#or ANY spaces being doomed forever over sin is only one way to do Christianity. like damn can the ones who like

[timeisacephalopod]

The pushback to the term "cultural Christianity" from atheists is real odd to me because, as someone who has been an atheist since 13, only ever went to church a handful of times never with my own family (made a note never to sleep over at that friends house on a Saturday again bc I HATED church it smelled like shit, was boring, pews are uncomfortable as fuck, and the religious people I knew were all wildly misogynistic and I've never been here for being told I was less of a person for being Born Like This), and generally had no actual connection to Christianity in a meaningful way but still only knows Christian mythology, has been steeped in Christian values I had to untangle, and my religious understandings are still deeply Christian.

Like Ive never paid attention to the bible, church, Jesus, Christian teachings, or whatever but if you asked me about any religion the one I'll reliably know the most about is Christianity. I don't know why atheists are offended by being called culturally Christian because they have bad blood with the religion because like sorry bruh that doesn't mean you're less indoctrinated by Christian values if the culture you grew up in is predominantly Christian. In fact I'd say that religion being this ubiquitous in the culture regardless of anyone's consent to exactly ONE religion being shoved down our throats is reason to team up with other religious folks who ALSO don't like being constantly evangelized to by the culture at large, not a reason to throw a fit because you don't like being tied to a religion that is so ingrained into the culture that shit like "oh my god" and "Jesus Christ" are common expressions of surprise regardless of how atheist you are. Like surely I'm not the only atheist to notice the shocking amount of cultural religious shit that works it's way into my life and speech despite having not set foot in a church since I was like 10, and I can't remember the last time I was in one before that.

Idk man cultural Christianity seems like a pretty damn useful term to describe my relationship with a religion I never fully bought into and then actively rejected as a child yet still hold weird connections to and knowledge of just because Christianity is so baked into the culture I grew up in like it or not. If you want to be mad, be mad at the Christians who stole your freedom from religion from you, not usually religious minorities who discuss cultural Christianity and how it damages them too.

[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

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

TLDR: Republicans believe themselves to be infallible and cannot be convinced otherwise

Republicans think America is perfect and always has been, while simultaneously believing that America is DOOMED and ON THE EDGE OF COLLAPSE at all times and want to bring us back to the Before Times™ when men were men and women were household appliances and minorities were someone else’s problem.  If you bring up a genuine critique of American culture or history they throw a pissbaby shit fit and start spewing nationalist platitudes, “America: Like It or Leave It!”  All their complaints stem from their perceived self-importance being eroded; they don’t like to realize that other people with differing opinions exist and should have their voices heard.  If a “brown” or a “black” or a “red” or a “yellow” is allowed to speak, that just means there’s one less space for a “white.”  All their complaints come from a slippery slope argument that if we don’t model our society after their specific cherrypicked interpretation of The Bible then we will degenerate into amoral savagery.

They say being gay is an abomination and allowing it will damn our children to hell; what they really think is that it’s gross and they don’t want to see things they think are gross.  There’s literally no good argument against marriage equality besides “I don’t personally like it.”  America is not a theocracy, so the belief system of Christianity should not be construed as the law of the land.  This stems from their belief that the Bible is infallible, “because the Bible says so.”  They don’t know and don’t want to know about the history behind it, nor the very contentious political landscapes at the times the books were written, nor the personal biases of the very human authors.  If the Bible is a literal textbook, then why?  What makes it so special?  By whose authority were its contents collated and designated THE Good Book?  If the Bible is literal, why not the works of Homer, or the Epic of Gilgamesh?  Just because the Bible says the Bible is right doesn’t make it so.  For the record, I am a Christian, and I think the Bible is just an old book.  I’m a Christian in that I follow the teachings of Christ, which can be summed up as “DON’T BE AN ASSHOLE.”  I live by that, and All the ChrINOs (Christians in Name Only) need to learn it.  Jesus would be ashamed of what he saw today.

They say that abortion is baby murder, on par with ritual human sacrifice and Satan worship. They don’t understand biology, they have a Sunday School understanding of philosophy, and live in a world so black and white that they can’t even imagine a reason someone would have an abortion besides that they’re a terrible person; a woman who would have an abortion is unfit to be a mother in their eyes because they see abortion as equivalent to smothering a baby with a pillow because you don’t want to take care of it anymore.  “He or she is alive, he or she has a heart beat!”  Well, at this point is is just a blob of tissue, not a living person; a heart beat alone does not make something alive or dead.  Your life comes from your brain, not your heart.  If someone is alive the moment their heart starts, then they must be dead the moment is stops, so CPR is necromancy.  A person isn’t considered dead until their brain is dead, so if they wanted to argue that life begins at brain activity they would have a stronger argument, though still weak because brain activity is not personhood either.  Patients in permanent vegetative states on life support may have some brain activity, but they are effectively dead.  There is no way a judge, appointed by senators elected by the people of the United States, can prove that not only do souls exist but that they are created the second a sperm fertilizes an egg.  If “souls” exist, they aren’t so much created as built up over time as we gain new experienced and our brains develop.  What we are is electricity in a ball of meat jelly in our skulls, and that comes to being at a point after which abortions are already banned.  Conservatives also just want to control women; Roe v. Wade isn’t explicitly about the right to an abortion, it is about the right to body autonomy.  Do women have the right to control their own bodies, or do they defer that right to their fathers and husbands?  Are women people or property?  Can a man make decisions on a woman’s behalf?  “You must forgive my daughter; as a simple minded woman she’s fallen into a stupor of female hysteria.  We’ll have the family doctor bring out the smelling salts and leaches.”

They say that certain vices are crimes against God, but only when some people do it.  Divorce is a sin because marriage is sacred, except when a conservative does it, then it’s totally justified because of such and such explanation.  Tattoos are the mark of the beast, worn by degenerates and lesbians, except when a conservative does it, then it’s just art and harmless self expression.  Marijuana is a gateway drug and we need to lock away its addicts and throw away the key, unless a conservative does it, then it’s just recreational, no big deal, we don’t want to ruin the [white] boy’s future because of it.  A black person who does cocaine is a criminal, a white person who does cocaine is a public figure (you’d be surprised how many actors and politicians regularly use coke; they have to have high energy 24/7 in case there are any cameras, so they need uppers to keep themselves presentable).  This all springs from the fundamental conservative philosophy of “it’s okay when WE do it, but not when YOU do it.”  That’s the long and short of it.  The in-group is allowed to do things, but the out-group isn’t.  It’s the Us vs Them mentality taken to the logical extreme; WE are people, THEY are monsters.  WE are allowed to have faults, THEY have to stay in line and follow all the rules.  OUR lives matter, THEIR lives are lesser.  When you strip away the showy bits and get down to the core of their beliefs, everything stems from their desire to hurt anyone who isn’t them.  They want power, they want to be special, they want the Good Guys™ to always prevail over the Bad Guys™, and they want to be the ones to decide who is good and who is bad.  Their opinions are the only ones that matter, everyone else is wrong because they’re not them.  Now, it’s not like you could solve every problem by opening up your mind to new opinions; there are some issues that are indeed black and white with objectively right and wrong answers, but they live in a world where they are incapable of being wrong.  They see personal growth as a betrayal of the self, that admitting a fault is terrible, that apologizing and learning from a mistake is traitorous.  No, they have to double down on every single one of their beliefs to re-instill it in their minds.  They can never doubt themselves, because God will punish them forever if they ever have doubt.  They can’t ask questions or look at things from other perspectives because that would be an admission that their perspectives are fallible.  They are afraid of changing their minds so much that they refuse to even listen when someone explains their opinions because they don’t want to have their minds co-opted by Satan’s LIES!  If they hear something convincing, it’s all over, their entire world collapses, everything they believe is a lie, they lose, they go to hell forever, The End.

That is the dichotomy under which Republicans live their lives.  Nothing matters but what they believe.  They don’t believe what they believe for logical reasons, so no amount of logic will ever make them not believe it.  They’re making up their own rules to win.  You’re playing Rock-Paper-Scissors and they throw Nuclear Bomb, which defeats all three, so you lose.  You say that’s not fair, they say tough.  You throw Nuclear Bomb, and they say they have a bomb proof shield, so the bomb doesn’t hurt them but kills you, so you lose.  You can’t even beat them at their own game because they’ve been playing it longer, and they cry foul when you stoop to their level, suddenly saying that you need to be the bigger person, walking right up to the line of admitting that what they do is wrong but not quite getting there, simply reverting to the complaint that you shouldn’t be allowed to do it.  “I can, but YOU can’t.”  That’s why it infuriates me when nobody ever calls out a Republican for their hypocrisy.  They do something, a Democrat does that exact same thing, they cry foul, but nobody ever says “well, you didn’t have a problem when you did it,” they just try to excuse their own actions rather than demand justification for theirs.  Democrats are always on the defensive, they always look like they’re losing even when they’re winning, so the Republicans can use that to build their base and rally together for the occasional victory (Democrats won 7 of the last 8 presidential elections; the last Republican to legitimately win the presidency was George H.W. Bush in 1988).

I don’t know how you’d even begin to fight someone who is this far down the rabbit hole of self denial.

Democrats self-reflect, Republicans self-deflect.

Democrats are progressive, Republicans are regressive.

Now I’m sure there are no Republicans reading this, but if there are they’ll make themselves known and “totally refute” everything I’ve said with some paper thin argument that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, but they don’t care because it stands up to them.  They only need to show one example of a Democrat failing to write off the entire party; they only need to show one black Republicans to deny the existence of racism; one gay Republican denies homophobia; one women denies sexism.  They are the party of tokenism.

They will point out the mote of dust in your eye and ignore the plank in their own.

Debate me, I have nothing better to do with my time, I’m a dirty libtard cuckflake soyboy beta with a case full of participation trophies and handouts paid for by other people’s tax dollars (funny, they think handouts are for degenerates, except when they get them.  Inheritance?  Privilege?  Never heard of them!)