#cultural christianity

[crazycatsiren]

Two things: Thanksgiving isn't a religious holiday and I don't celebrate Thanksgiving. That's all.

[chroniclesofajewishteen]

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

[magnetothemagnificent]

Perpetually pissed off that when people say "religious imagery" in regards to art and media they're just saying "Christian imagery".

Because stained glass, kneeling with your hands clasped, crosses, an old man in a beard in the sky...... that's all *Christian imagery*.

And it leads to like....an environment where non-Christian art with no Christian undertones gets mislabeled as Christian because they associate a nursing mother or a spire or a choir singing in operatic tones as Christian. It also leads to religious art that isn't Christian not being recognized as religious and its meaningful symbols and motifs unappreciated.

When I and other Jews make art involving fire, water, and trees- that's religious imagery. But this cultural Christian sphere doesn't recognize as such because they think religious = Christian.

[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. 

[starlightomatic]

the thing i'm calling cultural Christianity is really coastal liberal vaguely-secular-but-Christian-influenced American culture

an exvangelical atheist did NOT grow up in that

instead, they left the evangelical world and joined that instead

so I think hearing the thing they joined be called Christian is viscerally terrifying to them

[spot-the-antisemitism]

since apparently this is a debate

[zonatcannibalism]

some western atheist say things like "all people i that dont share my opinions on x thing are evil and deserve to be punished" and then get mad when you call them cultularly christian beacuse theyre antitheists. like bitch do you hear yourself

[sag-dab-sar]

Dear pagans, polytheists, and witches:

It is okay to celebrate Christmas.

Its okay to celebrating it as a non-Christian.

But you HAVE to accept and admit that it is a culturally Christian holiday.

In many culturally Christian countries you have to be cognizant of how Christmas is elevated above other religion's holidays.

Stop claiming every aspect of it is something stolen from ancient societies: bringing in trees, decorating with lights, gift giving— or whatever else you attribute to the "paganness" of Christmas with no legitimate sources.

Christmas was not stolen from the ancients and you cannot "reclaim it" by spreading pseudo-historical bullshit.

Just admit you will celebrate a culturally Christian holiday— its okay to admit that and move on.

[Edit: see my reblog of this for some basic sources to begin with]

[Edit 2: More info]

[Edit 3: I wrote a post about why you should accept/admit it as Culturally Christian and now that its Dec 25 I'mma just shut off reblogs for this, if you celebrated Christmas I hope you enjoyed it.]

[newnitz]

I don't really see people talking about how cultural Christianity is applied to Jews.

In Christianity, Jews are the people who rejected and betrayed Jesus and are punished with statelessness and destitution, whose only redemption is accepting the Messiah and the Son of God. This is the basis of several antisemitic tropes, most prominently deception, religious supercessionism and the Wandering Jew.

In cultural Christianity, these tropes are considered tenants of Judaism rather than Christianity, as Judaism is considered Christianity without Jesus.

Christians see themselves as tortured saints, persecuted for spreading the truth of Jesus and God across the globe. Missionaries who go to non-Christian lands to try and get the people to convert by fearmongering with damnation to Hell see themselves as victims when they're rebuffed and asked to stop.

Cultural Christian non-Christians are usually atheists and adherents of folk religion revivalist movements who have suffered religious abuse, as many sects of Christianity normalize emotional abuse by instilling inherent guilt in the Original Sin and even physical abuse in "Spare the rod; spoil the child". These cultural Christians see the millennia of antisemitism and roll their eyes, to them we're just another sect of delusional religious people with a persecution complex.

To become a Christian all you need to do is accept the Father Son and Holy Spirit, to affirm your beliefs and confess your sins. To become a Jew you are either born a Jew, or you learn the Jewish culture and religion for months on end and must live half a year under the strictest restrictions of the Jewish lifestyle to show commitment. That is the difference between a universal religion and an ethnoreligion.

In a Culturally Christian world there is no room for ethnoreligions, and they do not exist. All religions are about your faith and which God(s) you believe in. So in a Cultural Christian's eyes, a country of Jews is a country that holds one faith supreme above all others and conditions rights with conversion, as that's how Christian countries have historically been.

Christianity's common ground with Jews comes from the Roman Empire appropriating the religion from the Cult of Jesus, and making it more appealing to the masses by introducing Greco-Roman and Germanic folk religion aspects into it. Xmas is Yule but with Jesus, Easter is a fertility holiday but with Jesus and so on. In the eyes of the Cultural Christian, Christianity and Judaism are two once-antagonistic sects of the same religion, no different than Catholics and Protestants.

Cultural Christianity erases and appropriates Judaism and is as inherently hateful of Jews as religious Christianity.

Now, when it comes to the elephant in the room: Islam.

Islam, like Christianity, is a universal religion. You must believe in Allah and accept the prophets, which include both Jesus and Muhammad. It is no more inherently violent than Christianity, though it's no less. In the Christian's eyes, Islam is the competitor, the enemy. The Muslims conquered Christian lands and converted them, and they've fought holy wars against one another throughout the Middle Ages.

To become a Muslim the Cultural Christian doesn't need to unlearn any of the core tenets of their culture. They can simply apply it to Islam.

Which is why many Cultural Christians, damaged by Christianity, are sympathetic to Islam. And since Muslims and Jews are no longer on good terms, they use this sympathy to give themselves a free pass to be antisemitic. Whether Muslims check their converts for bigotry, allow it or are powerless to stop them, that's another issue.

Jews are not diet Christians. We have less in common with you than you have with Muslims. Unlearn Christian cultural appropriation.

And no, I don't care that it's "offensive" to associate you with Christianity due to the religious abuse you endured. You still see the world through a Christian lens.

[chroniclesofajewishteen]

Can we stop treating crosses like they’re non-denomination? Yes, even if it’s emo or goth. It’s still a religious symbol. You are culturally christian. That’s not a bad thing, but when you treat your culture like it’s everyone’s culture it does make people uncomfortable. I’m pretty goth sometimes. I get really uncomfortable when I look up goth stuff on pinterest and it’s all crosses. You can wear them, but when you’re an atheist with a pin that saying “fuck religions” it’s pretty fucking weird that you’re wearing cross earrings.

[magnetothemagnificent]

Something ex-Evangelical Christians, ex-Mormons, ex-any-flavour-of-fundementalist-Christianity etc. need to understand is that while yes, you were a victim of those communities, you were also the perpetrator of immense violence towards marginalized communities, particularly towards Jews and Indigineous people.

Yes, mission trips were traumatizing for you, but you were also either consciously or unconsciously taking part in Christo-colonialist efforts and ruining the lives of countless people. Yes, sermons about fire and brimstone were traumatizing for you, but the sermons you absorbed either consciously or subconsciously were laced with racist and antisemitic messages.

So when you call yourself an ex-Fundie, that doesn't absolve you of needing to deconstruct all the harmful ideas you learned and practice.

Because too often I've encountered people who may have *physically* left these spiritual systems (and I'm happy for them that they've gotten out of those abusive environments, don't get me wrong), but their belief systems still harbor the same antisemitic and colonialist ideas that they were taught in those environments, and they are still perpetuating the same harm they were conditioned to do.

[jessicalprice]

I’m not saying anything new here, but I’m still going to say it:

If you want an example of how powerful Christian hegemony is, just look at how uncomfortable-to-downright-angry a lot of people who aren’t practicing Christians (one sees this a lot with atheists and neopagans) get if you float the idea that maybe Jesus was not particularly nice or wise, that the New Testament’s teachings aren’t particularly compassionate, etc.

[starlightomatic]

I want you to think about how it must feel for a queer person who was raised in a conservative Christian family that taught them to hate queer people and once they came out was disowned by their family only to be called a “cultural Christian” by someone who doesn’t even know them. I want you to think about how much that hurts to be told that they are still part of the culture that abused and marginalized them. I want you to think that.

I think sometimes our life experiences can affect how we hear things and are able to engage with certain topics. I think if you need to step back from, block, or filter those conversations it's more than okay. However, the wider dynamics of power and oppression don't stop because of one's trauma. I know this doesn't feel good to hear, but there's more at play here than how things feel.

Many, many, people all over the world are still part of cultures that abused and marginalized them. And Christian culture, in the US, is not just Christianity. It's comprised significantly by secular people, atheists, and by folks who are nominally Christian but don't really go to church. I am very open to hearing another term for this culture that does not use the word "Christian," but no one has provided one. Largely I think because people are unable to conceptualize that it exists. I think there are two paths here. One is to recognize that engaging in these conversations is not good for you and put things like "cultural christian," "culturally christian," and "christmas discourse" on your blacklist. The other is zooming out a little and understanding that this conversation is not about labelling individuals but about describing power dynamics. It's okay if your trauma means that these aren't safe conversations for you, but your trauma does not mean that it is okay to silence people talking about the power dynamics and axes of oppress that marginalize them.

[the-incorrigible-chaia]

So, I've been reading the arguments that several Jumblr folks, including @starlightomatic and @tikkunolamorgtfo, have been having with ex-Christian atheists over the term "culturally Christian", and said ex-Christian atheists' staunch refusal to engage with the term, and it got me thinking that I see a very similar dynamic to that with white liberals, especially white queer people who came from conservative areas.

A lot of the time, white liberals from conservative areas, especially queer white liberals, have been hurt, sometimes badly, by their conservative communities. They've been marginalized and oppressed by white conservatives, and so they run as far in the opposite direction as they can to disassociate themselves with them. Which, I will add, is perfectly valid, and I can understand why they do so.

What's not valid, however, and is also extremely common, is when a person of colour then starts talking about white supremacist culture, and the white liberal insists that they cannot be racist, because they were marginalized by white conservatives, and they react with extreme hostility.

What's missed here is that the axis of oppression is a different one. Yes, white queers are marginalized by white conservatives, but it's on the basis of their queerness, and they still benefit from white supremacy on account of their whiteness. In the same vein, yes, ex-Christian atheists are marginalized by Christians, but it's on the basis of their atheism, and they still benefit from Christian hegemony on account of their being...

And here is where the term "culturally Christian" comes into play: All the things adjacent to Christianity that are still informed by and contribute to Christian hegemony. Analogously, whiteness is adjacent to, informed by, and contributes to white supremacy. And just as a lot of white liberals really, really don't want to think of themselves as white, because it feels like being lumped in with the white conservatives who hurt them, culturally Christian atheists don't want to think of themselves as being culturally Christian, because it feels like being lumped in with the Christians that hurt them.

And just as whiteness portrays itself as the absence of race, making it extremely hard to map out its defining characteristics as a discrete phenomenon, Christianity's portrayal of itself as a religion separate from culture—and the ensuing portrayal of ex-Christian atheists by themselves of being a cultureless secularity—makes it extremely hard to map out the defining characteristics of cultural Christianity.

But, just as we have to mark out the bounds of whiteness to dismantle white supremacy, we have to mark out the bounds of cultural Christianity to dismantle Christian hegemony.

And those bounds aren't policed from the inside.

EDIT: Accidentally @'d the wrong person.

[britcision]

So I’ve been thinking about cultural Christianity lately and how people tend to get very upset about it without really understanding what it is, so here is a primer

Cultural Christianity is not a choice you make. It does not mean you are Christian, or even that you remotely like Christianity; a lot of people who vehemently hate the religion do so because of their own cultural Christianity

It is not a shortcoming, or a moral failing, or a sin. It just means that the culture you were raised in was predominantly Christian.

Note: I did not say “majority Christian”. Christians don’t need to be a majority to have a dominant cultural influence

Cultural Christianity means you inherently understand and probably use swearwords like “damn”, “hell”, or a variation on the name “Jesus Christ”

It means when I say cultural Christianity is not a sin, you understand exactly what I mean without needing to have it explained - and you probably know the phrase “original sin” or “seven deadly sins”, even if not in full detail

It means hearing about Hades, god of the dead, wealth, and volcanoes, and assuming he’s the bad guy of Greek mythology… y’know, like Satan

(EVERYONE went to Hades when they died. The Elysian Fields, where the best heroes went, was in Hades’ underworld. The Eleusinian mysteries, a cult to Demeter and Persephone, was basically about asking them to tell Hades to give you a cool afterlife

And he would cuz he drank his “respect wife” juice if not all of his “respect women” juice. Did still kidnap her. But she is a major feature and often makes the decision herself or influences his when they’re mentioned together

Meanwhile, people try and cast Zeus as a good parent)

It means having to have a dreidel, a menorah, or a kinara explained to you at a time when you already knew about Christmas trees and Santa

(Yes, Santa Claus, Saint Nicholas, major host of the Mass of Christ, is culturally Christian. Even though Coke invented his aesthetic - that’s the “cultural” part)

It’s when you go to make up a new non-religious or pan religious winter celebration… that is centred around a day with family and gifts which is obviously the 25 of December. Maybe counting down 12 days before

It’s defaulting to calling a place of worship you don’t know the name of a “church”

Cultural Christianity is not something people have a choice in; you don’t pick where you’re born, and there are so many other cultures in places like Canada, America, and Britain that are culturally Christian out the ass! But… you will catch Contact Christianity in any of these places

It’s damn near impossible to consume any American or most Western media without brushing across it; cross imagery is everywhere, Christian demons and devils sneak into media all around the world

Western (and some other) Gothic fashion leans heavily on gothic architecture and, yeah, heavily Catholic imagery

Now, brushing across the media in other parts of the world does not impart the same level of cultural Christianity as growing up in a city with four churches on a single block and a Santa Claus parade

And you can grow up heavily in an entirely different culture even in the Bible Belt (but you know what Bible Belt means); you don’t have to abandon all other culture just because Christianity has a chokehold on your home

But when December (or fucking November these days) hits and you hear Mariah Carey in 3/6 stores, yes, you probably have some cultural Christianity

You sure as hell don’t need to be able to name half the denominations (can you name more than 4?), you may never set foot in a Christian church in your life, and still have a cultural Christian influence

If your street names have “saint” in them

If there are crosses or angels on more than half the graves in a cemetery

If you know how to cross yourself but aren’t really sure when you learned; you didn’t look it up or do research to find out

Now note: none of these have an inherent moral judgement attached to them

It’s just about what the culture you live in has taught you about the world, and there’s no culture that is magically the Right One or better than the others

There’s no reason to expect even specifically Christian culture to be the same around the world; it isn’t. It has the same root, but what flowers from the soil is another matter entirely

There is nothing wrong with acknowledging that you have culturally Christian influences and biases; being human is 90% absorbing information from the world around us and half processing it at best - there’s just too much input, and intentionally filtering out Everything Christian Ever?

Well unless you started at 2 years old, odds are pretty good it’s not really a personal choice kinda thing

And you cannot compensate for these influences unless you acknowledge that they exist, that you did not choose to form them, and that you do get to choose how they affect your actions going forward

Christmas stuffed a bunch of other religious traditions into a single package to make itself popular, but if you learned them as Christmas traditions first… do I even need to say it?

[fromgoy2joy]

i get so angered when ex christians take stories from the "Old Testament' share them without context and say "how can this be a loving G-D?! Checkmate!' When what they should have vexations with is the conditional salvation of the New Testament, not the tales of the Jewish people.

Also, what you were taught about New Testament G-D vs the Old Testament G-D is highly dependent on the christian belief that Jesus redeemed the world. Where through supersessionism teachings, old G-D was a big old meanie and now He's nice and fluffy for us Christians who've accepted him. By mindlessly reiterating this point, you contribute to virile antisemitism, delegitimize the relationship Jewish people have with Hashem, by shaping this around yourself and your own angst.

I say this as a person who no longer practices christianity and whose entire viewpoint collapsed the day I realized I had no faith in the church- deconstruct your faith in a way relevant to the structure you grew up with. Not what you see as witty one liners and in the ridicule of religious texts that belong to a 5,000 year old tribe.

(Heavily inspired by a convo with @daughterofstories. )