#culturally christian discourse

[autistic-ben-tennyson]

Do you think that "cultural christianity" is invalid as a concept? I've seen some posts calling it "religious essentialism" but I think that it does make sense.

The idea is that everyone in a Christian-dominant society or Christian background has to some extent internalized Christian beliefs even if they're ex-Christian or atheist.

Beliefs about sex and sexuality, forgiveness and atonement etc.

This doesn't mean that people can never leave their religion or unlearn the beliefs they were raised with, it just means that you should be aware of your biases.

Does this make sense?

I never really agreed with the concept either during my period as an atheist or now. It unfairly paints a broad picture of a religion that’s actually very diverse and has different denominations. People who use it never clarify if they mean Catholicism, southern baptism, mainline Protestantism or nondenominational Christianity. They often mean the version of Christianity that they grew up with that’s often evangelicalism, Calvinism or nondenominational churches. Many of these people who use it turn out to be Zionists and it’s not surprising why they believe this. Many have been taught to view Christianity as inherently antisemitic, as well as atheism and Islam. That is ironically not that different from evangelical persecution complexes with their belief that the world is out to get them.

Jumblr Zionists often use it to insult people they don’t like. Many are people with religious trauma who converted to Judaism because of wanting to take part in a legacy of oppression they weren’t a part of. It also is due to them viewing it as inherently more progressive or leftist than Christianity and more queer friendly. It’s often used to silence atheists from criticizing any religion besides Christianity, even if it’s coming from ex Jews as well as paint things Jumblr doesn’t like as bad like Aaron Bushnell’s self immolation. I think @bringmemyrocks has more information on this.

The term may have been coined for genuine reasons but slowly devolved into what it is now. It was originally used by Jewish atheists as a term to critique atheist spaces. Then it devolved into people like Prismatic Bell claiming “you’ll never leave the religion that hurt you if you put up a Christmas tree or use a Georgian calendar”. It was used with little sensitivity for those with religious trauma and often targeted a strawman of atheists or even Christian beliefs.

Christianity does influence our culture and beliefs, even if we aren’t Christian but there is little nuance to how it’s talked about and people tend to act like the beliefs of one denomination are the same for the rest, typically to prop up another religion as better. Christian beliefs about damnation can be used to justify harsh punishment and violent retribution but some can also use Jesus’s teachings on redemption to argue in favor of restorative justice and everyone being capable of change. Because the term is often used in a simplistic or derogatory way, often to paint Christians or atheists raised Christian as bad people, with little sensitivity for religious beliefs or trauma, I would rather not use it and I am glad the tumblr Zionists going mask off has pushed less people to use it as well.

[heavenaintaniceplace]

ive already expressed how bunk the culturally christian discourse is but something else occurred to me and its that the discourse not only alienates exchristians (on purpose) but also alienates poc, largely i think also on purpose. because ive seen so many false equivalence posts insinuating that backlash against culturally christian is the same as resistance to the idea of ‘white privilege’ or that being ‘culturally christian’ is the same as being white in a racist society. and so many people keeping this discourse going are white and trying to call out other white people for having another level of what theyve interpreted as unilateral all encompassing privilege, going back and forth on how privileged the cultural christians (exchristians, people raised atheist, people who have converted to other religions, jewish folks and muslims too now if they breathed the wrong too christian air or lived in the wrong country) are and equating it to being inherently racist. and you can see how this analogy doesn’t work for people of color and literally anyone marginalized in any other way. even if you think ‘culturally christian’ works as a term (it doesn’t but go off, mostly because yall stripped it of anything meaningful from conception) how can you say its equivalent to white privilege even for poc without being racist? for all this “you need to unlearn christian biases!” none of you are unlearning your racist biases.

being ‘culturally christian’ is not a person of color’s version of white privilege you myopic racist fucks. the white ‘culturally christian’ enjoyers are either trying to dodge some sort of guilt or accountability but it shows how they use intersectionality is broken and oversimplified otherwise we wouldn’t be having this discussion in the first place. its no surprise a concept made by a black woman (intersectionality) is misused by white folks. and no, i don’t care if youre white and nonchristian saying this, if you can make those kind of claims with no nuance then i get to do the same. a lot of the popular bloggers who say this are white and reblog from people known to harass poc anways...

and now for the personal anecdote as a black person: black churches didn’t get firebombed, be segregated and get defunded so they couldn’t organize against white supremacy for you to say ‘culturally christian’ is the same as being white and racist for everyone. they didn’t edit the bibles they gave enslaved people for no reason, they didn’t burn crosses in people’s yards and march streets with them in white hoods, or claim black people didn’t have souls or that integration was ‘unchristian’ or say that “only jesus could fix racism!” for you to get your white ass on tumblr and say this shit. i hope you feel genuinely uncomfortable and unsettled reading that.

[almostdefinitelydying]

It is so easy and so much more accurate to say: "your behaviour is informed by cultural christianity" or "you are defaulting to a culturally christian view" or " the society you grew up in is culturally christian and it influences your stance" instead, but I guess they're not divisive enough for people. I grew up in a christian culture and am influenced by it, but influence doesn't equal identity, when did it ever. Might as well call all queer people culturally cishet.

Yuuuup.. the person I argued with a few weeks ago, who claimed to be Sami, actually used that very argument. Implied that queer identity wasn't needed since we had "heteronormative" as a term. And therefore culturally Christian was a legit ID. The brainrot on that one..

There's also differences in how much people are influenced by the dominant religion of the culture they live in. You can't just blanket statement say that everyone is the same when someone might be 1. Raised atheist, someone else might be 2. Raised in another religion entirely, 3. Raised in the dominant religion. These three people will naturally be influenced at different levels and on different things.

But that doesn't count to these people, because what they really want is just a scapegoat. They want to have a valid target to bully. That for once it's not they who are oppressed. Now the tables have turned and -they- have a licence (according to them) to do the violence.

[starlightomatic]

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

an exvangelical atheist did NOT grow up in that

instead, they left the evangelical world and joined that instead

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

[antimony-medusa]

on Consequences in minecraft streaming

Okay so one of the real common things that I've been seeing lately is an increasingly passionate call for certain characters to experience Consequences (and the rest of the post always makes it clear that they mean a specific type of definatively negative repercussions) for their actions during QSMP events. And aside from the absolute deja vu of having seen these same calls when DSMP was airing, and how that turned out (sorry, the syndicate did not all have a meeting where they apologized for their sins while tommy told them they were horrible people), I'm not 100% sure if that's going to happen or pan out in the exact way that I think people are aiming for and expecting will happen.

I keep seeing a lot of people saying that it would be bad writing if people don't get "consequences" for their actions, and what they're specifically asking for is punishment and for people to realize what they're doing was wrong. BBH is supposed to repent for furniture thefts and torturing the people keeping him from his kid. Phil is supposed to realize that actually he's good at PVP and apologize for saying that his team has been suffering in purgatory. Tubbo is supposed to fill in his tubhole and only do things other people ask him to do.

But like, so much of the time, what we're seeing is these streamers being interested in writing morally grey characters, just some little guys who make bad decisions, and the thing about characters being morally grey is that they don't always have a come to jesus moment and become morally pure. Sometimes they just keep being morally grey. Sometimes they get worse on purpose.

Maybe BBH never decides that torturing that guy was bad, because he wanted to get his FUCKING KID back. Like, I seriously think you have to be prepared for that character arc to never end in Bad going "that was wrong to do", and maybe his cubito will still be happy. Phil is a dude with anxiety who's been sure that his kids are going to die from the moment he got to purgatory, streaming at 1-4 in the morning while other teams break into their base, even if bolas goes insane and scrapes out a win I think it's way more likely that that team is gonna go "what a wild fluke that's the power of gas masks" and not have a moment where they go "it was unfair of us to assume that we were underpowered, I guess everybody else was the underdogs! Our bad." Tubbo is tubbo, he's already building a new create thing, he is not going to apologize for leaving marks on the landscape with mod packs.

Like, the streamers are interested in making human characters, making interesting decisions, not communicating moral lessons to their fanbases. Bad is operating within a Taken film, not a sermon. Quackity wants his cubito to be pathetic, gay, and out for revenge, not to communicate the importance of forgiveness to those who hurt you. Tubbo's victory condition is having a nice date with Fred, full stop, does not care who he has to run over to get there.

Absolutely I think there are people intentionally doing corruption/villany arcs on the server, and they probably intend for that to lead places. There will be Consequences, as in, things will happen. Cellbit is doing cannibalsm on purpose, and not as a teaching moment about how good cannibalism is for your social bonds. But like, maybe that leads to him being thrown out of his family and not trusted because of his sins, OR maybe it leads to him murdering his way through a federation complex, facing down a bloody cucurucho, and going "you made me into you and I hate this" and eating him. Narrative consequences does not always mean punishment and a return to moral purity. Sometimes people just do bad things, and then repercussions happen, but they don't necessarily "see the error of their ways". The specific call for like— retribution and repentance as the consequences people are going for— for punishment— if a character has done something bad they don't "deserve" good things to happen to them and it's bad writing for that to happen— I just don't think that those are the stories the creators are necessarily interested in telling.

And secondly, what people are often asking for is character conflict— they want people to be socially excluded by characters they feel have been wronged, and learn the error of their ways that way until they apologize sufficiently. Phil is gonna hate BBH or Tubbo is going to hate Roier or something once they return from Purgatory. People want their cubitos to have beef with each other.

But the thing is, on a meta level, I don't doubt that the entire admin team and streaming team on QSMP is just screamingly aware that this fandom cannot be trusted with conflict. The election was just part of it, but I made it through the election, and Purgatory has been so much more unpleasant— and I am not just talking about twitter. This website, tumblr, has been full of people fighting each other for their teams. And I am not just saying "red team fans have been bad", because boy have I been staring in horrified awe at the takes that some red team people have been putting forward (what on EARTH do you mean BBH deserves to have his kid die, touch grass immediately), but if I step outside of red team circles, everyone is talking about how red team people are horrible hypocrites who win too much and only deserve to suffer (I saw this posting the day that blue had back to back wins, so it isn't even tied to how well red is doing). The quality of the discourse has been increasingly unpleasant, and this has been taking place in streamer's chats, on twitter, in discords, and here on tumblr.

Every QSMP streamer is increasingly aware that having conflict with another streamer is basically sending a wave of negativity their way, and setting off bombs in the fandom at the same time. And they're all friends with each other! Sometimes they decide that the story beat they're going for is worth it and just tell each other to stay off twitter, but like, you have got to be prepared that maybe they will just be friends again. And that might be weaker writing, for people to keep forgiving each other, but that is an unfortunate aspect of the technical aspects of this medium and this fandom. Maybe the creators would be more willing to have character conflict if they didn't know that that meant the person they were mad at in-game would get death threats on social media.

Like no fucking wonder Phil apologized for getting mad at Wil within the same stream and before Wil said sorry to him. This is why the French have given up on revolution arcs, you know it's why the women are all very careful to get along with people. All of those creators know the cost of making anyone into a villain, and I'm just saying maybe get prepared that we won't have inner-party conflict. Maybe they'll decide it's worth it for a fun story moment! Maybe they won't. Maybe don't get 100% married to the idea that the only good writing possible moving forward is for people to be thrown out of the community and then repent for their sins.

[hyperlexichypatia]

**Cracks knuckles and wades into The Discourse**

"Can atheists be culturally Christian?" is entirely the wrong question.

Of course they can! Plenty of people don't believe in the religious doctrines of Christianity, but still do things like celebrate Christmas or Easter, have church weddings, and other culturally Christian activities. Take for example, me -- I'm a Deist who is also culturally Christian. Christianity is the religious lens I understand best, even if I don't necessarily agree with it.

Plenty of atheists and broadly-secular people who live in majority-culturally-Christian places, like most of the U.S., also are often oblivious to the Christian basis of their cultural practices, and may think of culturally Christian practices are "universal" or "secular" or "for everyone." This comes up every time someone brings up the inappropriateness of public schools/places celebrating Christmas, when people come out of the woodwork to insist that of course Christmas isn't religious, they know plenty of secular people who celebrate it! (Note: This is often blamed on ex-Evangelicals, but I don't think that's fair. Ex-Evangelicals know what Christianity is. This is something I see more from people from secular families in mostly-secular areas who don't think about religious diversity because it's not relevant to their lives.) (Additional Note: Do not @ me with "WELL, ACTUALLY, Christmas is PAGAN--" No. Your history is oversimplified and bad. You are not celebrating Yule. You are not celebrating Saturnalia. You are celebrating Christmas, a heavily secularized Christian holiday with some cultural influences from European Pagan traditions.)

Additionally, many atheists/secularists/non-religious-people whose primary reference point for religion is Christianity (whether because they're ex-Christians themselves, or just because that's what they know from cultural osmosis) make broad, inaccurate assumptions about All Religion based on their projected understanding of Christianity, e.g. "I'm not religious because I don't believe that an omnipotent God controls everything in the universe and rewards or punishes people when they die." Okay, cool, but not all religions teach that, not all religious people believe that, not even all Christians believe that.

So, of course atheists can be culturally Christian, maybe without realizing it or thinking about it. Anyone who says they can't isn't paying attention! And that's why "Can atheists be culturally Christian?" is entirely the wrong question.

The right questions are "Is it reasonable to assume by default that anyone who lists their religion as 'atheist' or 'none' must actually be culturally Christian?" and "Is it reasonable to blame anything you don't like on 'cultural Christianity'?" and no! It's not!

Sometimes simply does not have a religious affiliation. And that's okay! There is a tendency to interpret "none of the above" as "Oh, so, the default thing, but a milder version of it," and that is... not accurate.

There's this vague sense that non-religious people aren't really a religious minority, that they're really just play-acting at being religiously marginalized, because after all, they're actually just non-devout Christians. Discrimination against non-religious people doesn't necessarily look the same as discrimination against religious people (like, there aren't atheist holidays that people are being denied time off work for), but it's still very real, and falls the hardest on non-religious people with the fewest cultural ties to Christianity, the very people erased by "Atheists are just cultural Christians" discourse.

Furthermore, the traits and beliefs and ideologies and biases that get called "culturally Christian" are often not actually unique to Christianity at all. Certain concepts, like an emphasis on redemption through death, are culturally Christian (although even that one is sometimes found in other religions), but to hear the people calling everything "culturally Christian" tell it, no other religion, culture, or philosophy on Earth has ever believed in virtue ethics, valued hard work and stigmatized "laziness", or been judgmental about petty infractions. Nor, I can't believe I have to say, is "Christians do it, so it's bad" a good argument against things like freedom of conscience or disability rights (neither of which are even especially popular among Christians).

The problem with way people are talking about "cultural Christians" isn't that atheists or other non-Christians can't be culturally Christian (of course they can) or that Christianity doesn't have pervasive influence in majority-Christian societies (of course it does). The problem is that people are using "culturally Christian" in inaccurate and nonsensical ways.

[tiny-huts]

Really fun how many time Matt tries to do anything with the gods or religion the fandom refuses to engage with the narrative and starts foaming at the mouth in barely concealed unprocessed Christian religious trauma.

[trash-bin-ary]

Man, apparently 6000 years ago people thought the earth was made 6000 years ago… that seems like such a long time ago and now we think the earth was made 4.5 billion years ago. Do you think in 4.5 billion years an alien or something will find our studies and go wow like I am now

[jackawful]

Engaging in any way with the discourse I'm seeing rn would be a bad counterproductive action but goddamn, how cruel do you have to be to consistently call ex-christians "christian atheists" or "christian antitheists" like. Yes, folks act badly due to trauma and may be yelling at you because they have baggage to unpack. Telling them they're still part of the thing that harmed them, regardless of how hard they try to distance themselves from it, is just...yikes. seems designed to hurt on purpose.

[rizzity]

Some people reference mid-century dystopia novels in the same way that conspiracy theorists reference the Book of Revelation.

"Unalive is Newspeak" and "Facial Recognition Payment is the mark of the beast" share the same space in my mind. -- The see-it-if-you-squint similarity comes first and foremost (euphemistic language derived from exerted power // your flesh determines your ability to do business), and you map that onto the Scary Satanic Thing That Surely Follows (Evil mind control // Evil mind control).

It's like it's less about using the text's themes to explain the world around us, and more about using vague aesthetic similarities to justify the text's eternal relevance and all-knowing-ness.

[autistic-ben-tennyson]

I have some different opinions about religion than when I started on here. I was a lot angrier towards Christianity as someone growing up in an evangelical home when I first started posting and was pretty vocal about it. In hindsight, there are some things I said that were perhaps not my place such as about Islam, because I was angry with how some people here view any criticism of non Christian religions as “cultural Christianity” and would shut down apostates. My view now is that “not every religion is Christianity and there are things that aren’t your place to talk about”, “Christianity is not inherently evil or abusive” and “viewing every other religion as more progressive or better than Christianity invalidates those who suffered and leads to Chauvanist attitudes” are all statements that can coexist. Before I created even an account, I was browsing tumblr a lot and came across many Jumblr blogs here that portrayed Judaism as the progressive religion that was the opposite of American Christianity. I fell for a lot of the jumblr rhetoric that claimed “Christianity, atheism and Islam” are inherently antisemitic and it made me hold some prejudice against people who did not deserve it including Muslim classmates I had and that view basically condemns billions of people as evil or bigoted.

So many people using that talking point turned out to be Zionists which makes their view that anyone born in a religion is part of it forever make a lot more sense. I am not sure if atheist or ex Christian works as a label for me as I am still figuring that out. I still respect and validate ex Christians who have suffered and are treated poorly by progressives here but I am starting to think some of the ways trauma is expressed here is detrimental to the cause and only fuels persecution complexes. @roundearthsociety talked about this, but a lot of people here on both left and right view religion as a club people join because of their moral or political beliefs and don’t understand how some can just have faith in it.

I still am a bit angry that I fell for the Chauvanist attitudes of Zionist jumblr converts and had times I agreed with Zionism myself. Avoidance is not a good way to deal with trauma or emotional baggage and I had a phase where I considered conversion to Judaism to escape what I saw as an irredeemable and hateful religion. Talking to people on r/exjew and @bringmemyrocks sort of changed that. Before anyone comes at me, I don’t hate Jews or Judaism and I do condemn Christian, atheist or Muslim antisemitism, but viewing any criticism of it or Zionism is not that different from evangelical persecution complexes, same with viewing anyone outside the religion as the enemy. I am sorry for some of the things I have said before like calling Islam toxic, but I am in a different place now than months ago.

[the-nerdy-autist]

Atheists are not Christian.

Atheists are not privileged in Christian societies.

Atheists are not considered Christian by other Christians.

What the heck is so hard to understand about this Tumblr except your own unexamined biases and prejudices?

[azurecanary]

Do i need to get involved in the "kink at Pride" discourse in the Queer Christian subreddit? Not really. Is the subreddit filled with people who have yet to disentangle themselves from every harmful aspect of purity culture? Yes

Therefore, my insight would probably be helpful

[starlightomatic]

The reason twats like you keep getting threatened with teeth unpacking for calling us cultural Christian is because you fuckers are too stupid to reason with when we tried to explain why we find the term hurtful and you don’t care. So the only way to you filthy fuckers to stop us my being as verbally abusive as possible so you can’t use the term without causing problems for yourself. If about causing so much trouble for you you just give up because it’s not worth it. I’m not sure why you continue to use you knowing how much pain it causes but I’m seriously starting to that Jews don’t have empathy because you don’t care about anyone else. Seriously why all such awful people? So we’ll make your life hell until you stop. And you will stop!!! FUCK YOU!!!!

just gonna pull some quotes: "being as verbally abusive as possible"

"jews don't have empathy"

if this bothered anon as much as they say it does, the healthy choice would be to block all jumblr bloggers and move on. instead, they constantly dredge up discourse from last year and proudly proclaim how verbally abusive they are.

they seek punishment for the people who are supposedly causing them pain, but sometimes on the internet, people will use language when discussing issues that does not play well with an individual's trauma history. in that situation, removing oneself from the triggering content is the correct choice.

however, what happens instead is a sort of transference -- for whatever reason, it feels safer and more comfortable to direct vitriol to jews than to whoever caused the initial injury. a scapegoat is always easier, and this is a classic jewish role. when you live in a society with baseline antisemitism, many people will keep it tamped down most of the time but it can be triggered by situations like this.

to pull that out of the last paragraph, folks like this are not going to their old pastors or youth group leaders or parents to curse them out. those individuals are either inaccessible or would be unsafe to confront in such a manner. jews on the internet are available, and of course, a jew is so annoying one cannot help but attack one. so that's what they go with instead.

[galadhir]

Another post in the tag of a villain who is my blorbo, saying basically that people who are villain stans don't understand the story right, they don't understand the villain's victims are people who deserve sympathy. That villain stans must be immoral ourselves because otherwise how could we love a character who had done so many horrible things?

And I'm like - you do understand that sympathizing with the characters who are drawn to be sympathetic is level 101 sympathy?

Yeah, you can empathize with and feel sorry for the human frailties of people who never did anything wrong. Great! That's good. It's good to have sympathy and empathy for good people.

But - and I'm going to go all religious here, because purity culture is supposedly based on Christian beliefs and I am a Christian - you've got to learn to be sympathetic and empathetic to the bad people too.

This is right there in our religion "Judge not, lest you be judged." "First take the plank out of your own eye before you try to take the speck out of your brother's." "Vengeance is mine sayeth the Lord. I will repay." (Namely - it's not up to us humans to take revenge.)

Famously, Jesus stopped the people from executing an adulteress (a crime which carried the death sentence at the time) saying "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone," at which point the accusers slowly realized that they were not exactly guiltless themselves and slunk away.

We are in fact commanded to love our neighbours (where 'neighbour' means 'everyone living on this planet with us.')

And loving our neighbours sometimes requires accepting that people who have done horrific things are still worthy of the respect given to all humans by virtue of being human.

That's a really hard command to obey.

(Frankly we should expect the commands given by a superhumanly good Creator to be too hard for us. God is better than we are capable of being, and that's how it should be.)

It's really hard to look at someone in real life who has done something abhorrent and accept that they too are a person who deserves to be treated with full human rights and dignity.

It's hard to get over the very natural revulsion and anger that tells us it would be righteous to treat this sinner with cruelty in return.

But that would not be righteous at all. ("Do unto others as you would have them do to you.")

Fortunately we have fiction. We can use fiction to help us develop our empathy. The villains in fiction have not actually hurt anyone in real life, so it's safe to handle them. It's safe to figure out why they did what they did, and ask yourself - if you were in their position would you have done better?

Which is also a good question.

"If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us." 1 John 18

Which means that (by God's standards) there is no distinction between good people and evil people. We are all just people. We all need grace and mercy.

And we can practice our understanding, compassion, empathy and mercy by loving our fictional villains in a similar way that God has loved us.

Maybe one day we will be called on to forgive a person in real life - to be compassionate and merciful to them - and it will have helped to have confronted the darkness in the heart of man already in our imagination.

Or maybe we'll just learn to be a bit more humble about ourselves while we also have some fun.

We're really not called to stop at Compassion 101. That's only where we start.

[woozapooza]

I’ve seen a lot of posts attributing the worst aspects of online social justice-oriented culture—such as black-and-white thinking and inflated self-righteousness—to Christianity, and I don’t doubt that there’s some truth in that. What I absolutely do not believe, however, is that this stuff is anywhere near exclusive to Christian culture. If you think that people who are neither religiously or culturally Christian never think that the righteousness of their politics puts them above basic moral and intellectual obligations, I think you are out of your mind.