r/ContraPoints • u/fancyschmancyapoxide • 5d ago
A missed point?
There is a point I think would have been interesting to explore in Conspiracy that Natalie got tantalisingly close to but only seemed to brush up against; the overlap between conspiracism and puritanism, and maybe calvinist protestantism. The fact that so many of these examples are tied to "the devil" is worth paying attention to, and would have been interesting to explore further, because this obsession with "the devil" seems to be something way more prevalent in US American christianity. I mean, one of the more objectionable Puritan beliefs to the church in England was the idea that the Puritanical devil could be considered an opponent to god, since they considered god to be infallible, and therefore elevating the devil to a rival position was heretical. I'd love to know what the incidence of conspiracism is like in countries and colonies with a more conventional protestant foundation. I live in Australia and if you spouted off about the devil here you'd be looked at like a weirdo, even in christian spaces (or at least the ones I used have to go to). To be clear I know it's already a super long video and if you devoted time to every factor of the issue it would be nine times longer; this is not a criticism. It just felt like Natalie kind of skipped over the whole devil part of all of these examples, but "the devil" has way less of a presence outside the US. Anyone got some insight into this?
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u/Aware-Seaworthiness2 5d ago
I'm from Europe and grew up in a strict Catholic environment, not the one you typically encounter on most catholics.
There's a branch of Catholicism that adheres to strict traditional rules and sees the modernizing of the church as the influence of Satan himself, these folks believe that the modern Catholic church is doing censorship to itself cause the devil has corrupted the church.
So I would disagree with you, there's plenty of more examples but yeah, satanic panic is not strictly a protestant thing and not exclusive to America, I think all of Abrahamic religions are somewhat susceptible to it
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u/AdditionalHouse5439 5d ago
I think the reason you sensed this and she ignored it in this video is because she made a whole “Tangent” video on Patreon about Satanism while researching and building this main video, where she dispatched a lot of those ideas about Satan and the very long history of similar satanic-conspiracy revolts in western society where people get convinced some group is eating babies.
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u/squidrama 5d ago
Yes I was actually feeling the opposite way to OP, like she was somehow retreading ground already covered in another video until I realised it was a tangent.
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u/sweet_jane_13 4d ago
I watched the tangent after the main video, and really enjoyed it in that order. A deeper dive into one part of the longer video
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u/fancyschmancyapoxide 4d ago edited 4d ago
Oh! I didn't know that. I'm not on the patreon yet.
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u/bellasketchupbottle 4d ago
If you’re interested, she made 3 videos on there last year that directly tie into Conspiracy: Granola Fascism (more about N*zis and the Qanon Shaman) Spirituality (a lot in there about conspirituality) and Satanism.
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u/wiklr 5d ago
Idk much about protestanism. Growing up catholic, demons, spirits and posessions have such a chokehold on the lay person. But in school, like relgious class / theology, these beliefs are not endorsed. They are mentioned in bible stories but it's stressed not to take them literally. We even had a class demystifying Jesus' miracles to ground it to reality. I know people who dont believe in depression, instead thinks it's a type of dark mark by some kind of entity. It's wild.
This topic can be expanded to catholic-core conspiracies. Irrc even the qanon was able to target Catholics in particular ans treating Trump like the second coming of Christ. Also add JD converting to Catholicism.
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u/fancyschmancyapoxide 4d ago
That is so fascinating. It's scholasticism vs. humanism. Centuries of catholic texts from the scholastic model that were written to be read a specific way (allegorically, anagogically etc but not literally), that then got interpreted by people who weren't trained to read them after the reformation and the shift to humanism. Then you have all these sects popping up because "it says it right here" but that's not what the writer meant for it to say, and not how a scholar would have read it when it was written.
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u/NOT_ImperatorKnoedel 3d ago
I think to some extent all religions have this issue where the beliefs of the common believer don't actually match up all too well with what is supposed to be the official doctrine.
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u/bonzogoestocollege76 3d ago
With Catholics in particular a significant gap exists between magisterial teaching and just the average life of a person. Tons of technicalities and rules people just learn to elide cause they don’t really make sense.
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u/bonzogoestocollege76 3d ago
Okay so an issue here is that people are treating Catholics and Protestants like schools of thought rather than denominations. There are Biblically literalist Catholics just as there are historical-critical Protestants. Trends in thought and scholarship transcend religious denominations and much biblical interpretation historically has been Protestant in nature. German Lutherans reading Kant and Hegel read the book differently than Anglican clerics reading Locke and Berkeley.
It’s easy to oversimplify these religions but it should be kept in mind that ALL denominations intersected with different linguistic and philosophical attitudes in the countries they exist in. Christians in US and Britain took on Analytic Philosophy to discuss Scholasticism while Christians in Germany and France interacted with Continental thought.
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u/monkeedude1212 5d ago
I'm not sure what more you want her to elaborate on than the dualism section covered that describes the generality across all conspiracies of a "good" vs "evil" force.
What is it about Puritanism or Satanism that's interesting that isn't covered there?
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u/fancyschmancyapoxide 4d ago
I guess coming at it from the other direction as a point of contrast. Here we see dualism is a key part of conspiracy, but is conspiracism as prevalent in other countries founded by dualistic faiths, abrahamic or otherwise? Using QAnon as an example, it would be like, was QAnon as big outside the US? If not, do other countries have their own versions? Or do other faiths? Does the most represented religious group in a country make a difference? Or the group that founded it? What are the parallels? That kind of thing. But like I said, I get the video has a defined scope that is clearly communicated.
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u/No-Ladder7740 4d ago
Much as I'm fully on board with blaming the prods for everything Catholics are just as bad. I mean the Da Vinci Code is basically what you get if you listen to a certain kind of Catholic for half an hour and then type it out with added adjectives.
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u/CarlosimoDangerosimo 5d ago
Counterpoint: Gorge, it was already a long video as is. At some point you need to somewhat defeat the stereotypical breadtuber allegations.
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u/ContraPoints Everyone is Problematic 5d ago
One early line of thinking I was exploring with that part of video was this hypothesis that satanic panics are a particularly Protestant, and especially Puritan phenomenon. It’s partly true—the emphasis on Satan as an active force, the basically anti-Catholic suspiciousness toward rituals in general. But I kind of moved away from the idea once I started researching the Taxil Hoax, where French Catholics synthesized an extremely similar satanic panic about the Freemasons. I think there’s also kind of a self-own here on the part of Catholics, where in the Middle Ages they invented the fantasy of Satanism by imagining Catholicism upside-down—the Black Mass, literal cannibal sacraments, etc. As a result, the popular image of Satanism is still basically “Evil Catholicism,” a trope so prevalent that American Protestants now regularly encounter Catholic rituals and conclude, “my God, these people are Satanists!”