Yes you are right that there are a lot of catholic people, we are talking about _culture_.

How many TV shows, movies, or songs have come out in the last 10 years that featured Catholics in any way or catholic imagery, or even just general traditional values? Like maybe 1?

How many TV shows, movies, and songs have come out featuring gay people or gay culture? A huge number.

Compare this state to the 60's when the hippies were the counterculture, how many mainstream movies and shows came out featuring them? Were they the cultural mainstream? The answer is obviously no. Movies of that day were being made by the then-mainstream trads.

We were never talking about representation in government. If you want to have an honest conversation about religious representation in government you will very quickly be labeled an anti-semite.

There is no contradiction in what I'm saying. It's the norm for media, especially film, to be produced about marginal groups. How many movies are made about mercenaries or hit men or fathers with "a certain set of skills" whose daughters are Taken? A huge number.

The opposite is also true. How may TV shows, movies, or songs have come out in the last 10 years that featured a guy working in a cubicle making Excel spreadsheets all day? Were they the cultural mainstream? The answer is obviously no.

> We were never talking about representation in government

Who wasn't? Culture isn't just what's streaming on Netflix. It's what people live every day of their lives. Hippies in the 60s weren't counterculture because they were making memes. They were counterculture because they were creating communities that were counter to the mainstream culture of the rest of the country -- communal rather than individualistic, based on chosen family rather than biological family, in pursuit of enlightenment rather than material success, etc.

>If you want to have an honest conversation about religious representation in government you will very quickly be labeled an anti-semite.

There it is! The anti-semitic dog whistle that is the foundation of so much "trad" identity. Literally 100% of US presidents are Christian but somehow it's the Jews who are in control of everything. And if everything is degenerate and wrong, then Jews are the ones promoting a conspiracy to undermine and destroy America.

This is literally the same underpinnings as Nazi Germany. No wonder there is so much overlap between "Trads" and white supremacy.

idk I never said anything about Jews, but calling people a Nazi is a great way to shut down conversation.

I love Jewish people, I have many friends who are Jewish, I have no problem with their representation anywhere. In fact, I have seriously considered joining the Jewish faith.

I am just saying if you go down the path of comparing religious representation in government, you are literally not allowed to have an honest conversation without doing exactly what you just did. All you have to say is "I found the dog whistle, this conversation is over".

> It's what people live every day of their lives. I see Pride stickers and representation in all forms of media every single day for the LGBT community. How is that not what we are all living every day of our lives?

At this point we're just trying to define what culture actually is.

> If you want to have an honest conversation about religious representation in government you will very quickly be labeled an anti-semite.

You literally said that you can't talk about how Jews (allegedly) have too much power in government. This is a classic anti-semitic trope. To say so and then respond with

> idk I never said anything about Jews, but calling people a Nazi is a great way to shut down conversation.

is dishonest and cowardly.

> I see Pride stickers and representation in all forms of media every single day for the LGBT community. How is that not what we are all living every day of our lives?

What is your conclusion? That pride stickers give people power of some sort? If that were true, transgender people wouldn't be 4x more likely to be victims of violent crimes.

Representation in pop culture is not power. Power is the ability to create and enforce laws, or the ability to not be shot and killed for your religious beliefs, as happened when 11 Jews were killed in a Pittsburgh synagogue -- killed by a man who followed neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Their killer would no doubt agree with you that "traditional" values were under attack, and that you couldn't even talk about it without being labeled an anti-semite.

https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/press/ncvs-trans-pres...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittsburgh_synagogue_shooting

Alright well I was genuinely trying to engage in good faith discussion here, but you seem angry.

I really don't believe that we can have any kind of productive outcome here. As I said, I don't hate anyone, I don't even have a problem with any of the representation that I'm talking about.

I was simply pointing out that the fact that I see these symbols plastered everywhere, including at Target, means that this is no longer an underground counterculture kind of thing. It's very mainstream.

If you want to insist on projecting your ideas that the world is filled with secret Nazis do it with someone else.

You do realize there’s an entire TV network based out of Birmingham Alabama for all that stuff

Can you think of a major network where the focus was on Christian themes in a way like queer eye is about LGBT+ themes?

The last one I can think of was "Touched By an Angel" and that is over 20 years old now.

Even this is wrong. The Hallmark channel makes 40 Christmas movies a year, all of them with Christian families, obviously. (Some allow for a character who is Jewish.) These movies attract millions of viewers.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/tonifitzgerald/2021/12/24/the-e...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathanberr/2019/01/11/widely-...

Wait until they find out who wrote most of those Christmas tin pan alley songs

It’s not a surprise to anyone who has studied show business at all. The Boscht belt and its associated Jewish entertainment circuit was a critical incubator of talent for our nations popular music.

No one is hiding any of this, and it’s trivial to read a memoir from many musicians and see a story about how they wanted to feel more included in the increasingly secularized holidays so they wrote music that was about the stuff that included in them.

The idea that an underserved market is able to be farmed by a niche cable network supports my thesis. The hallmark channel kind of explicitly Christian entertainment is counter cultural rather than mainstream.

There's a difference between people "doing what they've always done" or coasting on cultural inertia e.g. people who are Catholic and that means they go to a Catholic church but otherwise has a very small effect on their life and people intentionally choosing to join a subculture, e.g. convert to Catholicism or rededicate themselves to a religion after being one of the folks "doing what they've always done".

The norm these days is for people to fall away from their religion, not to join one. I think this is obvious for anyone to see, but Pew has done lots of surveys on the decline of Christianity in America: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/modeling-the...