Mr Breakfast

 

Here is our man Formscapes again. I commented on "Mr Breakfast" and one of his videos about the GenZ revival before.

>>>Recently (ish) the channel "religion for breakfast" released a video which addressed the "zoomer religious revival" phenomenon. In the video, Mr Breakfast argues that this phenomenon isn't actually occurring, and that the headlines claiming otherwise are all misleading, and presents a decent pile of survey/statistical data which seems to suggest that no such revival is happening.

>>>This, my friends, is a great example of why quantifiable data should never be trusted more than your own eyeballs. Source; my eyeballs. What the statistical data does show is that there had been a very pronounced downward trend in religiosity over the past few decades, and that this downward trend seems to be coming to a halt. But, argues Mr Breakfast, this halt of a downward trend is not a "revival" because there has not been an uptick in church attendance, professed religiosity, conversions, etc... >>>Statistical data is, I ven under the best of circumstances, a sawed-off shotgun among epistemological tools, due to the fact that it is extremely reductive and abstract, and - significantly - because the extent of this glossing is usually not fully clear to people. >>>In this case, what those numbers aren't accounting for is the fact that not all human beings are equal in terms of cultural influence. Among any generation of people, you are going to have a very large majority of people who are just kind of "going with the vibe", and a very small minority of people who are standing on the razor's edge between present and future. The latter are what the kids these days refer to as "main character energy", so I'm told. >>>So if you want to understand the direction a given zeitgeist is headed in, you shouldn't be taking of surveys of everyone as though everyone were equal. You need to look to the "main character energy" people and see what they are doing, bc in very short order, the "just going with the vibe" people will be following along with the trail being cleared by the former. >>>When I - a millennial - was in my late teens and early twenties, all of us "main character" kids were into things like Marxism, new atheism and postmodernism. No statistical study performed in 2008 would have predicted that in 15 years, those ideas would have leaked into every aspect of pop culture. But anyone paying attention could have told you that, bc they could see with their own eyeballs that those were the topics of interest to all of the people of that generation who were undoubtedly going to become novelists, opinion piece writers, screenplay writers and academics in the coming decades. >>>The current religious revival is like that. Look at the people who are suddenly converting to Orthodoxy and Catholicism. They aren't the "go with the vibes" kids. They are the cerebral, autistic nerds who will be novelists, opinion havers, screenplay writers, etc in the next decade or two. >>>Now to be clear, I don't think that this is a good thing - for reasons I'll be getting into in my next unscripted rant video, so stay tuned for that - but it is definitely happening, and that is in fact what the statistical data shows if you have eyeballs with which to see what the statistical data is actually about. >>>Nothing is Hidden™️

Original text here:

Formscapes comments Mr Breakfast