Catholics, Methodists, and Southern Baptists: The old Middle America isn't dead

• Another post sort of about same-sex marriage: Looking at its churches, Middle America's on life support, having survived the Sixties takeover around 1973 but obviously defeated. But still with impressive numbers, though apparently a minority. Let's look at America's churches. The biggest and thus most important ones STILL oppose gay marriage. Number one in every respect except size when counted against all Protestants together, the Catholic Church. That opposition will never officially change; it's impossible according to our teachings. But as everyone who's seen the mainstream news knows, "Survey Says." There is huge dissent among nominal Catholics, who go along with the mainstream. Catholics who still go to Mass are more likely to agree with the church. (Becoming more and more so again as the old liberals die and the young who don't believe just leave. We will be the great Cardinal Spellman's church again, but in miniature.) The Sixties including Vatican II eliminated Catholicism as a threat to the American way, the, ignorant, do-it-your-way, Protestant way; it fulfilled American Protestants' dream of swallowing up, assimilating, the country's huge Catholic minority. (From the news: Fordham's not really Catholic anymore.) Let's look at the mainline Protestants, once America's backbone, the country's founders. Few surprises: the small but once prestigious pillars of WASP high society have dominoed. Once at first place, the Episcopalians, AND their ethnic-Scottish runner-up, the PC(USA) Presbyterians. The big episcopalianized (semi-merged) Lutheran denomination, ELCA (the old Scandinavian immigrant synods), is on board too. All three have gay marriage as a local option, meaning local ministers, and Episcopal dioceses, bishops, can refuse. (The Neuhaus principle: optional orthodoxy isn't orthodoxy.) The Congregationalism of the Pilgrims, the United Church of Christ, is the most liberal; I've been told there's no opting out. But America's biggest mainline denomination, the United Methodist Church, is still officially opposed, but with widespread dissent much like American Catholicism. And let's head to the South: the Southern Baptist Convention of course says no. So, Catholics, Methodists, and Southern Baptists: that sounds like a big chunk of the country. The social-justice warriors, the Christian heretics of the white elite who are really fighting this civil war (not the gays themselves; they're too small), have their work cut out for them. The old Middle America's not down for the count (and no, we don't want to pick on gays; we want to live and let live). By the way, a tiny religious minority, America's Eastern Orthodox bishops, speaking through their conference, predictably are on the right side, speaking like the estranged Catholic true bishops they are. (If any non-Orthodox Americans noticed that, the Jews made up another Polack joke on the spot, and the boomer WASPs said, "Let me hear you say, 'Chizburger chizburger,' bishops, ha ha.")
• My usual American Independence Day ramble. Regular readers know: George III, our Christian king, was right. Moving right along: is the Special Relationship real or was it just Harold Macmillan's wishful thinking? (Or before that, a way to sucker America into World War II, which it sensibly should have sat out. Even before that, the anglophiles, progressives, were hawks for World War I. A Protestant crusade to wipe out Catholic Europe.) I've read that it was his way of trying to still run the empire, trying to be a wise old tutor giving the Americans advice; the Americans such as Kennedy thought he was a pest.
• Canada: What might have been? If America had stayed in the empire, might British America have become a Burkean Tory society I might have liked? (Bring back the Red Ensign.) Or was the liberalization of the British world (so American anglophiles tend to be lefty snobs, europhiles, not conservatives who love the royals) inevitable because of the "Reformation," furthered by the "Enlightenment" of which our rebellion was a part? (It was really the continuation of the Seven Years' War, the perennial rivalry between Britain and France; royal France supported the rebels to spite its old enemy.) I've long thought, since Canada got more but worse, mostly unusable arctic, land than the U.S. eventually took, its little socialist paradise is really parasitic, living off the big, bad capitalist dynamo of the U.S. while thinking it's better than us. National health care? (Which the American Catholic bishops have wanted since 1919; political opinions aren't doctrine.) Easy to do when you have a much smaller population than the U.S., which lives mostly right on the U.S. border where the best land is. Canada could survive without us (it has a breadbasket, its Midwest, the Prairie Provinces, and other resources) but would be much poorer.
• Probably clickbait, but: White professor calls for white mass suicide because of slavery guilt. Let me translate: "For thee (hey, that's a sin: "Othering!") but not for me." "You jump first." They wish all conservative whites would just die already. They'd still rule the world with their token black friends and grateful nonwhite underclass for them to benevolently rule, or so they really think; dumbasses. Pride goeth before a fall. And/or: hipster's trying to get some caramel sugar. Hey, I hear Rachel Doležal's available.
• George Takei mouths off, calling Clarence Thomas "a clown in blackface." Fine, George. Rachel Doležal's black because she probably buys into your ideology and Clarence Thomas is not. Happy? Dare I say, gay? Oh, and your show was just a pretentious version of "Gilligan's Island."
• Can't scare the Hair. I like Donald Trump. Maybe his campaign is just a publicity stunt and he's probably on the wrong side of much culture-wars stuff but the left hates him and he's not backing down. By the way, César Chavez opposed illegal immigration and I'm part Hispanic.
• Speaking of the right kind of anglophiles (Catholic AND "the English way"; as with me, Catholicism in English speaks to them with the idiom, not the content, of the 1928 Book of Common Prayer), the two ordinariate parishes in the Philadelphia area are thinking about merging, so "St. James the Less, Jr.," St. Michael's now meeting at a parish church in Northeast Philly, and "Good Shepherd, Jr.," Blessed John Henry Newman meeting at a parish church in Strafford, would unite at Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Bridgeport. Recently went to Mass at Mater Ecclesiae in Berlin, NJ, where they've modified the Leonine prayers so when the vigil Low Mass ends around 6, they pray the Angelus. I said the collect from the 1928 BCP (which it uses for the Annunciation, translated from a Latin collect, I think from the Gelasian sacramentary) from memory. Honoring some good people past and present.
• Photo: Revolutionary War re-enactors in Mount Holly, NJ. Actually some redcoats were Americans, hono(u)rable people. (No revolution, no Noah Webster spite spelling.) The Loyalists who settled what became Canada.