#christian atheists

[jessicalprice]

culture isn’t modular

I did a thread (actually several) on Twitter a few years ago about Christianity’s attempts to paint itself as modular, and I’ve been seeing them referenced here in the cultural christianity Discourse, and a few people have DMed me asking me to post it here, so here’s a rehash of several of those threads:

A big part of why Christian atheists have trouble seeing how culturally Christian they still are is that Christianity advertises itself as being modular, which is not how belief systems have worked for most of human history. 

A selling point of Christianity has always been the idea that it's plug-and-play: you don't have to stop being Irish or Korean or Nigerian to be Christian, you don't have to learn a new language, you keep your culture. 

And you’re just also Christian.

(You can see, then, why so many Christian atheists struggle with the idea that they’re still Christian--to them, Christianity is this modular belief in God and Jesus and a few other tenets, and everything else is... everything else. Which is, not to get ahead of myself, very compatible with some tacit white supremacy: the “everything else” is goes unexamined for its cultural specificity. It’s just Normal. Default. Neutral.)

Evangelicals in particular love to contrast this to Islam, to the idea that you have to learn Arabic and adopt elements of Arab culture to be Muslim, which helps fuel the image of Islam as a Foreign Ideology that's taking over the West.

The rest of us don’t have that particular jack

Meanwhile, Christians position Christianity as a modular component of your life. Keep your culture, your traditions, your language and just swap out your Other Religion Module for a Christianity Module.

The end game is, in theory, a rainbow of diverse people and cultures that are all one big happy family in Christ. We're going to come back to how Christianity isn't actually modular, but for the moment, let's talk about it as if it had succeeded in that design goal. 

Even if Christianity were successfully modular, if it were something that you could just plug in to the Belief System Receptor in a culture and leave the rest of it undisturbed, the problem is most cultures don't have a modular Belief System Receptor. Spirituality has, for the entirety of human history, not been something that's modular. It's deeply interwoven with the rest of culture and society. You can't just pull it out and plug something else in and have the culture remain stable.

(And to be clear, even using the term “spirituality” here is a sop to Christianity. What cultures have are worldviews that deal with humanity’s place in the universe/reality; people’s relationships to other people; the idea of individual, societal, or human purpose; how the culture defines membership; etc. These may or may not deal with the supernatural or “spiritual.”)

And so OF COURSE attempting to pull out a culture's indigenous belief system and replace it with Christianity has almost always had destructive effects on that culture.

Not only is Christianity not representative of "religion" full stop, it's actually arguably *anomalous* in its attempt to be modular (and thus universal to all cultures) rather than inextricable from culture.

Now, of course, it hasn't actually succeeded in that--the US is a thoroughly Christian culture--but it does lead to the idea that one can somehow parse out which pieces of culture are "religious" versus which are "secular". That framing is antithetical to most cultures. E.g. you can't separate the development of a lot of cultural practices around what people eat and how they get it from elements of their worldview that Christians would probably label "religious." But that entire *framing* of religious vs. secular is a Christian one.

Is Passover a religious holiday or a secular one? The answer isn't one or the other, or neither, or both. It's that the framing of this question is wrong.

And Christianity isn’t a plugin, however much it wants to be

Moreover, Christianity isn't actually culture-neutral or modular. 

It's easy for this to get obscured by seeing Christianity as a tool of particular cultures' colonialism (e.g. the British using Christianity to spread British culture) or of whiteness in general, and not seeing how Christianity itself is colonial. This helps protect the idea that “true” Christianity is good and innocent, and if priests or missionaries are converting people at swordpoint or claiming land for European powers or destroying indigenous cultures, that must be a misuse of Christianity, a “fake” or “corrupted” Christianity.

Never mind that for every other culture, that culture is what its members do. Christianity, uniquely, must be judged on what it says its ideals are, not what it actually is. 

Mistaking the engine for the exhaust

But it’s not just an otherwise innocent tool of colonialism: it’s a driver of it. 

At the end of the day, it’s really hard to construct a version of the Great Commission that isn’t inherently colonial. The end-goal of a world in which everyone is Christian is a world without non-Christian cultures. (As is the end goal of a world in which everyone is atheist by Christian definitions.)

Yet we focus on the way Christianity came with British or Spanish culture when they colonized a place--the churches are here because the Spaniards who conquered this area were Catholic--and miss how Christianity actually has its own cultural tropes that it brings with it. It's more subtle, of course, when Christianity didn't come in explicitly as the result of military conquest.

Or put another way, those cultures didn't just shape the Christianity they brought to places they colonized--they were shaped by it. How much of the commonality between European cultures is because of Christianity?

It’s not all a competition

A lot of Christians (cultural and practicing), if you push them, will eventually paint you a picture of a very Hobbesian world in which all religions, red in tooth and claw, are trying to take over the world. It's the "natural order" to attempt to eliminate all cultures but your own. 

If you point out to them that belief and worldview are deeply personal, and proselytizing is objectifying, because you're basically telling the person you're proselytizing to that who they are is wrong, you often get some version of "that's how everyone is, though."

Like we all go through life seeing other humans as incomplete and fundamentally flawed and the only way to "fix" them is to get them to believe what we believe. And, like, that is not how everyone relates to others?

But it's definitely how both practicing Christians and Christian antitheists relate to others. If, for Christians, your lack of Jesus is a fundamental flaw in you that needs to be fixed, for New Atheists, your “religion” (that is, your non-Christian culture) is a fundamental flaw in you that needs to be fixed. Neither Christians nor New Atheists are able to relate to anyone else as fine as they are. It's all a Hobbesian zero-sum game. It's all a game of conversion with only win and loss conditions. You are, essentially, only an NPC worth points.

The idea of being any other way is not only wrong, but impossible to them. If you claim to exist in any other way, you are either deluded or lying.

So, we get Christian atheists claiming that if you identify as Jewish, you can’t really be an atheist. Or sometimes they’ll make an exception for someone who’s “only ethnically Jewish.” If the only way you relate to your Jewishness is as ancestry, then you can be an atheist. Otherwise, you’re lying. 

Or, if you’re not lying, you’re deluded. You just don’t understand that there’s no need for you to keep any dietary practices or continue to engage in any form of ritual or celebrate any of those “religious” Jewish holidays, and by golly, this here “ex”-Christian atheist is here to separate out for you which parts of your culture are “religious” and which ones are “secular.”

Religious/secular is a Christian distinction

A lot of atheists from Christian backgrounds (whether or not they were raised explicitly Christian) have trouble seeing how Christian they are because they've accepted the Christian idea that “religion” is modular. (If we define “religion” the way Christians (whether practicing or cultural) define it, Christianity might be the only religion that actually exists. Maybe Islam?)

When people from non-Christian cultures talk about the hegemonically Christian and white supremacist nature of a lot of atheism, it reflects how outside of Christianity, spirituality/worldview isn't something you can just pull out of a culture.

Christian atheists tend to see the cultural practices of non-Christians as "religious" and think that they should give them up (talk to Jewish atheists who keep kosher about Christian atheist reactions to that). But because Christianity positions itself as modular, people from Christian backgrounds tend not to see how Christian the culture they imagine as "neutral" or "normal" actually is. In their minds, you just pull out the Christianity module and are left with a neutral, secular society.

So, if people from non-Christian backgrounds would just give up their superstitions, they'd look the same as Christian atheists. 

Your secularism is specifically post-Christian

Of course, that culture with the Christianity module pulled out ISN'T neutral. So the idea that that's what "secular society" should look like ends up following the same pattern as Christian colonialism throughout history: the promise that you can keep your culture and just plug in a different belief system (or, purportedly, a lack of a belief system), which has always, always been a lie. The secular, "enlightened" life that most Christian atheists envision is one that's still built on white, western Christianity, and the idea that people should conform to it is still attempting to homogenize society to a white Christian ideal. 

For people from cultures that don't see spirituality as modular, this is pretty obvious. It's obvious to a lot of people from non-white Christian cultures that have syncretized Christianity in a way that doesn't truck with the modularity illusion. 

I also think, even though they're not conceptualizing it in these terms, that it's actually obvious to a lot of evangelicals. (The difference being that white evangelical Christianity enthusiastically embraces white supremacy, so they see the destruction of non-Christian culture as good.) But I think it's invisible to a lot of mainline non-evangelical Christians, and it's definitely invisible to a lot of people who leave Christianity.

And that inability to see culture outside a Christian framing means that American secularism is still shaped like Christianity. It's basically the same text with a few sentences deleted and some terms replaced.

Which, again, is by design. The idea that you can deconvert to (Christian) atheism and not have to change much besides your opinions about God is the mirror of how easy it’s supposed to be to convert to Christianity.

Human societies don’t follow evolutionary biology

The Victorian Christian framing underlying current Western ideas of enlightened secularism, that religious practice (and human culture in general) is subject to the same sort of unilateral, simple evolution toward a superior state to which they, at the time, largely reduced biological evolution, is deeply white supremacist.

It posits religious evolution as a constantly self-refining process from "primitive" animism and polytheism to monotheism to white European/American Christianity. For Christians, that's the height of human culture. For ex-Christians, the next step is Christian-derived secularism.

Maybe you’ve seen this comic?

The thing is, animism isn’t more “primitive” than polytheism, and polytheism isn’t more “primitive” than monotheism. Older doesn’t mean less advanced/sophisticated/complex. Hinduism isn’t more “primitive” than Judaism just because it’s polytheistic and Judaism is monotheistic. 

Human cultures continue to change and adapt. (Arguably, older religions are more sophisticated than newer ones because they’ve had a lot more time to refine their practices and ideologies instead of having to define them.) Also, not all cultures are part of the same family tree. Christianity and Islam may be derived from Judaism, but Judaism and Hinduism have no real relationship to one another. 

But in this worldview, Christianity is "normal" religion, which is still more primitive than enlightened secularism, but more advanced than all those other primitive, superstitious, irrational beliefs.

Just like Christians, when Christian atheists do try to make room for cultures that aren't white and European-derived, the tacit demand is "okay, but you have to separate out the parts of your culture that the Christian sacred-secular divide would deem 'religious.'"

Either way, people from non-Christian cultures, if they’re to be equals, are supposed to get with the program and assimilate.

You’re not qualified to be a universal arbiter of what culture is good

Christian atheists usually want everyone to unplug that Religion module!

So, for example, you have ex-Christian atheists who are down with pluralism trying to get ex-Christian atheists who aren't to leave Jews alone by pointing out that you can be atheist and Jewish.

But some of us aren’t atheist. (I’m agnostic by Christian standards.) And the idea that Jews shouldn’t be targets for harassment because they can be atheists and therefore possibly have some common sense is still demanding that people from other cultures conform to one culture’s standard of what being “rational” is.  

Which, like, is kind of galling when y’all don’t even understand what “belief in G-d” means to Jews, and people from a culture that took until the 1800s to figure out that washing their hands was good are setting themselves up as the Universal Arbiters of Rationality.

(BTW, most of this also holds true for non-white Christianity, too. I guarantee you most white Christian atheists don’t have a good sense of what role church plays in the lives of Black communities, so maybe shut up about it.)

In any case, reducing Christianity--a massive, ambient phenomenon inextricable from Western culture--to the specific manifestation of Christian practice that you grew up with is, frankly, absurd. 

And you can’t be any help in deconstructing hegemony when you refuse to perceive it and understand that it isn’t something you can take off like a garment, and you probably won’t ever recognize and uproot all the ways in which it affects you, especially when you are continuing to live within it. 

What hegemony doesn’t want you to know

One of the ways hegemony sustains and perpetuates itself is by reinforcing the idea not so much that other ways of being and knowing are evil (although that’s usually a stage in an ideology becoming hegemonic), but that they’re impossible. That they don’t actually exist. 

See, again, the idea that anyone claiming to live differently is either lying or deluded.

There are few clearer examples of how pervasive Christian hegemony is than Christian atheists being certain every religion works like Christianity. Hegemonic Christianity wants you to think that all cultures work like Christianity because it wants their belief systems to be modular so you can just ...swap them. And it wants to pretend that culture/worldview is a free market where it can just outcompete other cultures.

But that’s... not how anything works. 

And the truth of the matter is that white nationalist Christians shoot at synagogues and Sikh temples and mosques because those other ways of being can’t be allowed to exist. 

They don’t shoot at atheist conventions because there’s room in hegemonic Christianity for Christian atheists precisely because Christian atheists are still culturally Christian. Their atheism is Christian-shaped.

They may not like you. They’re definitely going to try to convert you. They may not want you to be able to hold public office or teach their kids.

But the only challenge you’re providing is that of The Existence of Disbelief. And that’s fine. That makes you a really safe Other to have around. You can See The Light and not have to change much.

What you’re not doing is providing an example of a whole other way of being and knowing that (often) predates Christianity and is completely separate from it and has managed to survive it and continue to live and thrive (there’s a reason Christians like to speak of Jews and Judaism in the past tense, and it’s similar to the reason white people like to speak of indigenous peoples of the Americas in the past tense). 

That’s not a criticism--it’s fine to just... be post-Christian. There’s not actually anything wrong with being culturally Christian. The problems come in when you start denying that it’s a thing, or insisting that you, unique among humankind, are above Having A Culture.

But it does mean that you don’t pose the same sort of threat to Christianity that other cultures do, and hence, less violence. 

[kick-a-long]

I feel crazy today. i honestly think it's easier to see someone change genders and fully live that gender and think as that gender than it is for someone raised christian to become atheist or anything else and stop reverting to a christian worldview.

[macksting]

I'm gonna try to find other places my favorite people here are, that are not X or Tumblr. I'm gonna try to retain my contacts here. But I'm leaving again. I don't feel a need to get myself banned to make some point, and it looks like that's easy to do for now. He wants us off this site? Fine, I'll go. There's better places to be anyway.

But before I go.

I apologize in advance to any Christians who feel unfairly hurt by what I'm about to say, but: I don't hate Christianity, but I hate being unable to escape it anywhere I go. In the same way that a Christian atheist may still have a rabid hatred of Muslims, I find Christian and ex-Christian trans women still want our suffering to be holy, to be martyrs. Mostly they don't go running into the mouth of hell to suffer, if nothing else because that'd hurt and most of them aren't that devoted to this mindset; and some of us fly too close to the sun not out of masochistic death cultism but out of just being at heart a bunch of pains in the ass, so I ain't talking about that either. I'm talking about needing to be seen as suffering, as more suffering than others, as a kind of social oneupsmanship. And it's not better to do so in some kind of communion or solidarity or whatever, it's still ridiculous no matter how you do it.

We should be learning about the means of each other's oppressions, to better understand our own, not turning it into a fucking pissing contest.

And I cannot escape these mindsets. I see these baffling crab-bucket behaviors in these shitty online spaces that I almost never see in real life, with real world groups and people, because... iunno, maybe because I live in the PNW and a lot of folks didn't grow up being told that suffering is the highest form of virtue and therefore that if you are not suffering enough then you are not virtuous enough, and since real suffering sucks, it's best to just make people accept that the level of suffering you're going through, which is bad, is superior and unique and untouchably awful.

My friend Michael says it's also kind of a white thing. By creating a hierarchy of who is most oppressed and placing yourself on top, you can make yourself feel immune to criticism, and apparently this is just something a lot of white folks feel they need. Myself, iunno, I'm white too, I hope I don't do that, but I suspect my particular brand of OCD means my anxieties in that regard can't be alleviated without significant therapy and medication, which is not better but it does seem to make me a little less likely to try to put myself on top of hierarchies out of sheer terror of myself.

I seriously cannot escape this shit. I dunno how much I've got to go dismantling my own bullshit, but at least I wasn't raised Christian. It must be so exhausting. If you see me posting something positive that's happening, believe me, it's not intended as toxic positivity. It's intended as a radical statement that a better world is possible. It's radically asserting that life is not pain, and that our pain has causes that can be dealt with. And I dearly do hope it pisses someone off to see someone living their best life in spite of the horrors. A car outside our homeless shelter says, "Birds sing after the storm, so shall we," along with countless Christian statements scrawled all over it, and I am not waiting for some storm to pass. It won't pass in my lifetime. I'm singing now. And some of those songs are happy, and some of those songs are angry, and some are both.

If all you want is the aesthetics of suffering or the aesthetics of social justice, fuck off. I don't need more Christendom. I'm trapped in this place, and I am so fucking tired of it. I feel like Shrek yelling at Donkey, "can you please stop being yourself for five minutes!"

[politijohn]

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[puff-world]

Wrong, while I am not an expert in Islam, I know that the bases of the religious covering is women protected by god from men, like "you can not have me, God is at my side".

Miss "Feminist witch" on the bird website, your view of religion is shallow and scewed and based around Christian conservatism which is a small section of protestant Christians which is but one sect of one religion.

From your texts I can tell you were raised Christian in a conservative house hold but now deny it but a man can not truly be without religion and you prove that in which your view of religion is based souly on your own religion

[chroniclesofajewishteen]

Just because your church was a cult it doesn’t mean my synagogue is one

[audreyrose7]

I think about this all the time.

[chanaleah]

It's interesting to me that growing up Jewish seems to have given me a fundamentally different understanding of religion from my Christian friends. For me, I think that your religion (or ethnicity, since Judaism is an ethnicity) is not something you can get rid of. You can convert to another religion, but I never understood friends of mine who said that they weren't Christian, but Atheist.

"But you celebrate Christmas, right?" I asked them.

"Well, yeah," they said, "but we don't celebrate Christian Christmas. I'm atheist."

That didn't make any sense to me. Sure, maybe the version of Christmas they celebrated in their house looked more like treats and presents and less like nativity scenes and prayers, but it was still the same holiday.

So, I came up with the concept of the difference between "Not Christian" and "non-Christian". Which of course my "not christian" friends didn't understand. But my idea was that there are people who are "not christian" - mainly culturally christian atheists - and people who are "non-christian", like Jews, Hindus, Muslims, or others.

Because while both groups generally don't identify as Christian, we have different experiences. As a Jew, my experience as a religious minority is not the same as that of a culturally Christian atheist. They're not Christian, and I'm not Christian, but in different ways.

note (11/27/23)— I don’t entirely stand by the contents of this post anymore, specifically the part where I said that religion isn’t something you can get rid of. I have changed my mind and as of now do believe that atheism fully separate from Christianity is something that can be achieved, and while I’m not apologizing to many of those in my notes who despite their avowed atheism have continued to uphold Christian hegemony— I do apologize to atheists who have taken steps to distance themselves from Christianity and be careful not to uphold Christian hegemony.

[sinful-skeptic]

Another fine case of “practice what you preach.” It’s not the woman’s fault that you lack self control.

[rabbits-of-negative-euphoria]

you open yourself up to the devil by celebrating Halloween in the same way you open yourself up to the devil by celebrating St. Paddy's or Mardi Gras.

if you play ouija or try voodoo, you open yourself up to the devil. if you dress in a slutty costume or take psychedelics in a cemetery, you open yourself up to the devil.

likewise, if you get wasted on Guinness in downtown Savannah, you open yourself up to the devil.

if you twerk half-naked for plastic beads on Bourbon Street, you open yourself up to the devil.

these kinds of bacchanalia are by no means inherent to the holidays in question, and in fact, are extremely recent perversions of traditions which go back centuries. Centuries of Christian history.

[jesusinstilettos]

“Oh I’m just not the creative ty-“

Wrong, all humans are inherently creative in some way when their needs are met and they are given the leisure time to pursue hobbies. It came free with your being a social species wired by evolution to love doing stuff with your hands. Don’t define art through a consumerist lens where it’s only worth existing if it’s something someone would buy. Connect with your inner monkey, create to create and let it just be.

[jessicalprice]

One of the weird anomalous things about Christianity that explains the behavior of both Christians and Christian antitheists is that Christianity requires an Other.

That’s not a given for most cultures.

[actiwitch]

Hot take, apparently, but genuinely harassing or insulting anyone's religion is not ok.

Criticizing religious institutions, proselytizing, extremism, or horrible behaviors/beliefs done in the name of a religion? YES! Totally. That should be criticized.

Unpromptedly popping up on random posts by religious folks to say anything along the lines of "god isn't real", "the pagan gods are fake", "there is only one true religion", "[any religious group] are stupid/dangerous/barbaric" -- NO.

It's rude. It's unnecessary. And sometimes, especially in the case of minorities or oppressed groups, it's outright hateful. Theres nothing helpful, funny, or cool about randomly insulting one of the most personal aspects of a persons life. Unless it's invited or warranted, stfu.

[politijohn]

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This should never have been a thing

[animentality]

weirdly... wholesome.