#I got here from staranise linking to a few articles about enjoying problematic content

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Christianity, Orthodoxy, and Problematic Content

Morning, world. I just woke up, so we'll see whether I can actually make this coherent or not. Christians tend to (not all Christians, but an awful lot of Christians) be very concerned with having the exact right set of beliefs, or "orthodoxy". Which English translation of the Bible is the best one? Is salvation achieved through faith alone, or faith and works? Exactly how is the end of the world going to play out? Religions don't intrinsically have to focus that intensely on right belief. For instance, I hear that Buddhism is much more concerned about what you do (meditation etc) than what you believe. This is specifically a Christian thing. So it makes sense when Christians get very worked up about what sorts of books their children read and what movies they watch and what movies they listen to, sometimes to the extent of marking vast swaths of popular culture as off limits. Everything (in this worldview) either helps Christians become better Christians or it tempts them to evil. There's no "well, maybe this particular book is good for some people and bad for others" or "maybe everyone can decide for themselves" or "maybe talking to kids about evil will give them the tools they need to not be tempted by Satan", there's only right and wrong. There's been something kind of bothering me about the way people talk about "problematic content", and I just figured out what it was yesterday evening. When I think of media that way, it's a patchwork: on this show, this episode had a really compassionate and solid portrayal of a disabled person but this other episode handled disability in a way that really bugged me, and here's how I think it does on racial representation, and here's how I think it does on female characters, and yeah there's a lot of annoying heterosexual romance as though the shows creators think it's mandatory but also this one episode was clearly using metaphor to talk about queerness in a way that really resonated... So when people talk about "problematic content" as though any given work is either entirely problematic or not problematic at all, and as though it's going to hit the same way for every person (no room for eg some queer people to love Rocky Horror and others to find it annoying and weird) and as though it's a quality of the work itself rather than something that happens in a wider context (for instance, Frozen being created in a context where Disney already had an awful lot of "princess" movies with all-white casts, and in turn in a wider context of white characters in general getting far more representation than people of color, so that it's less about Frozen as a single work and more about the wider pattern of racial representation throughout the entire culture) ...then it's kind of like, are we even living in the same world here? Because your assumptions are not my assumptions. And they rather sound like assumptions that take the basic worldview of conservative Christianity -- good and evil, right belief and heresy -- and just changing the paint job. But there doesn't have to be orthodoxy. There can, and should be, heterodoxy: people understanding the world in different ways, people believing what makes sense to them based on their own lived experience (and thing is, people tend to have different life experiences from each other, even if you can find commonalities) and their own ability to reason, people tolerating different worldviews. You could be wrong. Statistically, every one of us is wrong about some things, even some things that we feel absolutely sure about. It is fundamentally good, not just acceptable but good, when not everybody agrees on everything.