I think I’ve finally figured out why Christianity and in particular overseas Christian missionary work creeps me out so much.
Watching yesterday’s MHP Show segment where they’re discussing the documentary God Loves Uganda, and there’s a bit with a well-fed, healthy, white, privileged American young woman telling a Ugandan woman who appears emaciated and extremely poor by our culture’s standards that she’s come all the way across the sea to bring them the “good news” of Christianity. Ms. Harris-Perry very rightly commented that maybe that young, healthy, white, privileged American woman should stop and take a moment to listen to what the Ugandan woman has to tell her for a change, which obviously never happens. It’s an unbelievably common thread in white American Christian missionary work: they come as benevolent emancipators to educate the local people and raise them up out of the squalor they’re only living in because they haven’t found Jesus yet.
And that’s when it hit me: the underlying belief, the reason that white American Christians never seem interested in hearing what these local people think and feel and know about life, is because there is a perceived causality between 1. Not being Christian, and 2. Not being rich and privileged.
It is the belief that poverty is due to a defect of character, rather than to oppressive circumstances.
This is the exact same belief that underlies the disgusting statements from the wealthy conservative white Christian rightwing in the US when they talk about how poor people wouldn’t be poor if they’d just let the privileged wealthy white Christians teach them about the dignity of an honest day’s work – because they actually think that people are poor because they just don’t like working. They brush aside the facts of jobs being scarce, of even if you can find a job it won’t pay anything even resembling a living wage, of black market industries and gangs that have taken hold in communities because there are no other options to support and protect your family, of entire generations being mowed down by violence and drugs, and, in many developing nations, of the fact that sometimes the ground just won’t grow anything, and even when it does it gets stolen or destroyed or extorted from you by roving extremist armies or by the very government that’s supposed to be protecting you and the rest of the people of your nation, and you’re lucky if they just take your food and money instead of raping and slaughtering you and your whole family—
And then some rich healthy white Christian American, who has never gone to bed starving, has never buried a child for a disease that can be cured but just not where you live and not for people like you, who thinks studying at a university is a BURDEN rather than a PRIVILEGE, is going to show up and tell you that if you just tried harder and learned the dignity of “real work” and learned to be a good Christian then you’d finally stop being poor and hungry and sick, because obviously that is all entirely your own fault and the people taking everything from you and trying to kill you and your family are meaningless because those things don’t exist in a rich white Christian American’s world so they’re not real because their world view is the only one that matters.
So yeah. Christianity, missionary work, efforts to spread democracy and “American values.”
Creep.
Me.
The fuck.
Out.
And on top of all of it: they walk around with that sense of serenity like they are literally god’s gift to these poor people who just don’t know what they’re missing if only they’d try harder.
Just disgusting.
Woof, this is a relic! As evidenced by the fact I had to make it an image post, because at the time of originally posting this, tumblr was doing that thing where text posts were getting automatically shortened into links. Fuck, I feel old.
It's interesting to me to see this first sort of awakening on this particular topic in my past. I was already an ex-mormon & ex-christian by this point, but I hadn't yet been able to articulate a lot of my problems with the belief system I had been raised in. Even here, what was such a moment of clarity for me at the time, now feels I was barely grasping around the edges of an idea.
It's Prosperity Doctrine.
It's what the Puritans believed, that good things happen to good people, and bad things happen to bad people. So if bad things happen to you, even just freak accidents, well you must have deserved it for some secret sin.
Ever heard some rich asshole talk about 'pulling themself up their bootstraps'? And it's almost always someone who inherited family money, or had good luck, or were privileged & given more chances to succeed because they were white or male or abled or beautiful or skinny etc? (And/or cheated & abused everyone who worked under them in order to amass their wealth.) That's called The Bootstrap Myth (or sometimes The Bootstrap Fallacy). It's a form of Prosperity Doctrine wherein being a "good" person is specifically defined as working hard and having good business sense (or in other words, not paying taxes and abusing your employees! Soooo sensible!!! /sarcasm)
The thing with Property Doctrine is that uses a very common but also very tricksy logical fallacy. See, they go from a) good person, so therefore b) good things happen to you, and then flip it all around to be: b) good things don't happen to you, so therefore a) you must not be a good person
When people say, 'A therefore B does not equal B therefore A,' this is what they're talking about. It's a fallacy, meaning it's false, it's not true, it doesn't work like that. A causes B, but that doesn't mean that B always happens only because of A.
My car's battery died (A) so therefore my car won't start (B)
Does not mean
Every time my car won't start (B) it must be because the battery is dead (A)
Your mechanic will tell you there are lots of reasons for a car not to start. No gas, a faulty ignition, etc. See what I mean? A may cause B, but other things can cause B too. So B happening doesn't mean A is necessarily the cause.
But in Prosperity Doctrine, they don't understand this (or they ignore it, because it benefits them). If someone is poor (B), it must be because (A) they made bad choices or they sinned or they didn't work hard or they didn't have good business sense or they didn't pray enough or WHATEVER
And then the really sinister part of this whole belief system: if this person sinned, or didn't work hard, or "God" just doesn't like them for whatever reason, then it would be against "God's" will (or the natural order or social Darwinism or whatever justification they come up with) for the Good Person to help them. Which is why you have conservative religious people defunding food stamps and medicaid and disability benefits and public libraries and public schools and literally any form of social safety net that might help those Bad People. Because they only need that help because they're poor (in money or health or any other dimension) and they're only poor because they're Bad and because "God" willed for them to be punished for their badness. If "God" wanted you to have money for food, he'd have already given it to you, so the Good People can't possibly go against "God" and let you have food stamps!
The thing about missionary work, though, to bring it back to my original rant all those years ago, is that it's an attempt to tell poor, starving, oppressed, traumatized people that they can become one of the Good People and stop being one of the Bad People if they accept Jesus into their life. Because, like I originally ranted about, Christians don't believe that there's any justifiable reason to be poor or sick or disabled or oppressed, those things are all just caused by "God's" will to punish you for being a Bad Person.
It's the same logic as the fuckwad who told me in Sunday school when I was still LDS that I wouldn't be depressed if I read my scriptures and prayed enough.
Idk, I'm not really coming to any big conclusion here. Prosperity Doctrine is the big conclusion, really. And it's not just limited to Christians. It's an extremely pervasive form of magical thinking. It's in everything from 'you must have sinned to bring this disaster on you and your loved ones' to 'you just didn't manifest hard enough so you're not beautiful/rich/famous/happy yet' and 'if you just sell enough in this multilevel marketing scheme or take on yet another side hustle you'll definitely get rich any day now!'
It's victim blaming and just about any form of oppression or "-ism" type bigotry, rolled up together and justified in this magical system where random chance doesn't exist and bigotry doesn't exist and privilege doesn't exist. It's a mystical justification for all these forms of bigotry, and for maintaining oppressive systems, and it's still just as magical & ludicrous when the person benefitting from it is trying to sound down to earth and talk about pulling themself up with hard work alone and absolutely never ever ever any help from anyone else never
And the thing is, again to go back to the missionary stuff that started all this for me, is that this system of magical thinking doesn't only justify an individual person's bigotry. It doesn't only excuse one person from refusing to give spare change to someone begging on the street. It also, necessarily, by definition, excuses the action of the violent, oppressive dictator who has their goons steal all the food and money and technology and medicine and clean water. Because that still counts as a Bad Thing happening to you, you poor malnourished people in various war-torn countries. And that wouldn't happen to you if you weren't one of the Bad People. And rather than take any kind of action to either treat the symptoms of your problems, like using their wealth & resources to provide housing or food or medicine, or treating the root of your problems, like helping you overthrow that dictator, instead Christian missionaries say that the real problem, the real reason for these Bad Things happening to you, is that you're not one of the Good People.
You haven't manifested hard enough.
You haven't hustled fast enough.
You haven't read a specific book often enough.
You haven't talked to some old man in the sky enough.
So, see, it's your fault.