Man I fucking hate how people on this site think Calvinism is the default for Christianity and Christian theology.
Like I'm gonna pull my hair out. Guys, guys, come with me to medieval Christianity where we had *ninety* FEAST DAYS A YEAR and where REFUSAL to ENJOY God's creation was a MORTAL SIN.
Puritan ideas about humanity being separate from the world and all physical pleasure being sinful weren't the fucking norm please guys I'm begging you...
(not that suffering was seen as negative 100% of the time, and fasting was absolutely part of the faith but not everyone was expected to live like a monk who took a vow of poverty. Also wait until I tell you that like, 80% of cheeses we have now were invented at monasteries and that often, rich youngest sons were sent to live at monasteries bc it they weren't Franciscan (iirc) life was pretty fucking sweet for a monk!)
Part of the reason I get so spun up on explaining how deep the roots of Calvinism are in American philosophy and life is because of exactly this! It's part of the American mindset to think that the way we do things here is Just How It Is, and to look past all the weird shit tangled up in the roots.
Like, no, Puritanism isn't actually how medieval monks thought! Puritanism was considered Real Fucking Weird and deeply heretical! Calvinism? Deeply weird! Deeply wrong! They had to fuck off to another continent bc people thought their shit was weird-to-the-point-of-being-illegal.
Calvinism puts every person in competition with every other person for one of a few Limited Spots In Heaven. That's not how you build a functioning society, actually, and that's why I keep yelling about it.
Life is here to be enjoyed, and G-d's creation is here to be enjoyed, and that's one thing that my Jewish ass and medieval monks actually both believe.
YES!!!!
Like, medieval Christianity is one of my hyperfocuses and I get so exhausted with people slandering it based on the beliefs of Calvinists!
There's a LOT of valid things to criticize in Medieval Christianity, but this whole "you have to suffer to be righteous and ANY enjoyment is spitting in God's face" is NOT ONE OF THEM!
And re the tags; I was raised by a lapsed Catholic who went into the weird Christonationalist America-as-will-of-God Evangelical Christianity that the GOP has as standard now, and that drove me into my obsession with Medieval Christianity in a lot of ways, because it was SO DIFFERENT than what (most) USAmericans seem to think of as "default Christianity" and seeing those roots makes the way Calvinism has completely warped the faith in the USA especially really fucking baffling....
Haha fun fact one of my cousins is named after John Calvin. When people are like "what level of religious weirdness were you raised on?" I just sort of wave my hands towards that. That. That is what I was raised on.
But yeah. There's a lot to criticize there, he said Jewishly, but "this life doesn't matter at all and only the life to come matters" and "enjoying life at all is a sin" both are not concepts that really exist the same way in medieval Xianity. The idea that "the past is like now but worse, dirtier, and meaner," combined with Calvinism laid over top of assumptions about medieval life, has given us a deeply distorted view of what people used to do and believe.
And that's dangerous in a lot of ways, but i think one of the biggest ways in which it's dangerous is that it allows people to look at fiction written about medieval Europe and feel secure and a little smug. "Well, maybe we're [list of bad current news items] but at least we're not that bad. You could be living 700 years ago!" It leads to a sort of almost... mental passiveness? because they think they're already better than how it Used To Be.
I need to go eat lunch so maybe I'm not as clearly explaining this as I need to be.
I don't know if this is anything, but it also makes it much easier for us usamericans to dismiss "Ye Olde Dark Ages." If we're so much better and better off than our nasty, brutish and short forebears, then we can simply ignore that part of history and daydream about...I don't know...resurrecting the Roman Empire
No, that was exactly what I was saying, yeah. We are already so much better by default in our own minds and therefore we can just coast.
Fun fact - "The Dark Ages" is no longer considered to be an accurate term in academia because. there was was plenty of culture and learning etc happening, and that Petrarch (the scholar who coined it in the 1300s) was an Roman Empire fanboy who ignored the vibrant culture around him.
aka daydreaming about resurrecting the roman empire is how we got puritanism and calvinism in the first place