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hystericempress
@hystericempress

earnestly: it is absolutely a pet peeve of mine when someone says 'christianity' when they actually mean 'megachurches' because as a queer gnostic boy howdy it sure makes me feel like my existence isn't welcome anywhere

like, the actual problem is a complex set of vaguely christian-flavored realpolitik that is effectively the transformation of group alienation by capitalist modernity into an elaborate revanchist grift-engine designed to peel money out of the pockets of frightened people. laying that at the feet of 'christianity,' a collection of literally hundreds of different sects, systems of faith, and ideologies is just asinine, because it places the blame in exactly the wrong place and for exactly the wrong reasons. it puts the responsibility for current conditions on 'having any sort of faith whatsoever' and not on the actual systems manipulating and exploiting people who feel the world has left them behind. the megachurch industry, and it is an industry, is made to capitalize on fear and the increasing lack of social 'third spaces' outside the work and home; they parasitize a lack of community in order to extract the maximum amount of grift they can, and this would be the case no matter what they were selling. calling that 'christianity' is so broad that it doesn't even describe the shape of the problem; you might as well say 'soap is reactionary' to mean 'Procter & Gamble contributes heavily to conservative super-PACs' because it's exactly as ridiculous of a generalization.

but you say this shit in a lot of leftist spaces online and people just look at you like you've been huffing paint. it fucking tires me out!!


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in reply to @hystericempress's post:

i have a lot of sympathy for your argument here, genuinely. as you may be able to tell i'm jewish and when i was a teenager, i thought i was an atheist because a) it was culturally in vogue to be that in the circles in which i spent my time but b) i didn't realize that i was speaking a different language from the people i saw talking about their atheism. when i said "atheist", i meant "there isn't a man up in the clouds pointing his finger at earth and zapping rush limbaugh with cancer or whatever", and when they said "atheist" they finished that sentence with "and because all religion holds that as a central tenet of belief, religion is stupid and so are people who follow it." my grandma once said to me "i don't believe in the same gd that you don't believe in" and it didn't sink in at the time, but she was totally right, the atheism i was professing was in reaction to a tradition that i never held. that atheism is what i now call xian atheism, and is held by western protestants who find that their religious tradition doesn't hold room for rationalism so they choose to side with rationalism and cast off their religious tradition. the religion i follow doesn't oppose itself to rationalism, so i don't need to be that same kind of atheist in order to hold on to my rationalism, and so as it turns out, i'm not an atheist, or, i'm an atheist in the same ways that the rabbis i know who are also atheists, are atheists.

the thing is, i think that the thing you're describing is the result of capitalist alienation butting up against millennia of religious tradition and the end result being megachurches is, from a marxist dialectics perspective, simply the way that the contradiction resolves itself. does that suck? absolutely! does that make it not-xianity? i'm not quite so sure. i think i'm pushing back a bit against your taking issue with the use of "xianity" as a metonym for all of the above, because the phenomenon described above has taken pains to associate itself with that metonym. speaking as someone who's a step further outside of all of those dynamics as yourself (you're xian but not into any of the above, i'm jewish but still live in an xian society), while i do know that all of the material factors that lead xianity to become what it has are not inherent to xianity or to religious practice generally, the centrality of protestantism to those material factors makes it really hard to separate one from the other. and not to put too fine a point on it, but the centuries of religious persecution jews faced has been at the hands of more than just the american megachurch types, it includes catholics, lutherans, puritans, russian orthodox, evangelicals, etc. etc. to me, your critique is akin to saying "not all men", but for religion. just as there are good men who fight for feminist ideas and causes, there are absolutely good xians, i'm related to a couple of em, and in no way do i want to minimize your distress when someone denigrates your traditions and beliefs in the course of criticizing american consumerist religious practice, and people who do this are absolutely falling prey to the fallacy of composition. but, the issue they're describing does in fact lie at the feet of (one specific context and formulation of) the religion whose name they're using.

i don't mean any of this as an attack, i'm pretty sure that we both have a common enemy and i don't want either of us tiring ourselves out fighting one another when we have much bigger fish to fry. i also completely understand that my perspective and context isn't one that's shared with every other leftist who rails against xianity in the way that you're describing, and hearing it from areligious or ex-xian people comes across as completely different as coming from someone jewish. for what it's worth, when i talk about this kind of thing, i personally tend to try to append the word "evangelical" to the phrase, because while it's still more expansive than whatever phrasing would be perfectly accurate, saying that the problem in our current context lies in "evangelical xianity" points the finger at a smaller and more specific slice of everything that falls under the gigantic umbrella of xianity.

Thank you, genuinely, for the actual well-thought through reply, that's actually very heartening. The issue I'm having really is more the hyper-broad generalization, and the point about it being evangelical christianity is exactly the right tack to take IMO, because it does narrow the band to the thing Causing The Problem. The only reason I concern myself at all with the matter(again, I'm gnostic, I also have Questions about the way post-Talmudic Abrahamic religion describes and defines God) is that possibility of misdiagnosis, in the same way that I wouldn't want my doc putting me on meds for a condition I don't have. I think about the history of Black Baptist communities during the Civil Rights movement, the way South American Catholic dioceses have traditionally shielded socialist revolutionaries, the role played by the middle-ages church in preserving scientific knowledge and rational science before the reactionary period of the industrial age, and while obviously all these things and groups have Other Issues historically, I find myself feeling that while the modern problem of prosperity gospel evangelism is a dialectical product of modernity, it is still a modern problem, and you have to have an actual dialogue about what it is that created these issues in the first place. For which, yes, organized religion shares no small guilt, but it doesn't share it exclusively and it critically doesn't automatically confer that guilt to individuals. I'm EQUALLY irritated by dismissive church polemics about atheists, gays, and everything else that exists outside their walled garden, those generalizations are beyond absurd, it's just that I actually live in a foxhole with people making generalizations about me so that's the one I tend to grouse about. I still have my rifle pointing towards the actual assholes, y'know?

yes! that is an excellent point and one i agree with very strongly, i think american leftism has a huge blind spot in the role of religion in a lot of people's lives both positive and negative, and southern baptist churches' role in the civil rights movement is one of my go-to examples of the potential positive impacts that organized religion could have in the political sphere. the other side of it is i think the sort of discussion that you're correct in being frustrated by, the tendency of dismissing religious people outright rather than actually engaging with their material conditions, their relationship with spirituality, and ways to focus them both that can improve people's lives. the misdiagnosis point is key, you can't fix a problem if your prescription only addresses symptoms, and for a bunch of people who will talk until the heat death of the universe, leftists sure do have a tendency to miss the obvious things and offer solutions mismatched to the context for which they're suggesting them.