#culturally Christian

[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.

[normalhumanperson]

Things I would prefer to be called rather than “culturally christian”

+ Raised christian

+ Has a christian background

+ Exchristian

These still acknowledge a person’s history with christianity while also respecting the fact that they have left it. Hope this helps!

[you-need-not-apply]

Being a decent human being isn’t inherently any faith. It’s being, and get this, a decent human being.

[jessicalprice]

Today in truths culturally Christian atheists who get really angry when you point out that everyone who lives in Christian hegemony is shaped by it to some degree aren’t going to like:

To actually deconstruct the ways Christianity has shaped how you think, you need to study Christianity. From the outside. When you no longer believe it.

You can’t deconstruct what you can’t recognize, and recognizing ideology and worldviews usually requires studying them from an exterior perspective.

[a-s-fischer]

The atheists who hate the terms "culturally Christian" or "Christianized" atheist/atheism, need to come to a reckoning with the fact that most of the people talking about the phenomenon of Christian cultural practices and default assumptions remaining present in atheist communities in historically Christian and Christianized parts of the world, are in fact also atheists.

Jewish atheists, and other atheists from non-Christian cultural backgrounds latched on to "culturally Christian" as a term to describe the ways in which atheist communities dominated by people from majority Christian, or majority Christianized, countries, are hostile to us and don't recognize our forms of atheism and secularism as legitimate, in spite of the fact that we also don't believe in any deity. it also became a convenient term to talk about the ways in which atheists from culturally Christian backgrounds frequently insist that to be properly secular, properly an atheist, you have to assimilate into a specific set of cultural practices viewed by these particular atheists as culturally and religiously neutral, AKA secular. "Culturally Christian" is a convenient term used to point out that these are not in fact culturally neutral practices, and that there are forms of atheism that do not include them, and include other cultural practices, and that atheists from other cultural backgrounds should not have to assimilate into another culture, for our atheism to be considered valid.

So like, the fact that the response to the term culturally Christian is to paint the non culturally Christian people using it, as religious people going after atheists as atheists, is both an example of a culturally Christian phenomenon, and also really obnoxious and ironic, given that the people who are making this argument are usually making it from within the atheist community. We are also atheists, which is why this phenomenon actually matters to us. This is an intra-community discussion, and trying to frame it as the mean religious people going after the atheists, erases our atheism, and is really annoying, and the only thing it serves to do, is to protect the people using this framing, from having to confront what those of us talking about the phenomenon are actually saying.

[jewishvitya]

Something really annoying about culturally Christian atheists, and especially antitheists, is that they'll talk about atheists like we're a whole category they can speak for.

You're not speaking as an atheist, you're speaking as an atheist with a Christian background. You don't speak for me. I don't believe in a god, I lost a lot over this, but I'm Jewish and nothing you say about atheists applies to me. You act like you're the default human. That's why we use the term "culturally Christian." You're not the default, your background and culture don't get erased when you stop believing in the religion.

And often you don't believe in their god, but you kept their mindset - especially the persecution complex.

[starlightomatic]

“you can’t even agree on what culturally christian means so that means it’s fake and useless and we should make fun of you”

or……… there was a lexical void in our discussions, we found a word to fill it, but didn’t get a chance to hammer out details till the discourse broke containment

maybe you could give the slightest bit of dare i say grace and stop trying to use gotchas to “prove” that it doesn’t mean anything

if anything people are using it to describe two specific and related things — the influence of christian hegemony on anyone, and the belonging to the culture shared by people-not-from-minority-religions in christian countries

that’s not “lol this is meaningless and stupid,” if anything that just means there were two lexical voids

sorry we couldn’t produce and differentiate terminology at a fast enough rate for you, but maybe you could acknowledge we’re actually saying something worthwhile instead of nitpicking how cohesive our dictionary definitions are

[hindahoney]

I've seen the cultural Xtianity discourse for so long so often I'm sick of seeing it. Because it's the same thing over and over. Jews being like "hey recognize that some atheists are still culturally christian and this still harms us" and atheists being like "WHAT DO YOU MEAN HOW DARE YOU CALL ME BY MY OPPRESSORS I HATE ALL RELIGIONS AND JUST FOR YOU SAYING THAT I HATE JEWS NOW"

[thejewitches]

The “Judeo-Christian tradition” was one of 20th-century America’s greatest political inventions.

Read the Article

[chanaleah]

please stop saying holiday when you mean Christmas

Changing the names of concerts and parties and vacation times and the season and decorations and pretty much everything doesn’t mean anything when the content of these things doesn’t change.

“Holiday concerts” be so fr there are 15 Christmas songs and one refrain of maoz tzur or dreidl

“Holiday aesthetic” I see red and green and white

“Holiday/winter break” it’s Christmas break. It happens around Christmas. Stores and restaurants and companies and schools close for Christmas.

“Holiday movies” you’re watching home alone.

“Happy holidays” appreciated from a cashier but that card has a Christmas tree

“Holiday spirit” joy and grace and peace? How about the spirit of fighting back against colonialist empires that try to force their culture on us?

I appreciate that this is generally a well meaning attempt to create inclusivity, but I think the populace should be doing more. In practice this often feels like a way people make themselves feel better about the fact that Christmas and Christian is so embedded into American culture in such a way that makes the months of November and December unbearable for many members of religious minorities.

[embervoices]

May your holy season be bright, peaceful, and loving, whoever you share it with, whatever you celebrate!

Tonight my household has the Advent altar lit, and I have given extra candles to my gods on the Community Well Being altar:

[you-need-not-apply]

No no I’ll say it: calling someone “culturally Christian” to invalidate their argument is disgusting.

If you don’t know what that is it’s where someone holds morals and beliefs similar to Christians but is not Christian.

Basically “how dare you care about this issue, I’m not Christian and I don’t care about it therefore you must be Christian and if you aren’t then well you still are”

I have been called culturally Christian for saying that rich people should feel guilty about being able to afford greener solutions but not using them. I have also been called culturally Christian for supporting Palestine. (Seperate occasions)

For some reason, this term has really blown up and I despise it. I am not, nor will ever be, Christian. I don’t believe in any similar gods either or Jesus (to me, he was probably just some guy asking everyone to stop stabbing each other) I’m a pagan focusing worship on the Greek pantheon.

If I started calling every homophobe “culturally muslim” that would not be acceptable. If I started calling everyone who supported Israel “culturally Jewish” that wouldn’t be acceptable.

So FFS stop using “culturally Christian” to ignore arguments. Stop using that term all together. Caring about people isn’t “culturally anything”. It’s basic human decency.

[blunt-force-therapy]

I really don't get why people think atheists participating in religious events is some sort of gotcha. Christmas, for an example: it's really important to my family, I have free time on that day that I'm most likely not using for anything else, and there's two dinners. Why wouldn't I participate?

I've seen plenty of religious people participate in religious events that have nothing to do with their religion, and no one claims that they're actually secretly not that religion or whatever. Why the extra scrutiny on atheists?

[atheostic]

I find it utterly enraging when Jewish people on this site act like their experience with genocide is the only one that's valid and that matters.

When they brush aside other people's trauma as if it's less valid than their own.

As if it's some kind of competition and SURELY no one's ever had it as bad as them.

The Christian genocide of Indigenous people in the Americas (which is STILL HAPPENING, btw) had killed 10% of the entire global population as of the mid-1600s (about 56 million people).

Yet I, an Indigenous woman, get told that not only is my people's equally traumatizing history irrelevant, I'm required to be "culturally Christian" by virtue of being born in Latin America.

Because apparently Latin Americans are a homogenous group with a hive mind.

[boreal-sea]

there are literally laws on the books in some states that atheists can't hold office but whatever dude

Yeah, and you can't kill Bigfoot in Washington. A weird law is meaningless if it's not enforced, and those laws are not enforced, because guess what?

Atheists are not systemically oppressed in the USA.

Meanwhile, lemme count up the number of Islamophobic hate crimes in the USA since 9/11...

(And yes - I'm atheist too, I'm just not a whiny baby desperate to feel oppressed for some reason)

[the-dear-skull]

I FIGURED OUT THE DISCOURSE GUYS!

Cultural christianity, Christian atheism / antitheism etc. were originally terms to describe a (mostly hypothetical) state enforcement to rid the society of any form of religion or spiritual practice, making it, ironically, a theocracy.

But then the term started to broaden into "People raised Christian who are anti religion." Then to "Any atheist who was raised Christian" to "Any non Christian who lives in a Christian hegemony." To finally "If you ever went to a Christmas party without bursting into flames."

By the time it got to where laypeople were hearing about this discourse, it was already in the aforementioned late stages, so you get people genuinely trying to heal from religious trauma being told that they'll never truly leave the Church because they got Sundays off at their job.