I'm Christian, sort of, and I've not been shy about talking about that here. As some sort of Christian, therefore, I've wasted far too much time wondering about what contemporary Christians really believe—that is to say, what the loud and obstreperous Christians believe, the sort of Christians whom you're likely to run into on the Internet. Before the advent of social media, I encountered such Christians on Usenet and on mailing lists, for I was once trying to participate in the C. S. Lewis fan community, which is dominated by evangelical fanatics. It was a real problem to me: thanks to Lewis and Chesterton and other writers, I had become sympathetic to the idea of Christian conversion in the early 2000s, but I had extreme difficulty in making myself feel any sort of kinship with the kind of person who was most likely to announce themself as Christian and admirer of C. S. Lewis. Wasn't believing in an infinitely unknowable God supposed to confer some sort of...oh, I don't know how to put it exactly...some feeling that it's not possible to know everything in the universe? Some appreciation that you can't even tell what's going on in another person's soul? Some flippin' humility? I'm reminded of the conventional wisdom about how going into space and seeing the Earth from far away is supposed to make people feel smaller and more humble, but obviously that doesn't always happen. Somehow, I converted to Christianity anyway, but I didn't stay in the fold for very long. The apparent smallness of Christianity, or at least that fraction of Christianity that loudly advertised itself to the world, baffled me. You'd think that being in touch with unfathomable divine mysteries would broaden minds and perspectives, and that's not what I was seeing at all. So I kept asking myself, what did these people actually believe?
cw: discourse on normality and its reactionary political implications