What is a common thing or trope that always seem to happen?
- Thread starter Viking25
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I think a surviving flourishing Christian population in Japan would have separate institutions from the Shinto-Buddhist population but I think the Christians can take advantage of the decline of the Shinto-Buddhist population if they play their cards well.
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What exactly would cause the Shinto-Buddhist population to decline, and why exactly would it not affect the Christian population?
They are facing a decline IOTL in the present and the Christians can take advantage of that decline due to a different culture if the decline still exists.
The problem is that Christianity is also experiencing a decline at the same time, so to "take advantage" you would have also to eliminate the decline of Christianity as well.
Best way to do that is to prevent the fall of Constantinople in 1453.
Another way to prevent the fall of Christianity is to prevent the American Revolution as the Church and State being united will become the norm.
I mean, the separation of Church and State was already starting even before the American Revolution. The rise of Enlightenment ideals in Europe, Martin Luther and the waning power of the Catholic Church were well in motion by this point.
But there will be no precedent of removing the control of the Church and the Monarchy in Europe if there was no American Revolution, so the French Revolution will be more difficult to justify in this timeline.
No idea because I haven't gotten to that part yet, but a summary would help.
I've never been able to find the right mood for initially reading the story enough to make it my primary focus long enough to get through to the end. I honestly barely know anything about it but the basic premise of the story.
I do qgree you need a POD before the American Revolution, but I dont think the US independence itself did impact christian influence that much despite being a secular state since it was still a majorly christian country that still featured references to God everywhere within its system("In God we trust" and all of that), I think the French Revolution was far more devastating to it due to the De-Christianization of France considering the fact that France was seen as the heart of Roman Catholicism and its model of Secularism deeply affected the others(including the american one)
I would actually say that the United States was a negative influence in the sense of being the most openly and stridently religious of the Western powers during the 19th and 20th centuries. So there is no guarantee that there is a correlation between the decline of religion and the existence of the United States of America.
Yeah, if anything America delayed the decay of religious influence for quite a while before it too went secular in the late 20th century
In any case stuff like the revolutions and the Protestant Reformation arent the cause of that decline and recognising that is important, they were symptoms
We got stuff like Sola Scriptura because the Church's traditions werent seen as compatible with the Word of God anymore, we got Anglicanism because preserving the royal line was seen as more important than religious duties by european monarchs, we got Calvinism because the Church couldnt convincingly conciliate Free Will and Omniscience, we got Luther because of Church corruption treating God's forgiveness as a commodity, we got Anticlericalism due to clerical exploitation of the people and the countries that we did see rebelling against Catholicism were being screwed by church authorities for quite some time - the Pope did everything he could to undermine the french state(and vice & versa), England nearly went bankrupt many times while the monasteries held an absurd amount of wealth and the rest of the Christendom did nothing while it was invaded many times(the very reason it became anglo-saxon), Germany was kept split into hundreds of vassal states to secure church authority on the region and its people used as cannon fodder for centuries, the Spanish Netherlands were... Well, the Spanish Netherlands, do I even need to talk about that disaster?
And thats all happening with also the context of the Colonisation of America where Christianity became seen as a hypocrite tool of european domination while it's main ideals of compassion, forgiveness and devotion to Love as God were put aside in the name of love for money even if that money was made on the backs of millions of indigenous and african people tortured and murdered for cash, and then we got ideas of racial superiority and material utopias...
I'd say moment where the Christendom looked more like it was following "Positive Christianity" rather than Catholicism was the moment the Church fell in the West, and everything after that was the path to Nazi Germany
It's kind of hard to remember that when 40+ Presidents and several hundred, probably thousands, of American officials including Congressmen, Senators, Secretaries of Federal Departments, Judges of all Courts, Sheriffs, Generals, Admirals, etc., covering virtually every branch and scale of the American civil service...
...harp on and on about how God blesses America, their own actions are the expression of God's will, or variations on this "we are a Christian nation founded under God" theme.
Come on, they are literally the only country in the world that decided it was a great idea to mount a mediatic criminal lawsuit, mobilizing the Department of Justice in full force... against a school teacher for the terrible "crime" of talking to his students about evolution.
Eventually, there comes a point where it becomes unbelievable that all these people are speaking only on their own behalf instead of on behalf of the entire country.