#i think i was raised generally christian fundamentalist but we moved often enough that we attended multiple denominations thru my childhood

[flame-shadow]

being a kid obsessed with dinosaurs while being raised christian fundamentalist (i think?) made for some very interesting moments.

books would say that dinosaurs lived hundreds of millions of years ago. my parents would say the earth was created 6000 years ago. so for a while, i thought dinosaurs were fake like dragons. and for a long while after that, i never paid attention to the estimated years because they were all clearly false.

books would say that dinosaurs evolved over their millions of years of existence, at some point some developed feathers, and that birds probably came from dinosaurs. the pastors and sunday school teachers would say that evolution wasn't real and that god created the birds as they are. i was confused and disappointed, because evolution made a lot of sense and sounded really cool to boot.

documentaries would show fossil sites and talk about how the rock can be dated. one time, i heard that god left dinosaur fossils for us to find as enrichment. another time, i was told that satan planted the fossils to sow doubt among god's followers. i thought it odd that some people thought god would want to trick his people with such an elaborate hoax.

years later, i heard someone say that god created the universe to look like it had always existed even though it was created relatively recently, and that's why the light from stars further than 6,000 light years have already reached us. i was reminded of the explanation of god putting apparently millions of years old fossils in the ground.

more recently (within the past decade and therefore i was no longer a kid nor a christian), i've heard the people who raised me to believe the things above reciting new "facts" that people have since come up with to explain away more recent scientific discoveries and conclusions. a few years ago, my grandmother had someone speak at her church, and afterwards she bought some of the books they were selling and shipped them to me. whereas twenty years ago, she'd have told me dinosaurs couldn't have existed, now she had sent me books about how actually dinosaurs were created 6000 years ago along with humans and all the other animals. these "facts" were corroborated by some other relatives next time i shared a meal with them.

they can't even keep their false facts straight because the old stories don't make sense anymore, even though the new stories aren't any better!

and i keep coming back to my early interest in dinosaurs.

the one that my mom was reluctant to allow me to pursue because of the perceived falseness of their existence. the one that i felt i had to carefully regulate what facts i expressed interest in lest my mom decide that dinosaurs were banned from being talked about the way pokemon was. and i was so so deliberate to pepper in the occasional qualifiers like "even though the bible says that's not possible, 150 millions years is a long time ago!" or "i know they're not actually going to turn into birds and this is just a drawing, but this one with the feathers does really look like it could become a bird someday."

thank god for dinosaurs (haha), because im not sure how long i would've been mired in such a closed-minded worldview otherwise. even though satan didn't sow the fossils in the earth, they did cause me to doubt the veracity of what i was taught.

[testudoaubrei-blog]

Content note for discussions of eternal damnation, and all sorts of other shit that will trigger a lot of folks with religious trauma.

Before I get started I might as well explain where I’m coming from - unlike a lot of She-Ra fans, and a lot of queer people, I don’t have much religious trauma, or any, maybe (okay there were a number of years I was convinced I was going to hell, but that happens to everyone, right?). I was raised a liberal Christian by liberal Christian parents in the Episcopal Church, where most of my memories are overwhelmingly positive. Fuck, growing up in the 90’s, Chuch was probably the only place outside my home I didn’t have homophobia spewed at me. Because it was the 90’s and it was a fucking hellscape of bigotry where 5 year olds knew enough to taunt each other with homophobic slurs and the adults didn’t know enough to realize how fucked up that was. Anyway. This is my experience, but it is an atypical one, and I know it. Quite frankly I know that my experience of Christianity has very little at all to do with what most people experienced, or what people generally mean when they talk about Christianity as a cultural force in America today. So if you were raised Christian and you don’t recognize your theology here, congrats, neither do I, but these ideas and cultural forces are huge and powerful and dominant. And it’s this dominant Christian narrative that I’m referring to in this post. As well as, you know, a children’s cartoon about lesbian rainbow princesses. So here it goes. This is going to get batshit.

"All events whatsoever are governed by the secret counsel of God." - John Calvin

“We’re all just a bunch of wooly guys” - Noelle Stevenson

This is a post triggered by a single scene, and a single line. It’s one of the most fucked-up scenes in She-Ra, toward the end of Save the Cat. Catra, turned into a puppet by Prime, struggles with her chip, desperately trying to gain control of herself, so lost and scared and vulnerable that she flings aside her own death wish and her pride and tearfully begs Adora to rescue her. Adora reaches out , about to grab her, and then Prime takes control back, pronounces ‘disappointing’ and activates the kill switch that pitches Catra off the platform and to her death (and seriously, she dies here, guys - also Adora breaks both her legs in the fall). But before he does, he dismisses Catra with one of his most chilling lines. “Some creatures are meant only for destruction.”

And that’s when everyone watching probably had their heart broken a little bit, but some of the viewers raised in or around Christianity watching the same scene probably whispered ‘holy shit’ to themselves. Because Prime’s line - which works as a chilling and callous dismissal of Catra - is also an allusion to a passage from the Bible. In fact, it’s from one of the most fucked up passages in a book with more than its share of fucked up passages. It’s from Romans 9:22, and I’m going to quote several previous verses to give the context of the passage (if not the entire Epistle, which is more about who needs to abide by Jewish dietary restrictions but was used to construct a systematic theology in the centuries afterwards because people decided it was Eternal Truth).

19 Thou wilt say then unto me, Why doth he yet find fault? For who hath resisted his will?

20 Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus?

21 Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?

22 What if God, willing to shew his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction:

The context of the allusion supports the context in the show. Prime is dismissing Catra - serial betrayer, liar, failed conqueror, former bloody-handed warlord - as worthless, as having always been worthless and fit only to be destroyed. He is speaking from a divine and authoritative perspective (because he really does think he’s God, more of this in my TL/DR Horde Prime thing). Prime is echoing not only his own haughty dismissal of Catra, and Shadow Weaver’s view of her, but also perhaps the viewer’s harshest assessment of her, and her own worst fears about herself. Catra was bad from the start, doomed to destroy and to be destroyed. A malformed pot, cracked in firing, destined to be shattered against a wall and have her shards classified by some future archaeologist 2,000 years later. And all that’s bad enough.

But the full historical and theological context of this passage shows the real depth of Noelle Stevenson’s passion and thought and care when writing this show. Noelle was raised in Evangelical or Fundamentalist Christianity. To my knowledge, he has never specified what sect or denomination, but in interviews and her memoir Noelle has shown a particular concern for questions that this passage raises, and a particular loathing for the strains of Protestant theology that take this passage and run with it - that is to say, Calvinism. So while I’m not sure if Noelle was raised as a conservative, Calvinist Presbyterian, his preoccupation with these questions mean that it’s time to talk about Calvinism.

It would be unfair, perhaps, to say that Calvinism is a systematic theology built entirely upon the Epistles of Romans and Galatians, but only -just- (and here my Catholic readers in particular will chuckle to themselves and lovingly stroke their favorite passage of the Epistle of James). The core of Calvinist Doctrine is often expressed by the very Dutch acronym TULIP:

Total Depravity - people are wholly evil, and incapable of good action or even willing good thoughts or deeds

Unconditional Election - God chooses some people to save because ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, not because they did anything to deserve, trigger or accept it

Limited Atonement - Jesus died only to save the people God chose to save, not the rest of us bastards

Irresistible Grace - God chooses some people to be saved - if you didn’t want to be saved, too bad, God said so.

Perseverance of the Saints - People often forget this one and assume it’s ‘predestination’ but it’s actually this - basically, once saved by God, always saved, and if it looks like someone falls out of grace, they were never saved to begin with. Well that’s all sealed up tight I guess.

Reading through these, predestination isn’t a single doctrine in Calvinism but the entire theological underpinnings of it together with humanity’s utter powerlessness before sin. Basically God has all agency, humanity has none. Calvinism (and a lot of early modern Protestantism) is obsessed with questions of how God saves people (grace alone, AKA Sola Fides) and who God saves (the people god elects and only the people God elects, and fuck everyone else).

It’s apparent that Noelle was really taken by these questions, and repelled by the answers he heard. He’s alluded to having a tattoo refuting the Gospel passage about Sheep and Goats being sorted at the end times, affirming instead that ‘we’re all just a bunch of wooly guys’ (you can see this goat tattoo in some of his self-portraits in comics, etc). He’s also mentioned that rejecting and subverting destiny is a huge part of everything he writes as a particular rejection of the idea that some individual people are 'chosen' by God or that God has a plan for any of us. You can see that -so clearly- in Adora’s arc, where Adora embraces and then rejects destiny time and again and finally learns to live life for herself.

But for Catra, we’re much more concerned about the most negative aspect of this - the idea that some people are vessels meant for destruction. And that’s something else that Noelle is preoccupied with. In her memoir in the section about leaving the church and becoming a humanistic atheist, there is a drawing of a pot and the question ‘Am I a vessel prepared for destruction?’ Obviously this was on Noelle’s mind (And this is before he came out to himself as queer!).

To look at how this question plays out in Catra’s entire arc, let’s first talk about how ideas of damnation and salvation actually play out in society. And for that I’m going to plug one of my favorite books, Gin Lun’s Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction (if you can tell by now, I am a fucking blast at parties). Lun tells the long and very interesting story about, how ideas of hell and who went there changed during the Early American Republic. One of the interesting developments that she talks about is how while at first people who were repelled by Calvinism started moving toward a doctrine of universal salvation (no on goes to hell, at least not forever*), eventually they decided that hell was fine as long as only the right kind of people went there. Mostly The Other - non-Christian foreigners, Catholics, Atheists, people who were sinners in ways that were not just bad but weird and violated Victorian ideas of respectability. Really, Hell became a way of othering people, and arguably that’s how it survives today, especially as a way to other queer people (but expanding this is slated for my Montero rant). Now while a lot of people were consciously rejecting Calvinist predestination, they were still drawing the distinction between the Elect (good, saved, worthwhile) and the everyone else (bad, damned, worthless). I would argue that secularized ideas of this survive to this day even among non-Christian spaces in our society - we like to draw lines between those who Elect, and those who aren’t.

And that’s what brings us back to Catra. Because Catra’s entire arc is a refutation of the idea that some people are worthless and irredeemable, either by nature, nurture or their own actions. Catra’s actions strain the conventions of who is sympathetic in a Kid’s cartoon - I’ve half joked that she’s Walter White as a cat girl, and it’s only half a joke. She’s cruel, self-deluded, she spends 4 seasons refusing to take responsibility for anything she does and until Season 5 she just about always chooses the thing that does the most damage to herself and others. As I mentioned in my Catra rant, the show goes out of its way to demonstrate that Catra is morally culpable in every step of her descent into evil (except maybe her break with reality just before she pulls the lever). The way that Catra personally betrays everyone around her, the way she strips herself of all of her better qualities and most of what makes her human, hell even her costume changes would signal in any other show that she’s irredeemable.

It’s tempting to see this as Noelle’s version of being edgy - pushing the boundaries of what a sympathetic character is, throwing out antiheroics in favor of just making the villain a protagonist. Noelle isn’t quite Alex ‘I am in the business of traumatizing children’ Hirsch, who seems to have viewed his job as pushing the bounds of what you could show on the Disney Channel (I saw Gravity Falls as an adult and a bunch of that shit lives rent free in my nightmares forever), but Noelle has his own dark side, mostly thematically. The show’s willingness to deal with abuse, and messed up religious themes, and volatile, passionate, not particularly healthy relationships feels pretty daring. I’m not joking when I gleefully recommend this show to friends as ‘a couple from a Mountain Goats Song fights for four seasons in a cartoon intended for 9 year olds’. Noelle is in his own way pushing the boundaries of what a kids show can do. If you read Noelle’s other works like Nimona, you see an argument for Noelle being at least a bit edgy. Nimona is also angry, gleefully destructive, violent and spiteful - not unlike Catra. Given that it was a 2010s webcomic and not a kids show, Nimona is a good deal worse than Catra in some ways - Catra doesn’t kill people on screen, while Nimona laughs about it (that was just like, a webcomic thing - one of the fan favorite characters in my personal favorite, Narbonic, was a fucking sociopath, and the heroes were all amoral mad scientists, except for the superintelligent gerbil**). But unlike Nimona, whose fate is left open ended, Catra is redeemed.

And that is weird. We’ve had redemption arcs, but generally not of characters with -so- much vile stuff in their history. Going back to the comparison between her and Azula, many other shows, like Avatar, would have made Catra a semi-sympathetic villain who has a sob-story in their origin but who is beyond redemption, and in so doing would articulate a kind of psychologized Calvinism where some people are too traumatized to ever be fully and truly human. I’d argue this is the problem with Azula as a character - she’s a fun villain, but she doesn’t have moral agency, and the ultimate message of her arc - that she’s a broken person destined only to hurt people - is actually pretty fucked up. And that’s the origin story of so many serial killers and psycopaths that populate so many TV shows and movies. Beyond ‘hurt people hurt people’ they have nothing to teach us except perhaps that trauma makes you a monster and that the only possible response to people doing bad things is to cut them out of your life and out of our society (and that’s why we have prisons, right?)

And so Catra’s redemption and the depths from which she claws herself back goes back to Noelle’s desire to prove that no person is a vessel ‘fitted for destruction.’ Catra goes about as far down the path of evil as we’ve ever seen a protagonist in a kids show go, and she still has the capacity for good. Importantly, she is not subject to total depravity - she is capable of a good act, if only one at first. Catra is the one who begins her own redemption (unlike in Calvinism, where grace is unearned and even unwelcomed) - because she wants something better than what she has, even if its too late, because she realizes that she never wanted any of this anyway, because she wants to do one good thing once in her life even if it kills her.

The very extremity of Catra’s descent into villainy serves to underline the point that Noelle is trying to make - that no one can be written off completely, that everyone is capable of change, and that no human being is garbage, no matter how twisted they’ve become. Meanwhile her ability to set her own redemption in motion is a powerful statement of human agency, and healing, and a refutation of Calvinism’s idea that we are powerless before sin or pop cultural tropes about us being powerful before the traumas of our upbringing. Catra’s arc, then, is a kind of anti-Calvinist theological statement - about the nature of people and the nature of goodness.

Now, there is a darker side to this that Noelle has only hinted at, but which is suggested by other characters on the show. Because while Catra’s redemption shows that people are capable of change, even when they’ve done horrible things, been fucked up and fucked themselves up, it also illustrates the things people do to themselves that make change hard. As I mentioned in my Catra rant, two of the most sinister parts of her descent into villainy are her self-dehumanization (crushing her own compassion and desire to do good) and her rewriting of her own history in her speech and memory to make her own actions seem justified (which we see with her insistence that Adora left her, eliding Adora’s offers to have Catra join her, or her even more clearly false insistence that Entrapta had betrayed them). In Catra, these processes keep her going down the path of evil, and allow her to nearly destroy herself and everyone else. But we can see the same processes at work in two much darker figures - Shadow Weaver and Horde Prime. These are both rants for another day, but the completeness of Shadow Weaver’s narcissistic self-justification and cultivated callousness and the even more complete narcissism of Prime’s god complex cut both characters off from everyone around them. Perhaps, in a theoretical sense, they are still redeemable, but for narrative purposes they might as well be damned.

This willingness to show a case where someone -isn’t- redeemed actually serves to make Catra’s redemption more believable, especially since Noelle and the writers draw the distinction between how Catra and SW/Prime can relate to reality and other people, not how broken they are by their trauma (unlike Zuko and Azula, who are differentiated by How Fucked Uolp They Are). Redemption is there, it’s an option, we can always do what is right, but someone people will choose not to, in part because doing the right thing involves opening ourselves to the world and others, and thus being vulnerable. Noelle mentions this offhandedly in an interview after Season 1 with the She-Ra Progressive of Power podcast - “I sometimes think that shades of grey, sympathetic villains are part of the escapist fantasy of shows like this.” Because in the real world, some people are just bastards, a point that was particularly clear in 2017. Prime and Shadow Weaver admit this reality, while Catra makes a philosophical point that even the bastards can change their ways (at least in theory).

*An idea first proposed in the second century by Origen, who’s a trip and a fucking half by himself, and an idea that becomes the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, which protestants vehemently denied!

**Speaking of favorite Noelle tropes

[hillbillyoracle]

Rebooting My Practice

This is going to be pretty rambly, but I always get a lot out of these posts when other people make them so I wanted to make one too.

I hit a point earlier this year, as I started to really see what all astrology could be, when I knew I was going to need to overhaul pretty much my entire practice. For the last decade, I've focused on divination; on doing activities that sharpen my intuition, following up and checking predictions, tracking cards and results to better understand the connection, etc. I did this primarily in the service of my main deity, the Morrigan.

I still work with her, but I'm in a lurch as to how to continue my work with her. I have yet to quite figure out how to balance her general distaste for shrines (with me at least) and deepening my relationship with her in the absence of local folks to read for as I've relied on for years (thanks COVID). I've been praying the Catholic Rosary lately as a way to deepen my relationship with the Virgin Mary and the Saint I'm petitioning lately and I feel her kind of peering in when I do that so I might have to design one for her. I have a feeling whatever I come up with will likely be in a free zine rather than a blog post at some point.

But where that left me was in this weird abyss, where the only really solid things in my practice were like 3 deities (The Morrigan, Hermes, Yinepu/Anubis) I worked with regularly and tarot cards. I think for plenty of people that's fine but I wanted something deeper and more effective. It was around the time that I was rethinking everything that I stumbled on to this post about a magical routine that absolutely enthralled me. It took me another month and ultimately moving house altogether to even begin to piece something together that would set me on the road to something like this. I knew I was not ready but I finally had a picture in my mind something to work towards. Like rehabilitating after an injury, sometimes you've got to do half as much as you think you can before you really take off.

So I wanted to take some time and talk about the way my practice is changing and what the new pillars are slowly emerging to be.

Planetary Petitions

While I don't have the Orphic Hymns for each of the 7 classical planets memorized yet as per the post, I started by doing planetary prayers more days than I do not do them. Thanks to my truly godawful downstairs neighbor at the new place, who's floor shaking door slams throughout the whole night have netted me an average of 3 hours a night, I'm usually up for the first planetary hour of a given day. Hey maybe it's a sign, a big universal push to show the fuck up.

I'm also incredibly lucky I loaded up on some planetary incenses right before COVID when a local store had a huge sale. It's proved well worth it as above all I try to get the planetary incense right, though I did have to default to a Frankincense one when we were first moving in.  I slowly feel like I'm beginning to understand the planetary spirits better but only slightly. I completely see why memorizing the prayer is recommended and I do feel that's standing in the way of me being closer with them.

I have not noticed a huge difference when I petition them truthfully. I get the vibe that it takes time to build up that relationship. Though I'm open to input here - for those who do planetary petitions, what made them click for you?

Saint Veneration + Christian Magic

One thing I put off for many years, though I knew it was coming, was working with more Saints. I knew it'd likely involve having to dip back into Christianity to make it work and I was completely right.

As my partner began revisiting her Catholic roots earlier this year, it got me curious about things like the Rosary, the Chaplet, and Novenas. I was raised charismatic fundamentalist Christian as a child and such things were explicitly forbidden. I remember getting a long talking to when I'd taken to reading about Sainte Jeanne d'Arc. So they aren't loaded for me the way they are for others, but they’re situated in this fundamentally familiar context that makes them feel like meeting a cool branch of the family you didn't realize existed.

I'm finishing a Novena to a Saint I've been praying to in the next few weeks. I am admittedly not as close with her as I'd like to be. I'm trying to figure out how to move forward with her as I'd really like to have her in my life. I will probably reach back out to Sainte Jeanne d'Arc as she's always felt familiar and been good to me. I also keep her prayer card and medallion in my wallet and have for many years so maybe there's more to build from there. It is my goal to have about 3 saints/Christian figures I can call on when I need help. I'm thinking of approaching Mary Undoer of Knots next but I'm worried it'll follow the same path as this current saint.

My partner and I bought Rosaries back in May and I absolutely love it. I've been saying at least a 5 decade rosary for most days but I'm regularly getting in a 15 decade rosary. I really love it and am totally convinced of the beauty and effectiveness of the system. I've come to understand Christianity in a totally different light through praying it regularly.

So that is on going and evolving and I'd love to hear from people who've cultivated close relationships with a Saint or Angel.

Ancestors

One thing that working with Christianity again has made easier is praying to ancestors. I've often felt a bit at odds with my own ancestors as they were not the most supportive of trans and queer people (and I am both of those) but in coming back to Christianity has given me and my ancestors a common language almost. As long as my disagreement with them over my attraction and gender identity is rooted in the Bible, it's been easier to work with them.

It's very early days with ancestor work. I'm slowly working my way through Ancestral Healing by Daniel Foor. But I'm feeling very heartened by it. I saw a post on twitter somewhere, if I can find it again I'll link it, where someone said that the way they started working with their ancestors was just thanking them everyday. And thanking my ancestors is complicated for me, my family like most have their own issues that also go passed on, but thanking them for what I am glad they gave me has been really beneficial.

My partner requested some divination from me when some of her medical issues were starting to get worse and part of the reading involved a strong push for her to investigate her father's side of the family. She got really into genealogy in the process and she's been teaching me a lot. Through that I actually learned my great grandfather's name for the first time - yes that's how out of touch I am with my own family history. But I was thankful to find out.

Through her own research, my partner found out that that branch of her family likely isn't German but actually German speaking Hungarians which was a revelation. She's in the process of confirming but it got us talking about foods and identity and language and how to honor our ancestors more regularly. We're going to try making a nice dinner on Full Moons with dishes that are tied to branches of our family as a way to trying to cultivate a closer relationship with them. I'll definitely update on that as it evolves.

Conclusion + Some Thoughts on Disability

I'm definitely still in the early days of all of this. It's not become quite the foundation I hope it will be yet. I still need to figure out how to continue and deepen my deity relationships. I still need to attempt some different types of spellwork I've been meaning to. And while I didn't talk about it much here, astrology has been playing a huge role in my practice but mostly in a passive way. More of that divination process I talked about in the beginning where I make predictions based on the charts I'm seeing and then double check my work.

I’ve been doing all this while in the thick of a bad flare. Moving plus lack of sleep as meant my disability has been weighing so much harder on me lately. Normally when I’m feeling well enough, I kind of roll my eyes at a lot of the “spoonie witchcraft” posts I see, but for some reason with this flare they just started making me angry and I’m still trying to parse why. I think I just feel like so many are rooted in this performative idea of “feeling” witchy rather than actually helping me with my disability. They aren’t usually focused on practices that either actually treat the pain I’m in or bring my spirit real comfort. 

I’m really hoping to put together a post or possibly a zine that does provide what I always wanted those posts to be. Honestly these pillars here have proven accessible even as I’ve been in some of the worst pain I’ve been in in years. So for any fellow disabled folks who just aren’t getting much out of those posts, I really recommend starting with these. Recite the Orphic Hymn for the day in the corresponding hour. Pray the Rosary or an adapted set of prayers for Pagan prayer beads. Don’t have much money for those? Look up how to make knotted rosaries and adapt the method. Pray to your ancestors and give them some water and a bit to eat. These are doable for a lot of folks even when they’re in bad shape, especially if you take your time with it. Might not make you “feel witchy” but they do some fucking work, that’s for sure. But idk, those are just my thoughts on it. 

So it hasn't all fallen into place yet but I wanted to share what developing a practice looks like in medias res. It's messy, somethings work better than others, but all and all I'm just glad to finally be making meaningful progress again.

[chamerionwrites]

i just want to say that you are incredibly cool and i really appreciate your attention to,, detail i guess is the word? following your blog and reading the news articles you link to & your commentary has definitely made me reconsider many of my political beliefs & changed them for the better, so i'm really grateful to you for that. thank you, and i hope you have as good of a day as possible :))

I get embarrassed about responding to this kind of thing publicly, but I was really touched by this and wanted to be sure you knew that I saw it and appreciated it so: thank you so much, Anon.

And fair warning that I’m about to get disconcertingly earnest and thus prove that I’m the exact opposite of cool, but I feel like it’s important to point out that much of what I post is me learning from other people? A lot of what you see here is essentially me making notes to myself about things I’m reading, or things I want to read, or scrapbook-pasting vaguely linked ideas that I want to synthesize because there’s a connection there but I haven’t yet articulated it to my own satisfaction. I’m really glad that it’s given you things to think about. But I wouldn’t feel quite right responding to this without acknowledging that I’m thinking alongside you, or that anything worthwhile I have to say about politics is influenced by a lot of sharp-minded and compassionate people both online and off - or that ultimately, you’re the one who sat down and did the reconsidering.

Like - I have a tough time discussing this except in generalities but it’s in a good cause so fuck it: I was raised in hyperconservative fundamentalist Christianity. Clearly I’m not a hyperconservative fundamentalist now. And the process of moving from Point A to Point B there is kind of akin to having that “YOU ARE NOT IMMUNE TO PROPAGANDA” meme acid-etched on the inside of your skull. If I’m attentive to detail it’s at least partly because I’m uneasy about missing a trick. If I’m pathologically fretful about nuance (though thank you for describing it more charitably LOL) it’s because the only...I won’t say “safe,” because often it’s a good way to get into hot water, but the only meaningful and moral and honest way I know to exist in the world is to lean straight into discomfort and doubts. People talk up curiosity and empathy a lot. But they mostly praise them as character qualities rather than actions, and in action I think both of those things often boil down to a kind of gracious assent to sit still with what makes you uncomfortable. Or to an absolutely mule-headed, scab-picking, bruise-poking desire to understand, even when some small scared lizard brain instinct is screaming at you to snatch your hand back from understanding like it’s a hot stove because if you do understand you’re going to have to reorder the way you think about the world, and maybe the way you think about yourself - and to the small scared lizard brain that can feel like a kind of death. In an abstract sense it is, if you want to get a little melodramatic about it. So much of the way we experience the world is tied up in how we think about it. If you shift those foundations drastically enough, then you’ve survived a tiny metaphysical apocalypse. A world you thought you lived in has ended.

But that’s not really death. That’s actually one of the most cathartic and freeing feelings I know. (Sometimes it’s the bruised catharsis in the aftermath of running a marathon, but nevertheless.) And I guess my point is that I’m grateful to you for being honest enough to sincerely scrutinize what you believe, and grateful to a lot of thoughtful people who keep reminding me by their example to do the same, and I’ll take your thanks as long as you take my insistence that (a) as far as I can tell the only way to stay attuned to nuance is to stay humble about the possibility of getting it wrong, and (b) I fuck that up plenty so I’m not any sort of authority here.

Anyway I apologize for having no chill and I hope you also have a wonderful day.<3

[trenton-woodcox]

Religion, Identity, and Role Conflict

When it comes to roles, identity, and socialization, I can’t help but reflect on my religiosity. At the moment, I’m very atheist—so much so I’d almost describe myself an antitheist. It wasn’t always that way, though, and upon reflection its somewhat of a miracle that I’ve ended up where I am.

I was certainly raised religious. While not necessarily consistent church goers, my family was very much Christian, and tried to make it to Sunday church as often as was convenient. This in and of itself is a clear point of socialization; kids generally believe what adults tell them , I think, and having a pastor preach at you the word of God when your young is a pretty good way to get someone to buy into the Christian identity and take up the responsibilities and behaviors of that role. There were little, more nuanced things that, upon reflection, upheld my belief and taught me how to assume the role; for example, I was consistently scolded for the phrase “Oh my God” --taking the Lord’s name in vain, and all that. I was also encouraged to pray when I felt sad, or angry. I think these things reinforced in me the idea that this thing I believed in was real and important, and there was some value in sticking to the duties that came with being a Christian—duties like keeping a check on my doubt, which was a big one I’d totally fail at later. Nonetheless, if I had to perform as a Christian (and I have had to do so), I could knock the performance out of the park—which just goes to show the thorough socialization I’d had by my family and church about all the little behaviors and beliefs that come with the identity.

I first experienced role conflict with my faith upon entering high school. I became very political, and saw myself as having a role as a responsible citizen. My peers, being in a small rural town at that part of my life, also had especially fundamentalist views on Christianity. Based on their behaviors, it was signaled to me that the Christianity I was familiar with was not enough—it was not the proper way to fulfill the role. There were other beliefs and actions I had to subscribe to as well. This became most apparent when I’d talk politics with people. I found Christian teachings being used against me as an argument against my political positions—positions I saw as necessary to my role as a responsible citizen. Things like gay marriage and drug legalization were against the teachings of Christianity. All the data around climate change was false, since the Earth is only 6,000 years old—not to mention the hoax of evolution!

This conflict between to roles I saw myself occupying led me to seriously examine the substance and merits of each. I became severely disillusioned with not just my own faith, by faith and religion as a whole. By the end of my Sophomore year, my inner role conflict had led me to abandon my role as a Christian and identify heavily with the values of Atheism—values that were almost entirely self-cultivated, based on foiling the religiosity that was around me. I learned how to be an Atheist by reversing many of my Christian beliefs, and working against the Christians I argued with.  

From a functionalist perspective, my initial socialization into Christianity made sense; my community and family were Christian, and my adopting the same values is a mechanism that keeps the peace and streamlines my integration into the community/group. Likewise, once we moved to the small-town rural scene, this is what my peers were attempting to do for me, with regard to a more fundamentalist Christianity. It just so happened those attempts backfired horribly; I’m not sure how a functionalist can explain this happening very well. From a conflict theory perspective, it makes far more sense; religious people have power, as a massive electoral block. As I became a political person, I found myself advocating for positions that would decrease or undermine the power of that block by contradicting tenets of their faith. Hence, conflict ensues, as a struggle for power between ideological factions vying for political pull.

At the end of the day, I think becoming Atheist had positive implications for me. When I first dropped my faith, I was wayyyyy too firebrand and mean towards religious people, to be sure—in my defense, the people I went to school with were pretty terrible! However, in the long run, I’ve simmered down quite a bit, and I think my lack of faith has put me in a position where I can more honestly engage with and accurately interpret the world around me.

For that, I’m thankful!