#The Cultural Christian Hegemony

[brightgnosis]

'Why is it so important to talk about Christian Zionism?' from Jewitches on Instagram

We’re making this video not to distract from the atrocities currently occurring in Gaza and across Occupied Palestine; but rather the opposite: we received many comments on our previous works of people defending their “alliance” with Christian Zionists, somehow believing that if they don’t believe in Christian Rapture Theology, nothing bad can come of it; particularly antisemitism.

You are not aiding Jewish people by aligning yourself with Christian Zionists.

Christian Zionism is fundamentally antisemitic: it sees “Jews as the people who fail to recognize & accept the true Messiah & have thus deprived themselves of both eternal life & sound moral guidelines”, it simultaneously dehumanizes, fetishizes, and mythologizes Jews; it views Jews as nothing more than Pawns.

Accepting these ‘allies’ is a betrayal of our values & the fundamental truth that all life is precious.

[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. 

[areumcl]

doodles

[meirmakesstuff]

IT BEGINS

Stolen from a friend's Facebook:

Description: Photo of an endcap display at a supermarket, under a large sign that says "Happy HANUKKAH". From the bottom up, the contents of the shelves are as follows: one full shelf of Manischewitz latke mix; one full shelf of Manischewitz matzah ball mix; one shelf with a variety of Manischewitz chicken broths as well as packs of egg noodles; one full shelf of non-Manischewitz boxes of Chanukah candles; a shelf bearing packs of chocolate coins and "grain-free coconut s'mores cookies;" one shelf of chestnuts and honey; an entire shelf of Streit's unsalted matzahs.

[jewishboricua]

nobody can convince me that cultural christianity in western culture, particularly the USA, doesn't exist when i specifically remember one time me and my family used to go to this plant based restaurant a few years back, and i remember that the owner was openly Buddhist and had put Buddha as part of the logo for her restaurant, and then I had watched a show that had a segment about Buddha, which I found really cool, so I proceeded to tell my conservative Christian mother about what I learned, then she told me "that's nice honey, but I go here for the food, NOT the politics." with a passive aggressive tone, and i'm not gonna lie, i think it's FUCKED UP that being a part of a religion that isn't Christianity or even being atheist/agnostic is "too political" and is even considered "pandering to an agenda"

[creature-wizard]

Judeo-Christian supremacy exists. Stop denying it. Why do you see Chruches every corner you go in America? That's because Christianity and its similar values such as Islam, Judaism, and false Anarchists have taken ahold.

I have never denied that Western culture is under Christian hegemony. I've written and reblogged posts on this topic - they're tagged with "cultural Christianity" and "Christian hegemony". Christian hegemony does exist, AND-

"Judeo-Christian supremacy" does not exist because "Judeo-Christian" isn't a real thing, because Christianity and Judaism are two completely different religions. Furthermore, Judaism doesn't have nearly the influence on society and culture that Christianity does. Churches aren't Jewish, they're Christian, and Christian alone. Meanwhile, Jews in predominantly Christian countries have faced discrimination and violence as long as Jews have been in predominantly Christian countries, because Christians decided to be assholes about people who didn't follow their beliefs.

Also, claiming that Islam is somehow part of this is just... ?????? Literally what? Islam has nothing to do with cultural Christianity/Christian hegemony. If anything, Christians in Western societies tend to be wildly Islamophobic.

[ardent-apostasy]

came across some cultural christianity discourse, so just a few (rather disorganized) thoughts from one (1) ex-christian's pov:

gonna start off by saying i do understand the idea of cultural christianity and the need for a term to encompass it. and it's definitely kind of uncomfortable, but like, a term for the concept needs to exist.

(i think part of the issue comes from "cultural christianity" or "christian culture" coming off differently than "cultural christian" or "christian atheist". "cultural christianity" addresses a culture. "cultural christian" addresses a person -- and i think that's what makes ex-christians get defensive.)

i think there's an element of shame to feeling like you belong to a different culture than the one you feel like you were supposed to?

i bring up this idea because i'm ethnically chinese, but i was raised in north america. my relatives call me a banana, because i'm "yellow on the outside but white on the inside". and like, there's nothing really wrong with that. it's the truth, and none of it is my fault. but it always feels shameful, anyways -- like i've failed my ancestors and i've failed the community that raised me. like i'll never be white enough and i'll never be chinese enough.

(and i have thought about it maybe being because of sorta white guilt over north america's shitty history, maybe wishing my culture wasn't built on another's bones. but then, china's hands are not clean by any stretch of the imagination. so it's not just that.)

i think another part of it is that "cultural christian" is, like, kind of an insult in many christian circles. (definitely dates back to at least 2011, idk if it goes further. idk if that predates the tumblr discourse or not.) it's a way for christians to tear town other christians for not being "christian enough". for some ex-christians, "cultural christian" doesn't mean "raised in a society influenced by christianity", it means "lukewarm christian who's gonna get vomited up by jesus and turned away from heaven"

being lukewarm, many christians say, is worse than not believing at all. (kind of like judas, who jesus said would've been better off not being born at all.) being lukewarm is something many ex-christians spent their christian years being terrified of.

(i would argue that some of the persecution complex actually comes from that fear. because we're told all the time about the lukewarm christians who weren't strong enough to die for their faith. we were raised on the story of cassie, promising that if a gun was held to our heads, we would still profess the name of jesus christ. we were taught that if we were christian enough, then the world would hate us. so if the world didn't hate us -- if the world wasn't persecuting us -- then it had to be because we weren't good enough. but anyways the connection between lukewarm fear and persecution complex is a topic for another day.)

so i think in that sense a problem is that "cultural christianity" is a term with two competing meanings which are very much different from each other, one of which IS 100% intended as an insult. and the problem with "cultural christianity" in the way that it's used on tumblr is that if you google "cultural christianity", the results are about the christian pov on cultural christianity. that's always a recipe for miscommunication.

and one last sort of thought: many things that are kind of "culturally christian" are things that the church often doesn't approve of. like, giving gifts at christmas? it's not heresy, but you better make sure that the gift you're most thankful for is jesus dying on the cross for you. also, santa is almost definitely satan.

(interestingly, something like christmas gifts is probably one of the things where christians and non-christians will agree on what "cultural christianity" might mean. christians will say it's culturally christian because it's people who don't believe in christ but want gifts. non-christians will say it's culturally christian because, like, it's literally about the supposed birth of jesus?)

anyways, there's not really a point here. just wanted to bring up some points that i haven't really seen mentioned whenever i see the cultural christianity discourse, because i think they're important to understanding where the discourse stems from. (i like to think discourse isn't all just people bitching at each other for no reason. i like to think it stems from miscommunication because we don't understand each others' traumas and triggers. but then that might be too optimistic.)

[brightgnosis]

'The largest Christian Zionist organization" from Jewitches on Instagram

Our video about Christian Zionism got over a million views so here are some things to remember: Christian Zionism has over 30 million adherents in the United States alone, but that doesn’t mean it is just for people in the US. It is a global ideology & it has offshoots & variations. Understanding the role Christian Zionism plays in global politics is key.

It is also vital to understand the differences between the 3 definitions of Israel: we have an in-depth video and blog, but essentially: Am Yisrael, the Peoplehood of Israel or the Jewish people, Eretz Israel, the physical Land, and Medinat Israel, the modern political state founded in 1948.

John Hagee & CUFI don’t care about Israel because they care about Jews; they care about Israel to serve their genocidal ideology.

[magnetothemagnificent]

Banish the idea that all antisemites look like Nazis.

Antisemitism is pervasive in every culture and people aware of Jewish people's existence.

Yes, some antisemites look like white European neo-Nazis, but...

A lot of antisemites look like an atheist influencer who mocks Judaism as a "gotcha" to Christianity.

A lot of antisemites look like a lady at Church who talks about how much she "loves Jews" because "Jesus was Jewish."

A lot of antisemites look like a political commentator talking about the "globalists" and the "secret cabal controlling the government and Hollywood."

A lot of antisemites look like your gay friend who says he can't be antisemitic because he's gay and "the Nazis killed gay people too."

A lot of antisemites look like social justice advocates who will advocate for every marginalized community but will stay silent as soon as they are confronted with the antisemitism in their own circles.

A lot of antisemites look like fandom bloggers who think it's funny and original to call Jewish features "feral" or "sleepy" or "sneaky" or "rat-like" or "creepy".

People who want to deny their own antisemitism will push the idea that only Nazis are antisemites.

[pargolettasworld]

Another one for the "cultural Christianity" ledger. This one is much more of a "condition of life" thing than a "personal belief system" thing, but it still shows how Christianity permeates (at the very least) North American culture.

Tonight is Kol Nidre, the beginning of Yom Kippur. I have a greeting shift at the beginning of the service, so I need to be at the synagogue by 5:30 PM. I do not own a car, and it's not safe biking conditions outside, so I'm going to look at my options on the bus.* Ordinarily, I wouldn't have too much of a problem. There are two different bus routes that connect my home and the synagogue, and it takes about 15 minutes on the bus, so the bus is an eminently reasonable proposition.

Except! Today is Sunday. Today, out of all the days of the week, the bus runs on a much reduced schedule. My options to get to the synagogue at 5:30 include 1) a bus that will get me there at 4:30, or 2) a bus that will get me there at 5:45. Nothing in between. This is a giant pain in the ass, impacting my ability to meet both a religious obligation and a social obligation; the synagogue needs greeters.

Why does the bus run a reduced schedule on Sunday? Because it is a Special™ day, The Sabbath, The Day Of Rest. You shouldn't need to go places on Sunday, says the schedule of the bus, a public utility. Why shouldn't you need to go places? Because you should be going to church in the morning and then staying home with your family.

What about those of us who do not observe the Sabbath on Sunday? Those of us who may not be Christians? Tough beans. You will observe The Day Of Rest with all of the other Christian normal people. Figure out your own damn way to get to your "synagogue" at 5:30 today. And then figure out your own damn way home. Regular service for the Christian normal work week resumes tomorrow.

You may not be Christian, but the public culture you live in sure is!

*My city has a form of public transit, so I'm already operating at +1 conditions on this.

[capricorn-0mnikorn]

Shout-out to anyone whose sacred/meaningful New Year is Not January 1st

But you still have to fill out every form and log-in info with the date according to the Christian Calendar.

"Common Era," my foot. More like "Colonists' Era." Am I right?

[meirmakesstuff]

I've significantly changed how much joy Instagram gives me in November by changing my mindset from "Adapting these Christmas suggestions for Chanukah would contribute to the Christmasization of Chanukah and probably make me feel worse" to "Adapting these Christmas suggestions for Purim would knock everyone's socks off and make me feel amazing." I'm taking notes now. I'm making spreadsheets. I'm thinking about replacement flavors for cinnamon.

[glimmer-gremlin]

There's a few people on my dash taking offense to the term 'culturally christian' that don't seem to understand what it means and I want to try and help. Think of cultural christianity like living in the matrix. Everything you do, everything you think, everything you are, is subtly affected by the world you live in and your upbringing, in ways that- and this part is the most important part- in ways that you won't notice until it gets pointed out to you. It's like trying to get a fish to notice the water it's swimming in.

It's not your fault!!! It's not some sort of failing, or an indignity that people are secretly laughing at you about. It's not pointing a finger and going 'har har, you're culturally christian, so you're too stupid to know you're still christian, dummy!!!' it's more like 'Hey. Please please please pay attention to the way this incredibly, horrifyingly powerful religion has infected the laws, culture, habits and patterns of thought of the western world. Please please please know that it doesn't have to be this way. Please please please know that morality is not always so black-and-white, or that the concept of an afterlife is much more varied than 'good place and bad place', or that not every religion actually cares about its own 'almighty creator' figure, if it even has one. Not every religion permits proselytizing, not every religion has ordained authority figures. There are different ways of living and thinking than you have been exposed to. Please pay attention.'

My parents are atheist, I was raised atheist. I'm still culturally christian. I don't believe in christianity, but having lived in a christian world I passively absorbed christian ideas of morality and how society should be structured and how justice should be carried out, that sort of thing. That is what cultural christianity means, it's the kind of shit you absorb without realising it whether you want to or not, whether you agree with it or not!!!

If you're taking offense to it, then you need to be paying attention to it, not getting pissy about people using the term when talking to you!!!

[jessicalprice]

cultural Christianity, Christian hegemony so pervasive that people don’t even NOTICE it

is people who claim to be ex-Christian or never Christian out here literally proselytizing that people should be like Jesus and no one seems to notice that that’s weird

like it’s baffling to me how often people who claim not to be Christian seem as invested as actual professing Christians in protecting Christianity’s brand

[pagan-corruption]

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.