“I haven’t found evidence to bear out what you are saying, while finding evidence that even when an individual’s level of observance is lessening, he still identifies as observant.”
Unless a poll asked, “do you use the word frum to describe yourself,” it really doesn’t have any relevance. Frum does not directly translate at “observant.” I think it means “burdened” technically. I’m not saying people like SarahLevine are not observant. It carries a certain connotation by virtue of the fact that it’s yiddish. Case and point, I bet Avi K could never use it to describe himself as much of his CR career has consisted of criticizing Yiddish and Ashkenazi pronunciation.
Like I said to Avi earlier, the point about not having labels for subsets might sound nice to a lot of people, but it carries no water logically speaking. There is a camp that will enlist in the IDF, and there’s a camp that won’t. The differences between the MO and Charedim today are not a fine line like people might like. It’s usually more than obvious. So, it’s only natural that there would be words to identify this difference.
I’m not sure what you were going for in the last paragraph. You seem to imply that I called others something derogatory or that I’m concerned with how to label others, which is dishonest. I did not call the MO anything other than MO. It was how I chose to label myself that caused your reaction. We all draw the point somewhere. Even the Conservative Jew who drives to shul on Shabbos thinks he’s being religious, but we know he’s not. There were accepted norms on where to draw that line for a long time, and the MO came in to upset and change those norms in the name of progress and survival in the modern era. That was their agenda, and it’s their right to believe in it, but I do not agree with it nor have I ever pretended to. And, I’m not going to change the way I talk to mesh with an agenda with which I don’t agree.