was liable to its own issues. And I'm going to go through each of these sects of Protestantism and analyze their core strengths and weaknesses. And for the Lutherans, the issue they run into is they charge headlong into Yonte's Law. And Yonte's Law is a social rule from Scandinavia. And let me pull up the 10 rules so that I can narrate them. But the thing with Yante's Law is dinosaurs. The thing with Yante's Law.
- [67:30]
A
I'm glad you still like dinosaurs from your origin of what if the dinosaurs never went extinct?
- [67:35]
B
Oh, yeah, that's lore now. It's weird when I do things in my life and people know about them. So Yonte's Law, this was made by a poet in early 20th century Scandinavia. And it's, you're not to think you're anything special. You're not to think you're as good as us. You're not to think you're smarter than us. You're not to convince yourself that you are better than us. You're not to think you know more than us. You're not to think you are more important than us. You're not to think you are good at anything. You're not to laugh at us. You're not to think anyone cares about you. You're not to think you can teach us anything. And if you're American, the closest parallel we have to this is New England. And Lutheranism can metastasize Yonte's Law because it's hyper Puritan. And it's hyper not Puritan, that's another sect of Protestantism. It's hyper, it's socially conformist. And so when you go to Scandinavia, these are societies that have the highest human development stats of anywhere in the world. And they're supposedly the happiest societies in the world, but at the same time, they are, they're happy because in that society it's conformist enough. You're not allowed to say that you're unhappy. And with Yonte's Law, you have these societies that became, that naturally fell into socialism and nihilism. And when you go to Germany or the Nordic countries, the reason that the Germans have this iron rigidity and obsession with following rules is that the Lutheran moral code that they were trained with prizes Things like humility and not sticking your neck out. And it's this very. It's this very conformist, feminine version of Christianity.
- [69:24]
A
Right. That's funny you mentioned that. They're not allowed to say they're happy because there's a big.
- [69:29]
B
They're not allowed to say they're unhappy.
- [69:31]
A
Oh, sorry. Not allowed to say they're unhappy. Right. Because there was a big propaganda campaign, maybe 2012 ish, around there, around Nordic democratic socialism as the model America should emulate. And evidence for why we should emulate this was that they were listed as like the happiest countries on a bunch of surveys. And then people were like, okay, but then why do they have the highest rate of suicide besides Japan or something? And they said, the sunlight, you know. But you can see how those surveys are contextually based in those cultural attitudes. And you can see how Yante's Law would work really well when you're applying it to this, like, Catholic elite that's having an artificial monopoly. Like, they're better than you. Oh, so only through you can I get to God. Okay, you're not better than me. Like, it works there really well. But then when you reverse it to where, okay, now everybody's allowed to engage. And then you take that principle of nobody's better than me to cut down any tall blade of grass, then you see, like, the negative expression of that. And obviously that's synonymous with leftism.
- [70:39]
B
I'm currently reading a biography of Frederick the Great by Carlisle, and there's an interesting element to it where Prussia, which Frederick the Great was the king of, it was a Lutheran country, but the ruling Hohenzollern family were Calvinists. And so the dynastic line that unified Germany were Calvinists for reasons that don't. For just historic aberration reasons, they chose to be Calvinists as a private spiritual decision. But then they were able to totally dominate the Lutherans because the Calvinists had this more action, more dominating mindset than the Lutherans did. And a lot of these Lutheran countries were dependent on the peasants could do Jante's Law, but the nobility were the ones pulling the weight and doing the leadership. And if you look at Scandinavia, the Vasa ruling family, they were the Swedish ruling line that dominated the entire. They conquered Poland, got out to Kiev, beat Russia multiple times. Sweden was a great military power that either nearly conquered Eastern Europe or the Holy Roman Empire. And that's hard to believe until you read about these wars themselves. And you see the tipping point from the Vikings with the sort of like, wo Don like aggression and disagreeability and warrior culture. And Yonte's law is the toxic feminine counterpoint to that. It is equivalently feminine to how masculine the Vikings were. And so when you're looking at Sweden, which was one of the first countries in Europe to have conscription and the reasoning for that was they had a really low population and a ruling class. They trusted these Scandinavian countries. The nobility often made deals with the peasants where the peasants agreed to submit to the nobility because they trusted them. And when you replace the nobility with the socialist state, you get profoundly a cringe in effeminate societies because the nobility were expect the peasants. They can do this stuff because the nobles tell them what to do. And an element you see increase over European history is the loss of agency and initiative. Where if you look at Europe in the 18th and the 19th centuries, it's awash in those things. But those guys must have either gotten socialized out or immigrated to America or died in the world wars where Europe lost agency over the course of centuries. And when you're looking at modern Scandinavia, which is terrified to say no to immigration or no to wokeness, it's because of this Jante's Law culture.
- [73:27]
A
It's funny how they have that really strong parallel between the Yantes law of feminine and the hyper individual masculinity of a Viking culture. And you could say that when they rebelled against the Catholic Church, that was the one time where both the feminine and the male intersected in alignment towards that. Because the individuals like don't tell me what to do priest. And the females like, you're not better than me, priest.
- [73:53]
B
It's because Luther was his wife.
- [73:57]
A
Right. They had a good integration of the masculine feminine.
- [74:02]
B
And it's. You see the same trends in America where New England is our yontes law and Texas is like our wo Dan where we have the cowboy culture and the aggressive Viking culture and we also have the collectivist village shame based culture. Right.
- [74:21]
A
It's Appalachia versus New England basically. And you could say Texas. Yeah.
- [74:25]
B
Facts and.
- [74:28]
A
But New England can be so good when it's masculine. Like I don't want to just call them feminine and give up on them and like. So I agree.
- [74:36]
B
Do you want to do a cultural history of America next episode or 16th century Europe?
- [74:44]
A
Let's do America.
- [74:45]
B
Yay. Great. So next video is a cultural history of America. And I agree the New Englanders used to be the most impressive group of Americans. They were just, they were stunning and brave and same thing as the Scandinavians. And I'm trying To figure out what else I know about the Lutherans. The Lutherans are the pietists Lutherans. I think that the pietists are Lutherans. They're just influenced by the non conformists. Where the Lutherans have this very strong introspective streak, where a lot of the German mystic tradition is. A lot of the German mystic tradition stems back to the Lutheran pietist introspection where they. Pietism is actually one of my favorite sects of Protestantism. This might get us derailed from the direction a little bit, but you have this trajectory in Protestantism towards introspection and you see it a combination of the non conformists like the Anabaptists, and then it spread to the Quakers and then the Methodists and the pietists. And I was raised Quaker, where Protestantism is naturally built to be very good at mysticism. It should be perfect for mysticism because it is literally made by mystics for a close connection to God personally. And there is nothing in Protestantism that stops it from being from having mystics because in Catholicism you have a better integrated mystic tradition. But there's rules for how to be an acceptable Catholic mystic. And there isn't really for a Protestant. Like I could hypothetically found a church of Protestantism if I wanted to and there wouldn't be any anything stopping me. That's what the Mormons did. And the thing though is that due to the mechanization of North European society, Protestantism actually became quite inhospitable to mystics past a certain point. But the introspective tradition is the inverse of that where Lutheranism would make these associations called pietists. And I always liked this idea where you and your friends meet up every week and then you discuss your personal relationship with God and how over the last week you have been living your life in a manner to reach God. So it's these study groups. And these study groups had a profound impact on history partly because they became supercharges for philosophy and for abstract thinking. Where the Germans got this down, and I would say the predominant reason that Germany was the biggest philosophy bed was due to this. Where the German philosophers were often of this pietist trajectory. And most of the German philosophers were Protestants and Lutherans. And so when you look at figures like Kant, Kant came out of this tradition. I believe Nietzsche was influenced by it. I believe I'd have to check it myself. A lot of them were influenced by pietism. And pietism created enormous amounts of introspection, which is why Germany had this very. It was the wellspring of psychology for both Carl Jung and Freud and all of the early psychological thinkers.
- [78:04]
A
This sounds like Elon's what did you get done this week? But instead, like, what was, what advancement did you make in your relationship with God? Or how did it help you in your life? It's kind of similarly. Connected. And so this seems like the source of a lot of Marc Andreessen's anxiety because this is like a positive case for introspection.
- [78:27]
B
I am not going to talk about this because Marc Andreessen and I have been friends for years and I disagree very much about this. I am very pro introspection, but I don't want to blast a friend publicly.
- [78:41]
A
Oh, I'm just trolling him because he's hilarious. But all right, so what's the next sect?
- [78:47]
B
So you have Lutherans, you have the Calvinists, which were the second biggest one. And the Calvinists were a splotch across Europe where you had Calvinists in Scotland, in eastern England, in the Netherlands, in Switzerland. And we talk about John Calvin in the Protestant Reformation video. He was a really hard guy. And the Calvinist societies were the origin of totalitarianism. Basically all of the totalitarian philosophies stem back to Calvinism. But the Calvinists were also the foundation for capitalism and a lot of freedom and science. Where Calvinism is like a psychological supercharge where it increases the psychological, it increases the psychological tension inside something for a variety of ends. And so if you go through the different Calvinist countries, the Netherlands, they used Calvinism as a social glue to fight a nearly one century war against the Spanish. And the Netherlands had a, as a tiny country, about a million people, they had a colonial empire in across the world, in many different continents. And they, they helped build capitalism. It was one of the foundations of the Industrial revolution. And eastern England, England was about 10% Calvinist. It was about 80% Anglican and about 10% Catholic. And the Calvinists were pushing against the Catholics where the Anglicans were stuck in the middle where they had to work with one of these groups of social radicals. And so the Anglicans got split in the English Civil War was between the Puritans based out of eastern England and the Catholics in the west, who were often more nobility, while the Calvinist entrepreneurial types, high agency people, they were attracted to it. And that was true in France where the Huguenots were Calvinists. The in the Netherlands, they were in eastern England, Same deal in Scotland they had a coup against their corrupt monarchy where the Calvinists formed a Taliban like state. And that also occurred in Geneva. When the Calvinists took power, they basically totally removed freedom. And David Hackett Fisher talks about the different motivating concepts of freedom. And for the Calvinists, their concept of freedom was freedom to follow God. Their idea is when you follow God it increases your agency level so you can be free to live your life. And there is a spiritual truth to that, but it's also a lie in that you're policing people's daily lives. And so when you deal with a lot of the left, these are descendants of Calvinists. If you map the areas that like the left today, it's the descendants of Calvinism. There's very few Calvinist populations that are not woke left today. Except the ones that converted away from Catholicism and from Calvinism in America. Like the Midwestern Yankee diaspora were the Scots Irish, where the Scots Irish in America converted from Calvinism and Presbyterianism because Presbyterianism is a sub variety of Catholicism. Sorry, I keep in. They're similar words, but Presbyterianism is another name for Calvinism. And a presbyter was an elder where the council elders were the people, where you had these committees of spiritual elders that ran the town or ran the society, where in Scotland you had these sort of committees of these Calvinists who would virtue signal against each other. And they became hyper extreme. And I read this book called the Cousin War by Kevin Phillips and he has this segment talking about how the Scots Irish of Appalachia who migrated over a little bit before the American Revolution as they converted from Calvinism to baptism, which we'll get to in a little bit for when baptism formed. He said that part of the motivation was that in Calvinist circles it was very dower and it was very morally restrictive. And then for the Baptist you go down to the creek and then you get baptized with scantily clad women or with shawls that you can see through the water. And it was a significantly more loose social structure and that fit better with their more frontier individualist mindset.
- [83:24]
A
You can kind of see why Calvinism went theocratic, right? Because it almost harvested the benefits of the, like the immediate benefits of the shift from the rigidity of Catholicism. So that gave it a tremendous advantage that enabled it to consolidate around when in reality, like the ultimate vision of Protestantism is that adaptability which is the origin of baptism. Where Baptists were a small percent of the English Civil War and then they, they grew in, in the US but their core doctrine in the beginning wasn't even like anything you associate with a modern Baptist church. It was just the, the principle of church Independence, yes. Where the Presbyterians were more like Federalists and the Calvinists were more like Theocrats.
- [84:10]
B
The Baptists formed as part of the second great wave of Protestant religious formation that occurred in England as a side effect of the English Civil War. And that was because people were getting tired of these doctrinal wars. So the Baptists and the Quakers, they were not as doctrinal as the previous groups because especially where the Baptists and the Quakers formed in North England, it was this war zone of these religious elites who hated each other. And so the peasants and the North English herding peoples, they got tired of it. And so the Baptists and the Quakers and the Methodists, the sex that got popular in America, they were an overt rejection of that of. We want to return to a more basic spirituality and to talk about Calvinism. Your point? I read a really interesting book by Erich Fromm, who's my new favorite author crush. I periodically go through periods where I'll. I ordered 10 of Erich Fromms books in a row because I read three and they were so good. And it's called Escape from Freedom and it talks about the human desire for submission. And he explains, he starts the book with Protestantism where because he was writing this trying to explain why Hitler emerged. And he said Hitler developed because humans have an innate need for submission. And so when you have rapid social changes, people desire social structure to make them feel safe. And I'll clarify, this varies massively by population. Certain social classes, certain ethnicities, certain demographics have radically different tolerances for chaos, in desires for freedom or submission. And he was talking about how the rise of capitalism in the early modern period created a societal structure of constant fluidity and change. And Calvinism and Protestantism, but especially Calvinism appealed to the upwardly mobile upper middle class merchant classes of the capitalist hubs because these people had lives that were very chaotic, opposed to the earlier structure where you were attached to the land and a lord. So they ended up in these structures. And that were against social hierarchy. And people use social hierarchy to psychologically stabilize. That's normal across societies. And because the social hierarchies didn't work well with the fluid capitalist structure, where in Puritan systems you had the Puritan capitalist and then fluid workers beneath him without the rigid hierarchy. And that was very effective. And they were using Protestantism and especially Calvinism as a psychological unifier. There's a big difference between Protestantism and Catholicism. And again, Calvinism are the uber Protestants. They saw the other Protestants as Catholics and Martin Luther made faith the main locus of Protestantism, where the Catholics had in Luther was in many ways a rejection of the Catholic indulgences, which was a widely loathed practice. That the Catholics would sell the right to spend less time in purgatory. And due to corrupt local agents, they would say we're selling your position to get into heaven. And that felt like a direct rejection of the Bible, which loves the meek and helping the poor and that stuff. And so the faith emphasis was a way of getting around the autistic Catholic we will prescribe the amount of works you do to heal your sins. So faith became the locus. An issue though is that the pre modern concept of faith is a. And the shift from a spiritual worldview to a mechanistic materialist one that changed a lot of our attitudes towards religion. So we stopped seeing Christianity as a spiritual path to reach the kingdom of heaven and we transformed it into an ethical code. Which is how you get to saying that socialism is the real Christian values, which is a sleight of hand that worked so well. People don't realize they've been conned. But also with faith, faith is supposed to be a sort of wellspring spiritual force where once you develop a close relationship with God, you feel faith well up within you and then you. And then you can sort of feel the flow and you can trust the flow of God's plan. And what a lot of the faith discourse, and you see this as early as the 17th century was if you do not dogmatically believe the structure of our theology, you are a bad person. Because faith is the dominant unifying variable of this societal structure. And if you don't have total faith in God, then you're a bad person. And this created the Calvinist purity spiraling. Because when faith is your main organizing principle and you've removed traditions and hierarchy and the and often and sometimes an internal logic system because faith can often override logic is you end up in these virtue signaling over who has the most faith. So when you look at woke people, they're doing the same thing. It's not about the logical consistency, it's your faith in it. And this creates, you know, I, the world's ending, who gives a fuck. I feel weird using sexual comparisons for this stuff. But you're basically creating performance anxiety because the way you tap into this underlying current of faith is to let go and have trust in God. And then if you're trying to force it, that's not faith. And so you can't ride the current because that's about Letting go. So the Calvinists got stuck in this double bind because they were so reliant on faith. That provoked a lot of anxiety. And Erich Fromm said what Protestantism and Calvinism were trying to do was this capitalist rapidly changing social structure created a lot of psychological anxiety. So they were using faith as their psychological locus to build their identity. And Erich Fromm is more critical of that than I am because Erich Fromm was writing about a century ago and he thought that the psychoanalytic Freudian tradition, although he writes critically of Freud, would work better than it did. And when I was reading this, I was thinking, what else were these people in the 17th century supposed to do? They lived hard lives. You can't get rid of trauma overnight. And so I'm thinking with the psychological mechanisms they had in front of them, this seems like a rational outcome.
- [90:55]
A
Right. And we're seeing kind of echoes of this re emerge on both fronts where people are turning Christianity into a virtue signal and also connecting it into politics. Because like you said, what was it you said a second ago that that related to that.
- [91:17]
B
I was talking about how the Calvinists would wokeness does virtue signaling in this manner. And faith is the main locus of it.
- [91:28]
A
Yeah. And then, but okay, so yeah, so what that does is it turns people away because it's like a hard sell or it's like a shame. It's like, okay, so then I don't feel how you're saying I am. So then maybe this, I'm, I'm not into this. And then the other side is people through virtue signaling their faith can then advance material interests with the, with the kind of authority of.
- [91:59]
B
Yes.
- [92:00]
A
Their religious proclamations. And then you tie up these very specific contextual political issues within interpretations of Scripture. So you're saying you, if you agree with my interpretation of Scripture, that means you have to agree with my politics. So then obviously it breaks down from there where people start once the, once the political environment shifts, then people kind of lose faith in the religion because it actually wasn't attached to the religion, but some political point they're trying to score.
- [92:31]
B
Thank you for providing multiple useful transitions for me. So first of all, that helps lead to the third group where I need to talk about the Anglicans too. But the third group were the nonconformists. And one of the elements of Protestantism is it has a much higher variance rate than Catholicism where Protestantism's issue is that it can culminate in trans or radical solipsism. Because when the individual interprets the Bible themselves, you've opened up a lot of variants where on the positive end the Protestants were the big drivers of a lot of modernity. And American Protestantism is the most vibrant sect of Christianity where we've converted a lot of the Third World to American Protestantism. And America is practically the only religious industrial country left of scale because American Protestantism is so adaptive. And even American Catholics take on a lot of these Protestant attitudes. And so that's the first thing. And you see a variation between that and the positive end. But also in Nazi Germany, the biggest supporters of the Nazis were the Protestants because they weren't. They were unmoored from the church structure that the Catholics had to point it at Nazism and say it was morally bad. And you also get weird messianic cults more than the Catholics, where you did have the messianic egalitarian cults among the Catholics, but they got. It got metastasized with Protestantism. And we spoke earlier about the Anabaptist cult in Munster that took over a town in Germany and devolved into sexual communism and having rivaling prophets uttering the words of God to kill each other in civil wars and just total madness. And this is why I'm not as harsh on Luther and Calvin as a lot of people where I do see the negatives. But they were operating inside the spiritual toolkit they had in their society that could allow them to maintain sanity. And because each of them were taking different spiritual toolkits and playing with them to see what would work. And when you look at what that happens when that doesn't occur, it's groups like the Anabaptists. And Anabaptists are best known in America for the Amish. They're the origins of them. And they're one of the more radical sects of anti Baptist. For those that don't know. The Amish are from Pennsylvania about like half an hour from where I grew up. And they still live as. As if it's the pre industrial world. And they speak a dialect of Swabian German from centuries ago. They drive horse and buggies, they don't use electricity and all of those things. And the Anabaptists, they had like peasant Christianity where it's we just want to live the word of God and speak peacefully and live happy lives and not have hierarchy and structure. And I'm not really a Quaker anymore. I talk too much about war. I'm too overtly hierarchical. But it is sort of rich for me to. It's like a mocking Anabaptists is like throwing A stone into someone else's glass house when you live in one. But I am no longer a Quaker, so I'm not being held to their moral standards. And the Anabaptists, they were popular at certain periods. They had the Peasants revolt in the 16th century which killed hundreds of thousands of people in Germany before ultimately getting crushed by the product, by the authorities and the nobility. And they were an undercurrent to all of this, where at their best, these nonconformists are genuinely sincere and good Christians. And to use the Quakers, who were an English example, because it's a useful transition to look to the non conformists because they later rippled into a lot of Baptists and Methodists where the Quakers are a North English Protestant sect and they emerged as a side effect of the English Civil War, where George Fox, I think it was a former military captain who got disenchanted. And you would wander around the north of England and say that the will of God existed within everything. And the Quakers would just sit together and meditate. And I did two services of this a week for years on end where I would structured meditation for two hours a week for my entire teenage years. I think that had a big effect on me. And so when you feel the will of God, you stand up and speak. And the Quakers were pacifist. They didn't believe in social structures, but they were considered wild. They would often strip naked in protest by running naked through towns. They were often very brave too. Where there was a Quaker who walked into Cromwell, who was the military dictator of England, they walked into Cromwell's. She walked. It was a female too. The Quakers had very high social status for women. And the Quakers also invented the concepts of privacy and of prisons, where the idea of the Quaker ideal of prison rather than just killing someone was prison was there to rehabilitate their soul. So the original Quaker ideal was you shove someone into a room with just the Bible and with just being forced to read the Bible, you see if they rehabilitate their character or not.
- [97:55]
A
Kind of like when they put the Bible in the hotel room.
- [97:57]
B
Yeah. And so the Quakers did a lot of this, a lot of this stuff. And they were foundational to America much more than Britain and the church, the both. It's ironic, the Quakers talked a lot about simplicity and not being ostentatious, where they became quite wealthy because much like the Calvinists because they were frugal and they had high trust communities where both the bank of America in the early 19th century and the bank of England were both founded by Quakers as well as the Industrial revolution in both England and America were spearheaded by Quakers. And the Quakers and the Anabaptists were seen as insane social radicals because in an aristocratic society they were the equivalent of people trying to blow up the entire social structure. And you can watch the English Civil War video. I'm purposely avoiding the wars of religion because we've done a bunch of videos about those already. But the English Civil War had oscillating dominance between Anglicans and Quakers. Sorry, not Quakers, Anglicans, Puritans. And you had Catholic kings who could never convert England's to Catholicism. And so these dissenting sects like the Quakers became more popular. And Cromwell was tolerant to all of the deviant Protestant sects. Cromwell maintained a puritan oligarchic state where for example, he banned celebrating Christmas because in the Calvinist worldview you should be saintly every day. So having holidays was bad. And because having holidays is bad because it separates you from being saintly every day you can say that they were spiraling into sort of into obsessiveness.
- [99:44]
A
So Christmas was every day basically.
- [99:46]
B
Exactly. But then there was no celebration where. Because they believe special. Yeah, they believe celebration was innately bad. And so at the same time, while he imposed this Puritan oligarchy, he was quite tolerant to the Protestant dissenters. So the Quakers developed and emerged there. The Baptists are a similar vein. And the Baptists are a heavily American sect of Protestantism where they emerged in North England similar time to the Quakers. And because each Protestant sect has their own specific gig that separates them from the others. And for the Baptists it's that you get baptized as an adult because their idea is that if you baptize someone as a child then they can't be self aware of their decision to be a Christian. So Baptists wait until you're an adult to baptize you, to force you to go through the conscious choice of choosing to be a Christian. And.
- [100:44]
A
And by adult do you mean seven aren't.
- [100:46]
B
Don't Baptists get baptized as like when they're teenagers?
- [100:51]
A
I know they get baptized all like throughout your life you can get baptized, but I didn't know if that's where the seven verses. Because Catholics get baptized at birth. So I thought maybe that's where the seven year old distinction came from. But it probably varies.
- [101:04]
B
I don't know. I didn't grow up in the Bible Belt. Where I grew up it was mostly mainline Protestant churches. And the Baptists became very popular in the American South. Same thing as the Methodists who emerged In England from, actually from the Welsh a little bit later. And the Baptists are the biggest. I think there are more Baptists than there are Catholics in America. And they're the dominant religion of the American south. And they're the only. The Baptists and the non denominationals are functionally Baptists in America. You see a lot of non denominational churches and they really annoy me because I want to know what your doctrines are just on an anthropological theological basis. But the idea is we just believe. When churches say we just believe in Christ, I'm like, come on, I know you're a Protestant. I know you're going to have a theology that's functionally similar to the Baptists. And it's this weird modern shell thing where they're like, oh, we're just in chill vibes. We don't believe in theology. And then you talk to their pastor.
- [102:10]
A
Yeah.
- [102:10]
B
And that. You talk to their pastor and their pastor definitely has views on the topic because that's, I mean you don't pick a pastor who doesn't have views on theology.
- [102:18]
A
It's like coy, like, well, I'm just following the Bible and this is where I ended up, so it must be right. I haven't really examined it. You know, of course they have something. And I think like when you talk about Baptists in the English Civil War, it's very like it hasn't really evolved into a character. And I think, and I think that's why people see the historical baptism differently or kind of color it with modern interpretations. But if you had to, if you had to give a broad character to like the Southern American Baptist movement is that it probably settled into more of a like fire and brimstone vision where it's focused on like avoiding the negative vision rather than the positive vision, which has been perfect for fighting off like the, the worst elements of society, but lacking for establishing a positive vision which fits perfectly with the role of evangelicals, like saving us from communism while like not being super evolved politically.
- [103:15]
B
That I'd agree with that. The Baptists, they're also quite anti intellectual and they're anti aristocratic and they're often obsessed with Israel or the Book of Revelations or they're quite political. So they develop these neuroses and they're big in the American South. I thought you articulated that well. And the Baptist dominance emerged in America in the 19th century and same thing as the Methodists. The Methodists are of a similar school where they emerged in 18th century England and they got popularized in America at the same Time where Wesleyan, the founder, even came to America and participated in the first Great Awakening in the mid 18th century. Where America's had great Awakenings every century with the first one in the 1740s, the second one in the 1840s. We had another religious awakening in the 1940s and the 50s. We might have another in the mid 21st century. And the Methodists were an attempt to make a British version of pietism. They're the Protestant sect. I've never converted to Methodism, but they're the one I'm most most sympathetic to. And they were really popular in the 19th century and especially in the middle states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Appalachia. And their idea is that you should, you should do the pietist thing of reading the Bible and having these study groups to reach God together. And the Methodist issue is they've just, they just become milquetoast. They don't have the edge and they're just seen as one of the, like the Protestant churches.
- [104:48]
A
At least they're not Episcopalian. But we have to talk about the. We'll. Yeah, we'll definitely get to them, I'm sure. But with the, I think with like the reducing it to not reducing it because the belief in Christ is like the fundamental core. But the point of like being a Christian isn't just to avoid hell, it's to like how, how does that faith like inform your actions and advance positive, positive like value sets in the world, including spreading that the religion and the belief in Christ, which is which if you, if you just focus on that in a meta sense, you can kind of become insular and satisfied. Like okay, as long as you're not going to hell, you're good. That's all that matters. But it's still good to do, do good to do good things. Like Christ, when he came to earth, he healed people and stuff like that. So it's a little bit limiting. And it's interesting what you said about Protestant sex being more likely to go crazy. Like you get the increased volatility. You mentioned the movement with the Nazis where the Catholic party was like one of the only counter non socialist parties voting in that election. They only got like 14. Of course the Catholics can go socialist like in France. But this is the problem is you bait. There's this idea that you know, you can read the Bible yourself that leads to all this volatility and that's true, but it's also not true and that you can't understand the Bible yourself. It parallels perfectly with the debate around experts where you have these institutions where people say, oh, I don't, you don't need the experts, right, because the FDA is corrupt or something. And then, so then you go into the other end. Well is actually you do still need people and institutions to get information from. And you need like networks of, of, of expertise. But the, the, then the institution has failed. But then if, if everybody just reads their own book at that point, like some of the results can get even worse in the failed institution where like, if you listen to cnn, it's going to have all these bad consequences, but you're not going to believe that lizard people control the earth. Like that's guaranteed. Like, you're safe with the Catholic Church on some fronts, but you lose all the potential.
- [107:14]
B
So I read the trilogy on the guy who worked for the CIA, who did the CIA's research into the spirit world. And he has this symbol for. Because he went through a whole heroic arc of the things he saw in the spirit world and wrote it down where he makes a symbol of 20th century Christianity. And it's something that's really. I'm going to throw this in, that's really interesting about it is how much genuine spirituality was taboo in the 50s, because in the 21st century, people by and large do not care. Joe Rogan talks about this all the time. If you were to investigate a lot of the important people that have important people today that have really wonky spiritual beliefs and. But in the 50s, the managerial class used religion as a tool of social control. And this guy, when he was having these very vibrant spiritual teachings, these very, very vibrant spiritual experiences, he had to keep them in hiding as people would throw him into an asylum, even though he was a functioning member of society. And that's very blackpilling because it makes you realize, and this was something my mom would often say, that the 20th century had an enormous amount of indirect social control. Where my mom lived in Iran for a little bit and she would say that in Iran there was more freedom to talk about what you actually thought than there was in America. But another element of it is he has a symbol of. He has this thing called louche, which is. It's a symbol he made of the society generates these emotions. And then people feed off the emotions generated by the society. So people's entire lives are generating these emotions that other people make money off. And that's of course, a symbol for the advertising industry and the media industry and politics, all of which generate emotional reactions among the population and then feed off the result. And one of the loose things he talks about is he has this symbol of a church that's on the edge of heaven. And everyone inside the church stays there because they like the pastor and they like the rituals, but they don't actually walk through the doors to heaven. And when I read that, he said, you know, this is one of the louche settings. And that just crushed me. I was so depressed to read that because I'm like, oh, my God, that's so many churches today.
- [109:29]
A
Right. Where it's the. It's like the comfort, the familiarity, it's been reduced to like tradition or even a social club. Like, it's something to do when you're like old people are. Are lonely. And so they're just like doing this out of a. Yeah.
- [109:44]
B
A lot of.
- [109:45]
A
A much more basic interaction than it should be.
- [109:47]
B
A lot of the dynamics. And this is not just churches, it's everything. It's social games. And if you were to dissect the interactions, it's these different people playing social games inside this set structure to increase their social status and then their little social club. Yeah. And they use the Bible as an external criteria to mediate that. And so to cover the last parallels
- [110:10]
A
with the politics thing, to cover the
- [110:12]
B
last group of Protestants, the Anglicans emerged due to Henry VIII's conversion to Protestantism so that he could remarry. And the Anglicans are more Catholic than the Lutherans were, where they're mostly Catholic. But they do have the. You can read the Bible yourself. And they're sort of the English church where for a lot of English history, in order to have government jobs or to work university, have university positions into the mid to late 19th century, you had to be Anglican to be a professor, you had to be an Anglican to be the nobility, you had to be an Anglican. And the Anglicans are. They're very moderate. And they're the Episcopalians, which is the American version, they're seen as the stable upper class church. And the Anglicans are good in the same way England has been good. You can't separate them from the English project. And the current Anglican church, much like a lot of the mainline Protestant churches are divided between the English church that wants to have women priests and the African church that doesn't. And I'm going to clarify the term mainline Protestant because it keeps emerging. And the mainline Protestants, it's a term from the Philadelphia mainline, where I grew up, where it's the train line out from Philly. And in the 20th century, as there was white flight from Philadelphia to the suburbs, these Protestant churches emerged. There. So the idea is that the people who live in this area go to these type of churches and it's the Presbyterians, it's the Episcopalians, it's the Methodists, the Lutherans. And where I grew up, most people went to mainland Protestant churches. And those churches have been utterly gutted over the last few generations because they haven't been able to maintain dynamism. While the Evangelicals and the Pentecostalists, which we'll talk about in the third World, they have been the Protestants that have been growing and able to compete and expand.
- [112:17]
A
And I, I think there's also more room for evolution in that area. Like I think the trend of the, the Baptist churches are actually getting better rather than settling into their, their flaws. And then with the universities, I think Cambridge was the one that was. Cambridge was Calvinist, some of the first Calvinist. Right. They had. And then Harvard was established also by Calvinists from the people who lived in the same area as Cambridge. So Cambridge and Harvard are the original Calvinist universities. And then Wittenberg is the original Lutheran University. And all those are very strong hubs for progressivism.
- [112:56]
B
During the English Civil War the Calvinists controlled the university system in England. And as a side effect they made it so that you had to be an Anglican to get a university job. When the Anglicans re solidified power in the late 17th century after the English Civil War.
- [113:12]
A
Right. So Harvard was the new Cambridge. That's where they went to have their theocracy because they couldn't take over England.
- [113:20]
B
As I go through the rest of this video, we've established most of the non third world Protestant sects. We still have to explain Mormonism and Pentecostalism, but, but we're going to go through a lot of European history and I'm going to sidestep that because we have a variety of other videos in the topic where if you want to look at Protestantism's decay in the Protestant countries, you can look at the Death of God video. If you want to look at the reaction of Protestant countries to the Enlightenment or science, you can look at those videos and what I will say is the Protestant countries were the super carriers of a lot of this modern stuff, but they themselves were more immune to it than a lot of the populations they exposed it to because these new modern things were invented by Protestants. So it was part of their organic culture. Where North European Protestantism had this adaptive Faustian spirit to it that allowed it to take a lot of this Faustian Western ideas and not have it corrupt them. Where during The Enlightenment, the German and the English Enlightenment largely stayed religious, while the French one became significantly, significantly atheist. And there were exceptions like Hume was more so. I forget if Hume himself was religious, but his arguments were used predominantly for non religion. You had blank slatus like Goodwin. But during the Napoleonic Wars, England and Germany were religious, while France was exporting atheism, agnosticism and the German Enlightenment thinkers like Kant or Goethe or Hegel. These were deeply religious people and they were basing these ideas from Protestantism. People said that Hegel was practically a theologian. Kant was the same deal. A lot of them, like Kant was pulling from an esoteric Lutheran mystic named Swedenborg that was very popular at the time. You can see the suppression of the mystic, where Swedenborg in the early 18th century was very popular and he would talk about different. He talked about Dante's spirit world. But then Swedenborg was repressed. And Kant was into mysticism in his youth and he had to throw it out because it was too taboo. And so he said later, if you have these sort of experiences, you should go to an asylum. And this is part of religion and science agreeing to shoot the mystic in the late 17th century. And this meant that the west developed as a society because the mystic relates to perception, where religion removed from perception or direct contact with God and science removed from the context of the human condition. Because if you shoot perception, you've shot the ability to connect these dots. And we talk about that in both the death of God video and the rise of science video. And it's the same thing that repressed the Hermetica. And so after this point, Protestantism leaned more heavily on sola scriptura. And when you look at the 18th century, Protestant Europe was still heavily Protestant. It was the defining element of people's identity, but people got more chill about it. And you can see this in New England's trajectory, where America was founded by radical Protestants in many cases, between the Puritans in New England, the Quakers in Pennsylvan, the Calvinists in New York, and then you had the Anglicans in Virginia and originally the Presbyterians in Appalachia. But then the Baptists converted the south over the 18th century, the Puritans evolved into Congregationalists and Methodism and Lutheranism became popular in the middle states. And so when you look at New England, when you have authors like Nathaniel Hawthorne in the early 19th century, he is writing about how strict his Puritan ancestors were, because they no longer were. And they saw things like the witch trials. The witch trials died out later in America than they did in Europe. And he saw that his Puritan ancestors was sort of shame as they went too far. And at the time of the American Revolution, in New England's family genealogies, people would often write about, great Grandpa was super religious. Then grandpa got wealthier and loosened it up a bit. And then each generation the religion got weaker until the American Revolution, where you have thinkers like Thomas Jefferson who were. Thomas Jefferson was a Unitarian. And Unitarianism is a sect of Protestantism that's non trinitarian. And those who know me know that I love. I am a radical trinitarian. And Unitarians think God is one. And it was popular in Romania in the 16th century. 19th century is one of the earlier Protestant sects. And Unitarianism had a brief flowering in the early 19th century and then it lost popularity. It was part of that whole Emerson transcendental move. And then the evangelical push of the early 19th century made America more Christian than it was at the time of the Founding Fathers. These things oscillate back and forth with the late 17th century was more loose and degenerate. And then you had a religious breakthrough in the early 18th century, and then it loosened up again. And those shifts also occurred in Europe, where there was a big boost in Protestantism in Britain and Germany and the rest of Protestant Europe in the early to mid 19th century as a reaction to the Napoleonic wars and industrialization, where there was a moral panic that these city populations would not maintain Christianity due to the Industrial Revolution. So there was a big push to reconvert the cities back to Protestantism through the evangelical churches. And that worked over the 19th century until around World War I.
- [119:20]
A
That would be really interesting to examine because like the death of God in the cities, anything that worked even relatively remotely to reverse that at any time would be worth examining because that's. That's like a big problem. And then your example, or a big center of the problem, and then your example of how Thomas Jefferson was a utilitarian is a perfect example of how we talked about how people will examine the philosophies, but not the actual religious sects, which are much more informative around their overall value set. So like with Jefferson, we always debate was he influenced more by Rousseau or Locke, or what would he have thought about this in the modern politics, according to that, how those philosophies differed. But really what we should be looking at is like, how did Unitarianism impact Jefferson's conclusions?
- [120:11]
B
Yeah, Unitarian, I don't really know that much. Jefferson was part of a lot of the Founding Fathers. Were the Founding Fathers had complex and subtle views on religion, but a lot of them were sort of deists or hermetics. Where Jefferson, the Jefferson Bible is. He wrote out every quotation said by Jesus and made it a 100 page book that I have. And so he thought, let's just take the Bible, strip out everything except what Jesus said. And I don't think that would work because the Old Testament has this entire framework of all of these structures for how to maintain a society and how to have these harsh moral standards. And then the New Testament loosens that up so that you can have. Because Christ's salvation doesn't make sense without thousands of years of buildup with the
- [121:00]
A
Old Testament is the biblical history that tells us everything like wrong with humanity and then prophesizes Jesus himself. And like it's the. So the people who were like gathering that or, and prophesizing the Messiah, like that's a, that's a significant connection to like it's foundational to. Yeah.
- [121:27]
B
Merrick and I were once talking to my grandmother who's Unitarian and she said, I'm Unitarian, I attend church. I don't believe in Christ's divinity, I don't believe in hell, I don't believe in the resurrection, I don't believe in dogma. And I'm like, okay, so what's left? All of the elements of Christianity. And I was talking to a guy who said, oh, it's a tool of. Once you get to churches like that, they're leftist organizations where you want to maintain the social organization principles, you can continue to push leftist values.
- [121:58]
A
Right. It's like, I like apples but without the skin and also take out the core. And actually, you know, I don't really even want apples, toddler foods, to be
- [122:10]
B
clear, if people don't like that, I am criticizing various people's spiritual beliefs. I do not have coherent religious views. I am trying to figure stuff out. So I operate in a principle where I look around the world and I try to think this thing adds up, this thing doesn't add up. And so I view it as a sort of. I view my spiritual views as an open source process that I'm trying to cultivate and I'm trying to read, figure out. Okay, so we've gotten to the 19th century. We have the different Protestant sects established and Mormonism is one of the last ones that we haven't talked about where Mormonism developed an update in New York among New England Yankees. And it was seen as just an insane religion at the time because the Mormons believed that Christ came to America and preached to the natives. They practiced polygamy. Joseph Smith said that he had been given gold tablets by an angel and they claimed to be Protestant. And they faced profound social discrimination at the time where the local communities would often shoot Mormons, kick them out of towns, use the local forms against them. And they got kicked west, starting in Ohio, in Vermont, out to Missouri, and then they moved up to the Great Salt Lake around Utah, and they formed a distinct community in Utah. And the Mormons are known today for being some of the highest achieving, best acting, like most admirable groups of Americans. Even if a lot of Americans disagree with their theological beliefs.
- [123:51]
A
It's really. Mormons are really funny because if you think about it, it's completely insane. It's like this Joseph Smith guy. They're like the real Israel was in Utah because we found some saltwater and there was a C in the Bible and. But then like, so it's completely insane and they, they started their own thing. But we can't really, if we can't really like go after the Mormons theologically because if you look at them like, exactly like you said, they're the best group of people. They have like the best politics. Right. Like we talked about the value of evangelicals and stopping communism if you had to. But if you had to choose one sect to represent politics, it would be. The Mormons would probably get you the best result. They're more like libertarian and also not like unbound libertarians. So it's like it's easier to just ignore them because if you talk about the theology, like you have to point out that it's working. So it's like, let's just not talk about it and let the keep voting.
- [124:58]
B
The Mormons are the ultimate manifestation of the Faustian will. In an anthropological basis, Mormons are one of the most Western populations, right?
- [125:08]
A
Oh, yeah. Well, because they, I mean, they really did pioneer their own country. I mean, they were kind of similar to the Calvinists in that they saw this new world as an opportunity to start, like not only like a new nation or whatever, a new everything.
- [125:24]
B
Yeah, they're emblematic of 19th century booster culture where American Protestantism has this corporate element you don't see in the rest of the world, at least until recently, where a lot of Protestant churches have gotten. And the Mormons aren't commercialized. I don't think that's one of their core failings, but a lot of Protestant churches are. I find the prosperity gospel gross, where it's. If you believe in Christ, you're going to get rich. Or a lot of it is Christianity as therapy, where Christ is like a therapist who supports you. And you see that in a lot of especially big churches. And the final big sect of Protestantism to get to are actually the biggest. And they're American, the Pentecostalists. And the pentecostalists emerged in 1920s Los Angeles, where they're also part of booster culture. And LA had a lot of cults at the time. It was one of the places it was known for and it was part of the whole Californian cult culture where Aldous Huxley and Alan Watts were hanging out in California and people were doing drugs. But you had a lot of sects of Protestantism there that new sects that often parade off gullible migrants from the Midwest. So the biggest of these is the Pentecostals. And the Pentecostals, they work themselves up into a frenzy while they'll shake. And so they. I once went to. I've had a few interesting church experiences. I once. I went to two churches for influencers in Los Angeles. One of them was this house of church in the hills. Of all of these LA influencers who had three hour services where they'd shake, they said, thank you, Jesus. They're having PTSD convulsions in the room. And it was a strange experience. And they're more of that Pentecostalist aim. And the Pentecostalists are very popular in the Third World, especially Africa, where Africa is the big source of new Protestants lately. And Protestantism has been the most rapidly growing sect of Christ Christianity, predominantly due to Africa, but also Latin America and Asia, where for lots of these sects, a majority of them are in Africa. Most Quakers on Earth are in Kenya and East Africa. I believe most Anglicans are. And the conversions in Africa don't follow clear maps, but the Pentecostalists were popular because they hit into a lot of the local shamanic cultures. So I believe a majority of South Africa is Pentecostalist, concentrated among the black population. The whites there tend to be Dutch Reformed Church or Anglicans or English churches. Zimbabwe is majority Pentecostalist. I think the Pentecostalists have a big influence in Zambia or Nigeria, parts of West Africa. And the Pentecostalists, they're almost like there's a term called Rave Christianity where you go to a Christian rave and you take Molly and you dance. This is something people do.
- [128:18]
A
Wow. And I didn't even know that.
- [128:20]
B
Yeah. And so Pentecostalism, I think there's 800 million adherents around the world. It's a huge force and I wish I knew more about it. And I have a friend who's. He's trying to establish an independent city state in West Africa. And I told him, do you think the Pentecostals have innate spiritual potential? And his answer was no. He said, I don't think. He said, I think they're just. They're going to become. They're anti intellectual and they're a reaction to the issues. That's not going to fix it. I'm not as doubtful. I think when you throw that many conditions together, you're going to get creativity because Africa doesn't have strong social formations. You're putting people in altered states and the mix of local African shamanism with Christianity. And the Africans genuinely believe in Christianity vastly more than Western people do. And it's often of a magical variety. Where I read this book by a Christian missionary in Africa, by Christian missionaries talking about how to convert Asian populations, white populations and African populations. And he said in Africa you do so by talking about the magic of the church that he'd go to churches in Nigeria and say that Christ is a great sorcerer who will protect you and Christ will drive away demons. Because these are the concerns they have. And so Pentecostalism is this huge force in Africa and Protestantism is growing very rapidly in Africa. And I wish I knew more about that, but I don't have a lot of good sources on this. I don't know people who have studied it that deeply, etc.
- [129:56]
A
Well, it parallels with the invisible, what we were talking about with the evangelicals in the south where it's like you can criticize them as missing some element, but they may have the actual foundational element which is necessary to build off of which is that spirituality.
- [130:16]
B
Yes.
- [130:17]
A
Which we talked about earlier in the episode.
- [130:19]
B
I don't want to get into this, but when you're looking at new religions, a lot of you have to have the genuine connection to spirituality and you also have to have a coherent religious operating system that you can expand. The fathers of the Church, the Prophet of Muhammad were very clear at making a religious operating system that's logically coherent. You can expand. And I don't think that the Pentecostalists or the Baptists really have that now. So they could develop it, but that would require the sort of mental architects who could build that sort of thing.
- [130:56]
A
Yeah, but that's sort of the point of their spirituality is it's like that. Yeah. I don't know exactly how to go
- [131:04]
B
into that, oh man, the death of God is manifesting across all of this.
- [131:09]
A
There's something there that we need.
- [131:10]
B
So it's because you've cut off, by shooting the mystic, you cut off science from religion. It's. You can't. These genuinely spiritual groups, they're succeeding because they're as irrational as possible. In the south, it's because they've used the faith principle to override the sort of mystic intellectual axis of religion that you need for the higher level abstraction, logically putting things together. And that's why a lot of educated people dislike the Baptists, because they pick up on that.
- [131:42]
A
And you can add rationality onto spirituality, but you can't add spirituality on top of rationality. And that's kind of the core difference. So
- [131:52]
B
can. Yes. And as the final sub regions, there's been a huge wave of conversions to Protestantism in Latin America. A lot of countries in Latin America are nearly majority Protestant, especially so in Central America. In Brazil's like a quarter Protestant. And I was reading Alec Riri is the best historian of Protestantism and he said that the Protestants were well liked in Latin America and I guess the rest the of. Of the Third World, because I've read the same thing about the Karen people of Southeast Asia, because the Karen converted to baptism from American preachers, much like how American preachers started the Taiping Rebellion in China. And American preachers were instrumental in a lot of the opening up of China to the outside world or a lot of the development of Asia, like the anthropological categorization of India. But in Latin America, people liked Protestantism because it provided social order and it wasn't attached to the local corrupt elites. So people who converted to Protestantism, they had higher senses of social agency, they had higher senses of powerlessness because people grew disillusioned with the governments and with the social structures of the Catholic Church. So they'd convert to Protestantism and then they'd operate within these high trust Protestant communities that were not dependent upon the outside society. And so you end up with these islands of high trust Protestantism. And it's a comp. I would guess it's a comparable dynamic in Africa, where the missionaries have consistently been the people who brought civilization and higher culture to Africa. They're the people teaching literacy. They're the people telling you to like, not enslave your wife. They're the people who push for the end of stuff like human sacrifice. And these were all practices in Africa before European colonialism. And they were largely shut down by
- [133:47]
A
the missionaries, the American evangelical missionaries. Are totally badass. Like, people don't realize the kind of stuff they're doing is stuff that is, like, out of a completely different era in terms of risk taking and believing in what you're actually doing. Like. Like every element of authenticity that's missing from modern culture is perfectly alive. And the badassness of the missionaries.
- [134:16]
B
Yes. So to finish off with the death of God, it's this underlying variable that gradually added up, and there aren't a lot of clear demarcating variables. You can watch the video if you want to know more, but I say Darwin was a turning point for protestantism, where Darwinism pulled the warrior culture in north. In the north European Germanic countries that protestantism was originating from by pointing at the innate darwinistic brutality of life. And so when you look at the battles over religion in protestant countries, it tends to be creationism versus Darwinism. And so there was a big one in early 20th century America. There was a big one in 19th century Britain. And in most cases, it was a Protestant saying the world was made 6,000 years ago. And then a scientist saying, but dinosaurs are real. And this is the stupidest frame to fight religion over, because you've picked one of the least defensible religious arguments you could get. You could have a religious person argue about moral codes, about metaphysics, about any of this stuff, and then you have the secular person on their smartest thing, where you should push a secular person on, okay, why did you kill 150 million people? Why are none of your logical structures rationally consistent? Why do you have to say that reality doesn't exist for your system to work?
- [135:43]
A
And they can say, dinosaurs, bitch. I don't ask your questions.
- [135:47]
B
You can both be religious and believe in dinosaurs, and you saw a collapse in protestantism in the north European countries in the early 20th century. So as of now, England and the Netherlands in Australia are less than a quarter protestant, which is a huge historic shift. And it's been almost entirely negative in those societies where the death of God has been the death of these north European societies. For when they were Christian, they dominated the world. And then afterwards, they degraded into being pathetic. And then in America, Protestantism survived a few generations later. And our big religious collapse was in the 21st century, which we forget. It's the same thing as our birth rate collapse, Where America was, I think, over 80% Christian in the year 2000. In the 1990s, when you polled Americans, most Americans in the 90s basically wanted America to be a Christian theocracy. And Sam Huntington talks about that. In his book who Are We? Where most Americans in the 90s were opposed to homosexuality. They wanted Christianity to be taught in the schools. They said that America was an innately Christian society and the government should reflect that. So America had a secular elite that controlled the educational system and the government. And we were still a predominantly Christian society through the end of the 20th century. And the death of religion in America is in Europe. It occurred a few generations earlier, same thing as China and a few other countries. But in America, it was part of the mouse utopia process, where America lost its religion, ironically, only a decade before the Middle east did, at the same time as places like Vietnam or Thailand. So when you're looking at the decline of religion in America that's been precipitous over the 21st century, it's part of a global process that's not the earlier European decline of religion.
- [137:45]
A
And I mean, we examined why it lasted so long on one dimensions, which is the evangelicals. Yeah, but are there any other differences within, like, the regular or like the. The sects of Protestantism that overlap more with Europe? Like, are the American Presbyterians or Catholic American Catholics still more resistant to the death of God than the European Protestant Presbyterians and Catholics?
- [138:09]
B
The evangelicals are by far the most resistant because they operate out of faith and they don't really care about the logical consistency. So they don't have to deal with the logical issues of the death of God and be like Walter, my friend, and in Europe. So I was watching a debate about religion, and my mom said, rudyard, you have to keep in mind that when these secular people attack religion, they're attacking the functioning of a coherent society. And so the religious person is defending their entire worldview. And for the secular person, they're processing this on an entirely different level.
- [138:46]
A
Level, which is that they're just trying to degrade things that are stopping them from doing what they want in other domains.
- [138:56]
B
They're talking at each other. They're not talking to each other. Because my mom was religious. She didn't. She didn't approve of the secular perspective. And I'm trying to figure out how to tie this off. Things are getting worse now, but if there's one theme from this video, it's the massive adaptation, adaptability of Protestantism. Protestantism, as religions go, its great advantage is the ability to form a new sect or make a new Reformation that changes. And we have the ability to do that, still be religious today and make logically consistent religious structures. You just have to shoot the death of God. And that can Be done at any time. You should believe in yourself and follow your dreams. Actually, you should believe.
- [139:41]
A
You said, we need to shoot, shoot the death of God. To save God, we need to shoot the death of him. Right. And then, and then we can get back to how autism drives civilization and not sex as, as Freud suggested, autism. Do autism without having a spiritual base, otherwise you'll just kill a bunch of people.
- [140:04]
B
Autism does not just drive civilization. Mass virility does.
- [140:10]
A
Yeah, that's what I mean. I'm dissociating like autism comically with the male. But it's like the Roman Empire meme where like the girl is asking what are you thinking about to her boyfriend? And he's not thinking about her or sex. Right. Which is, which is what she wants him to think about. He's thinking about the Roman Empire.
- [140:29]
B
I don't like the way, I don't like the way we use the word autism because it's used as a sort of catch all and a degradation for things that, that don't fit the term. If you say anything smart, it's autistic. If you say anything descriptive, it's autistic. I have gone on periods where I'm making poetic descriptions of nature and like spiritual things. You'll call it autistic. And I'm thinking if you're calling the poetic autistic, that's the exact inverse of this. You're just using.
- [140:57]
A
I'm reclaiming the word anything that I like.
- [141:00]
B
This is why I avoid the Internet and it's why I avoid modern in society. Because you cannot talk about things because every word becomes its opposite and then words become meaningless. Then if you tell someone I want to talk about this thing, they'll say, I didn't mean that. Because the words have lost meaning. Where if people say like incel or chud or autistic and people say, oh, chud's a positive, chud's a negative. People say, oh, like the nothing ever happens meme. And I'm just like, this is just chattering children. Why must you guys do not convey words that have any value. So why should I treat you with any respect?
- [141:37]
A
Chud got they, they reversed the meaning of chud to apply it to men of action, to degradate like maga people or something as saying. As people who say nothing ever happens. Yeah, it's like listening. Yeah. So it's like, it's a reversal. But the, the core of the autism thing that relates to masculine is like the logical, the logical or whatever vision. But autism itself is like A mental disorder where that doesn't actually have anything to do. It's half connected because if you, if you lose part of your brain, you can only think logically, but it's not connected to the, like, positive aspects of it. So you say autism kind of like comically and endearing to reclaim. Reclaim that which is as a. As if you're in the libertarian community for a while, you have to. You have to reclaim the term autism screw.
- [142:36]
B
I dislike that our entire language has become mean. Can't we just say someone's smart? Can't wait to say. Made an articulate point. Because every single people are only willing to say things if they're mean. Like, I just compliment people and people are shocked when I compliment them because people will be like, oh my God. Like, I don't. There's all. People have to couch everything they say in cynicism and deflection. And I mean, I deal with a lot of the Internet discourse. It's like I'm walking past a bunch of. You have a chicken coop and the chickens just cluck at each other. It doesn't convey meaning. They're just making noise to feed off their chicken clucking group network. And that's what a lot of the Internet feels like.
- [143:18]
A
Yeah, totally. Which relates. Ties into our conversation in a very interesting way and. Yeah, but I didn't. I'm not able to make the connection at the moment.
- [143:28]
B
Okay, well, I'll catch you next week for the cultural history of America.
- [143:33]
A
Yes. And, oh, yeah, there was. There was one more thing you said about Calvinism where they. It was like it was the origin of the concept of positive freedom. So we don't have to go back on that. But I just thought that was interesting. So maybe someone can find that Easter egg in the episode.
- [143:50]
B
That's a good point.
- [143:52]
A
Also, look into my other show. I just released an episode on Iran which I had fun making. So if you want to check it out, Austin Padgett, Ludwig Never mises is the at. But it's. It's on YouTube.
- [144:03]
B
I watched part of it.
- [144:04]
A
The link is in. Sorry. What's up?
- [144:06]
B
I watched part of it. You did a good job.
- [144:08]
A
Oh, thank you. There you go. So go check that out if you're out of History 102 content.
- [144:14]
B
Okay, bye bye.
- [144:15]
A
All right. Peace.
- [144:17]
B
History 102 by Rudyard lynch and Austin Padgett is a podcast from Turpentine, the network behind Moment of Zen live players and econ102. If you like the episode, subscribe, follow on YouTube forward to a friend and let us know what else you want us to cover. Thank you for listening. Carvana is so easy. Just a click and we've got ourselves a car. See so many cars. That's a clicktastic inventory.
- [144:44]
A
And check out the financing options payments
- [144:47]
B
to fit our budget. I mean, that's Clickonomics101. Delivery to our door. Just a hop, skip and a click away and bought. No better feeling than when everything just clicks. Buy your car today on Carvana. Delivery fees may apply.