culture isn’t modular

I did a thread (actually several) on Twitter a few years ago about Christianity’s attempts to paint itself as modular, and I’ve been seeing them referenced here in the cultural christianity Discourse, and a few people have DMed me asking me to post it here, so here’s a rehash of several of those threads:

A big part of why Christian atheists have trouble seeing how culturally Christian they still are is that Christianity advertises itself as being modular, which is not how belief systems have worked for most of human history. 

A selling point of Christianity has always been the idea that it’s plug-and-play: you don’t have to stop being Irish or Korean or Nigerian to be Christian, you don’t have to learn a new language, you keep your culture. 

And you’re just also Christian.

(You can see, then, why so many Christian atheists struggle with the idea that they’re still Christian–to them, Christianity is this modular belief in God and Jesus and a few other tenets, and everything else is… everything else. Which is, not to get ahead of myself, very compatible with some tacit white supremacy: the “everything else” is goes unexamined for its cultural specificity. It’s just Normal. Default. Neutral.)

Evangelicals in particular love to contrast this to Islam, to the idea that you have to learn Arabic and adopt elements of Arab culture to be Muslim, which helps fuel the image of Islam as a Foreign Ideology that’s taking over the West.

The rest of us don’t have that particular jack

Meanwhile, Christians position Christianity as a modular component of your life. Keep your culture, your traditions, your language and just swap out your Other Religion Module for a Christianity Module.

The end game is, in theory, a rainbow of diverse people and cultures that are all one big happy family in Christ. We’re going to come back to how Christianity isn’t actually modular, but for the moment, let’s talk about it as if it had succeeded in that design goal. 

Even if Christianity were successfully modular, if it were something that you could just plug in to the Belief System Receptor in a culture and leave the rest of it undisturbed, the problem is most cultures don’t have a modular Belief System Receptor. Spirituality has, for the entirety of human history, not been something that’s modular. It’s deeply interwoven with the rest of culture and society. You can’t just pull it out and plug something else in and have the culture remain stable.

(And to be clear, even using the term “spirituality” here is a sop to Christianity. What cultures have are worldviews that deal with humanity’s place in the universe/reality; people’s relationships to other people; the idea of individual, societal, or human purpose; how the culture defines membership; etc. These may or may not deal with the supernatural or “spiritual.”)

And so OF COURSE attempting to pull out a culture’s indigenous belief system and replace it with Christianity has almost always had destructive effects on that culture.

Not only is Christianity not representative of “religion” full stop, it’s actually arguably *anomalous* in its attempt to be modular (and thus universal to all cultures) rather than inextricable from culture.

Now, of course, it hasn’t actually succeeded in that–the US is a thoroughly Christian culture–but it does lead to the idea that one can somehow parse out which pieces of culture are “religious” versus which are “secular”. That framing is antithetical to most cultures. E.g. you can’t separate the development of a lot of cultural practices around what people eat and how they get it from elements of their worldview that Christians would probably label “religious.” But that entire *framing* of religious vs. secular is a Christian one.

Is Passover a religious holiday or a secular one? The answer isn’t one or the other, or neither, or both. It’s that the framing of this question is wrong.

And Christianity isn’t a plugin, however much it wants to be

Moreover, Christianity isn’t actually culture-neutral or modular. 

It’s easy for this to get obscured by seeing Christianity as a tool of particular cultures’ colonialism (e.g. the British using Christianity to spread British culture) or of whiteness in general, and not seeing how Christianity itself is colonial. This helps protect the idea that “true” Christianity is good and innocent, and if priests or missionaries are converting people at swordpoint or claiming land for European powers or destroying indigenous cultures, that must be a misuse of Christianity, a “fake” or “corrupted” Christianity.

Never mind that for every other culture, that culture is what its members do. Christianity, uniquely, must be judged on what it says its ideals are, not what it actually is. 

Mistaking the engine for the exhaust

But it’s not just an otherwise innocent tool of colonialism: it’s a driver of it. 

At the end of the day, it’s really hard to construct a version of the Great Commission that isn’t inherently colonial. The end-goal of a world in which everyone is Christian is a world without non-Christian cultures. (As is the end goal of a world in which everyone is atheist by Christian definitions.)

Yet we focus on the way Christianity came with British or Spanish culture when they colonized a place–the churches are here because the Spaniards who conquered this area were Catholic–and miss how Christianity actually has its own cultural tropes that it brings with it. It’s more subtle, of course, when Christianity didn’t come in explicitly as the result of military conquest.

Or put another way, those cultures didn’t just shape the Christianity they brought to places they colonized–they were shaped by it. How much of the commonality between European cultures is because of Christianity?

It’s not all a competition

A lot of Christians (cultural and practicing), if you push them, will eventually paint you a picture of a very Hobbesian world in which all religions, red in tooth and claw, are trying to take over the world. It’s the “natural order” to attempt to eliminate all cultures but your own. 

If you point out to them that belief and worldview are deeply personal, and proselytizing is objectifying, because you’re basically telling the person you’re proselytizing to that who they are is wrong, you often get some version of “that’s how everyone is, though.”

Like we all go through life seeing other humans as incomplete and fundamentally flawed and the only way to “fix” them is to get them to believe what we believe. And, like, that is not how everyone relates to others?

But it’s definitely how both practicing Christians and Christian antitheists relate to others. If, for Christians, your lack of Jesus is a fundamental flaw in you that needs to be fixed, for New Atheists, your “religion” (that is, your non-Christian culture) is a fundamental flaw in you that needs to be fixed. Neither Christians nor New Atheists are able to relate to anyone else as fine as they are. It’s all a Hobbesian zero-sum game. It’s all a game of conversion with only win and loss conditions. You are, essentially, only an NPC worth points.

The idea of being any other way is not only wrong, but impossible to them. If you claim to exist in any other way, you are either deluded or lying.

So, we get Christian atheists claiming that if you identify as Jewish, you can’t really be an atheist. Or sometimes they’ll make an exception for someone who’s “only ethnically Jewish.” If the only way you relate to your Jewishness is as ancestry, then you can be an atheist. Otherwise, you’re lying. 

Or, if you’re not lying, you’re deluded. You just don’t understand that there’s no need for you to keep any dietary practices or continue to engage in any form of ritual or celebrate any of those “religious” Jewish holidays, and by golly, this here “ex”-Christian atheist is here to separate out for you which parts of your culture are “religious” and which ones are “secular.”

Religious/secular is a Christian distinction

A lot of atheists from Christian backgrounds (whether or not they were raised explicitly Christian) have trouble seeing how Christian they are because they’ve accepted the Christian idea that “religion” is modular. (If we define “religion” the way Christians (whether practicing or cultural) define it, Christianity might be the only religion that actually exists. Maybe Islam?)

When people from non-Christian cultures talk about the hegemonically Christian and white supremacist nature of a lot of atheism, it reflects how outside of Christianity, spirituality/worldview isn’t something you can just pull out of a culture.

Christian atheists tend to see the cultural practices of non-Christians as “religious” and think that they should give them up (talk to Jewish atheists who keep kosher about Christian atheist reactions to that). But because Christianity positions itself as modular, people from Christian backgrounds tend not to see how Christian the culture they imagine as “neutral” or “normal” actually is. In their minds, you just pull out the Christianity module and are left with a neutral, secular society.

So, if people from non-Christian backgrounds would just give up their superstitions, they’d look the same as Christian atheists. 

Your secularism is specifically post-Christian

Of course, that culture with the Christianity module pulled out ISN’T neutral. So the idea that that’s what “secular society” should look like ends up following the same pattern as Christian colonialism throughout history: the promise that you can keep your culture and just plug in a different belief system (or, purportedly, a lack of a belief system), which has always, always been a lie. The secular, “enlightened” life that most Christian atheists envision is one that’s still built on white, western Christianity, and the idea that people should conform to it is still attempting to homogenize society to a white Christian ideal. 

For people from cultures that don’t see spirituality as modular, this is pretty obvious. It’s obvious to a lot of people from non-white Christian cultures that have syncretized Christianity in a way that doesn’t truck with the modularity illusion. 

I also think, even though they’re not conceptualizing it in these terms, that it’s actually obvious to a lot of evangelicals. (The difference being that white evangelical Christianity enthusiastically embraces white supremacy, so they see the destruction of non-Christian culture as good.) But I think it’s invisible to a lot of mainline non-evangelical Christians, and it’s definitely invisible to a lot of people who leave Christianity.

And that inability to see culture outside a Christian framing means that American secularism is still shaped like Christianity. It’s basically the same text with a few sentences deleted and some terms replaced.

Which, again, is by design. The idea that you can deconvert to (Christian) atheism and not have to change much besides your opinions about God is the mirror of how easy it’s supposed to be to convert to Christianity.

Human societies don’t follow evolutionary biology

The Victorian Christian framing underlying current Western ideas of enlightened secularism, that religious practice (and human culture in general) is subject to the same sort of unilateral, simple evolution toward a superior state to which they, at the time, largely reduced biological evolution, is deeply white supremacist.

It posits religious evolution as a constantly self-refining process from “primitive” animism and polytheism to monotheism to white European/American Christianity. For Christians, that’s the height of human culture. For ex-Christians, the next step is Christian-derived secularism.

Maybe you’ve seen this comic?

The thing is, animism isn’t more “primitive” than polytheism, and polytheism isn’t more “primitive” than monotheism. Older doesn’t mean less advanced/sophisticated/complex. Hinduism isn’t more “primitive” than Judaism just because it’s polytheistic and Judaism is monotheistic. 

Human cultures continue to change and adapt. (Arguably, older religions are more sophisticated than newer ones because they’ve had a lot more time to refine their practices and ideologies instead of having to define them.) Also, not all cultures are part of the same family tree. Christianity and Islam may be derived from Judaism, but Judaism and Hinduism have no real relationship to one another. 

But in this worldview, Christianity is “normal” religion, which is still more primitive than enlightened secularism, but more advanced than all those other primitive, superstitious, irrational beliefs.

Just like Christians, when Christian atheists do try to make room for cultures that aren’t white and European-derived, the tacit demand is “okay, but you have to separate out the parts of your culture that the Christian sacred-secular divide would deem ‘religious.’”

Either way, people from non-Christian cultures, if they’re to be equals, are supposed to get with the program and assimilate.

You’re not qualified to be a universal arbiter of what culture is good

Christian atheists usually want everyone to unplug that Religion module!

So, for example, you have ex-Christian atheists who are down with pluralism trying to get ex-Christian atheists who aren’t to leave Jews alone by pointing out that you can be atheist and Jewish.

But some of us aren’t atheist. (I’m agnostic by Christian standards.) And the idea that Jews shouldn’t be targets for harassment because they can be atheists and therefore possibly have some common sense is still demanding that people from other cultures conform to one culture’s standard of what being “rational” is.  

Which, like, is kind of galling when y’all don’t even understand what “belief in G-d” means to Jews, and people from a culture that took until the 1800s to figure out that washing their hands was good are setting themselves up as the Universal Arbiters of Rationality.

(BTW, most of this also holds true for non-white Christianity, too. I guarantee you most white Christian atheists don’t have a good sense of what role church plays in the lives of Black communities, so maybe shut up about it.)

In any case, reducing Christianity–a massive, ambient phenomenon inextricable from Western culture–to the specific manifestation of Christian practice that you grew up with is, frankly, absurd. 

And you can’t be any help in deconstructing hegemony when you refuse to perceive it and understand that it isn’t something you can take off like a garment, and you probably won’t ever recognize and uproot all the ways in which it affects you, especially when you are continuing to live within it. 

What hegemony doesn’t want you to know

One of the ways hegemony sustains and perpetuates itself is by reinforcing the idea not so much that other ways of being and knowing are evil (although that’s usually a stage in an ideology becoming hegemonic), but that they’re impossible. That they don’t actually exist. 

See, again, the idea that anyone claiming to live differently is either lying or deluded.

There are few clearer examples of how pervasive Christian hegemony is than Christian atheists being certain every religion works like Christianity. Hegemonic Christianity wants you to think that all cultures work like Christianity because it wants their belief systems to be modular so you can just …swap them. And it wants to pretend that culture/worldview is a free market where it can just outcompete other cultures.

But that’s… not how anything works. 

And the truth of the matter is that white nationalist Christians shoot at synagogues and Sikh temples and mosques because those other ways of being can’t be allowed to exist. 

They don’t shoot at atheist conventions because there’s room in hegemonic Christianity for Christian atheists precisely because Christian atheists are still culturally Christian. Their atheism is Christian-shaped.

They may not like you. They’re definitely going to try to convert you. They may not want you to be able to hold public office or teach their kids.

But the only challenge you’re providing is that of The Existence of Disbelief. And that’s fine. That makes you a really safe Other to have around. You can See The Light and not have to change much.

What you’re not doing is providing an example of a whole other way of being and knowing that (often) predates Christianity and is completely separate from it and has managed to survive it and continue to live and thrive (there’s a reason Christians like to speak of Jews and Judaism in the past tense, and it’s similar to the reason white people like to speak of indigenous peoples of the Americas in the past tense). 

That’s not a criticism–it’s fine to just… be post-Christian. There’s not actually anything wrong with being culturally Christian. The problems come in when you start denying that it’s a thing, or insisting that you, unique among humankind, are above Having A Culture.

But it does mean that you don’t pose the same sort of threat to Christianity that other cultures do, and hence, less violence. 

This is brilliant. A standing ovation for you, @jessicalprice​. Do you mind if I quote or repost this on other sites? I’m so sick of atheists on the internet telling me I’m delusional for believing in anything, and I took it really personally for a long time. I worried that I wouldn’t be taken seriously as an intelligent and mature adult for believing in magic. Then I recognized the “latent Christianity” problem in the way that some atheists think, and it clicked. 

I also appreciate the commentary on how inherently colonial it is. Internet atheists don’t seem to recognize that religions other than Christianity exist (to the point where they’ll talk about “theists” when they really mean evangelical Christians), and when someone brings up Hinduism or Shinto or anything else, they just assume that all religions are the result of “indoctrination.” Or else, they’ll use paganism as an argument from absurdity: “You don’t believe in Anubis, do you? Lol, that’s how I feel about your God!” Syncretism would blow their minds. And as you explained, that entire assumption that paganism is stupid, childish, or primitive comes from Christianity. I remember discovering just how much animism there is in Ancient Greek religion, and then realizing that there is no real distinction between animism and polytheism.

Go for it!

“you can’t even agree on what culturally christian means so that means it’s fake and useless and we should make fun of you”

or……… there was a lexical void in our discussions, we found a word to fill it, but didn’t get a chance to hammer out details till the discourse broke containment

maybe you could give the slightest bit of dare i say grace and stop trying to use gotchas to “prove” that it doesn’t mean anything

if anything people are using it to describe two specific and related things — the influence of christian hegemony on anyone, and the belonging to the culture shared by people-not-from-minority-religions in christian countries

that’s not “lol this is meaningless and stupid,” if anything that just means there were two lexical voids

sorry we couldn’t produce and differentiate terminology at a fast enough rate for you, but maybe you could acknowledge we’re actually saying something worthwhile instead of nitpicking how cohesive our dictionary definitions are

also… tbh yeah I do think that if a specific person says “don’t call me culturally christian,” then don’t call them culturally christian.

iirc (and i don’t have the source on me, sorry) the chofetz chaim says you shouldn’t say something to someone you know will upset them, and that has been used as a source to say one shouldn’t deadname

now obviously this is not on the level of deadnaming but the basic principle stands i think

if being called this triggers someone’s trauma, obviously we don’t want to do that

but with that said it is perfectly okay to use it to describe a group and for that group to implicitly include ex-christian atheists. just not directed at a specific person who has asked that the term not be used for them. if someone still has a problem with that, at that point it’s on them to use xkit to block the term so they don’t see it.

and if someone actively seeks out bloggers using this term to get them to stop using it, that is also on them.

also you don’t actually know the details of someone’s life and background. someone may have cultural influences you don’t know about, and/or may really have meaningfully differentiated themself from christian culture in a way they haven’t articulated. this is probably a much smaller proportion of people than the proportion who think they have, but the point is you don’t know cause you’re not in their life.

again we can still use the word to describe groups, and we can still discuss the ways that ex-christians are by and large described by it. if there are a few edge cases that aren’t, then they just aren’t included in the term and that doesn’t impact our ability to have conversations.

even if there are a lot more people who think they’re edge cases than actually are, that’s just an error on their part and we can still use the term just as effectively i think.

like if i make a post going “i wish christians and cultural christians would stop doing xyz”

and someone sees it and is like “but i’m not a cultural christian!!!!!”

then either a) the post wasn’t about them and they can keep scrolling

or b) the post was about them but they don’t think it was so they can keep scrolling

either way it doesn’t matter and the post is still valid.

Let's just break this down into an equation of sorts. Here is what atheists from Christian backgrounds say to atheist Jews all the time:

Rosh Hashanah = Jewish holiday

Judaism = Religion

Celebrating Rosh Hashanah = Being religiously Jewish

Being Religiously Jewish = Not Being Atheist

Conclusion: Jews who consider themselves to be atheists but celebrate Rosh Hashanah are not really atheists, they are religious Jews.

(Now, obviously, this completely fails to understand that Judaism is orthopraxic, and does not require a belief in God, and that there are also two specifically atheist/agnostic strands of Judaism that exist, etc, but put that aside)

So you would think they would apply the same logic to Christian holidays

Christmas = Christian holiday

Christianity = Religion

Celebrating Christmas = Being religiously Christian

Being religiously Christian = Not Being an Atheist

Conclusion: Being from Christian backgrounds who consider themselves to be atheists but celebrate Christmas are not really atheists, because they partake in an inherently Christian celebration.

In theory, the same principles should apply. However, this is what we usually get instead:

Christmas = Christian OR Neutral Secular holiday

Christianity = Religion, Neutral Secularism = Nothing

Celebrating Christmas = Being religiously Christian OR Being Nothing

If As Nothing = Can be atheist 👍

We see that the Christian holiday gets different rules, even though secular/atheist Jews may view Jewish holidays the same way those people view Christmas. Furthermore, we usually get this:

Christmas = Neutral Secular holiday that Jews (atheist or not) should celebrate

Neutral Secularism = Nothing, Just Vibing In The Void

Celebrating Christmas = Neutral as Taupe, No Meaning

Jewish People Who Don't Believe in God, Don't Celebrate Jewish Holidays, But Do Celebrate Christmas = Can Be Atheist 👍

Like if we talk about NOTHING else on this subject, this is the one double standard I cannot handle.

If I celebrate my own cultural holidays I can't be in your atheist club, but if I celebrate your holidays, I can? Bro, what the Matzoh-Meal-encrusted FUCK

Tbh I'm kinda surprised at the "cultural Christian" discourse. Like is it that hard to accept that maybe spending your whole life in a Christian nation may have affected your worldview somewhat

I think the problem is that that's not how the notion gets used, or at least, that's never how I've seen it used.

It's usually used, in my experience, to deny that atheists with any Christian heritage, even if they've been atheists all their lives, are meaningfully different from Christians. The argument often implicitly goes "there are atheist Jews who are still Jews, there are atheist Muslims who still identify as Muslims, therefore atheists of a Christian background are really just Christians". This ignores, of course, all the atheists of Jewish or Muslim background who don't identify as Jews or Muslims, who actually identify as "atheists" full stop. But cultural Christianity is often used as a cudgel in the repertoire of people who are interested in painting atheism-full-stop as something inherently bad, inherently a product of privilege, and so on. As a result, the term is often used in a nonsensical way and leaves a bad taste in the mouth of many.

I do think the OP is correct as stated—growing up in an ambiently Christian culture does carry with it certain ideological baggage that, if not consciously rejected, may potentially take root. The thing is, insofar as this affects atheists, especially those with a Christian family background many generations back but no actual life history as a Christian... it stands to reason that it likewise affects Muslims, Jews, and so on who grow up in the US. Which is in fact probably true, but I imagine this fact would draw the ire of many people who use the term.

But the reality is that most of the time, on tumblr at least, calling someone "culturally Christian" is a way of saying "even if you have rejected Christianity, in fact even if you have never been Christian and your parents have never been Christian, if your family was Christian at any point in the past then you still count as a Christian to me". It is sensible that this would ruffle the feathers of atheists.

yeah like, the term gets applied very broadly and very inappropriately on tumblr from what ive seen. like ive even seen people argue that atheists of jewish and muslim backgrounds in america are "culturally christian" because the usa is a christian country, which i dont think i need to explain why it's incredibly offensive and also nonsensical. i mean, china is an atheist country, but nobody's going to argue that christians, jews, and muslims in china are "culturally atheist", and yet people do that for atheists living in the usa. its just a really unfair double standard that i dont think people using the term on tumblr are realizing theyre doing

yeah, it’s a bit silly how much of this site has taken “being an atheist doesn’t make you ontologically incapable of holding Christian/conservative values” and ran with it so far that they’re just as hostile to atheism as Christian hegemony is

God yeah. The decontextualization treadmill works faster when it comes to internet religious conversations but it seems like for this term specifically it got turned up to 11 and I wonder why that is.

Well… the term was coined by an Israeli Jew who, while intending mostly to talk about people from Christian families/heritage, also mentioned that they have noticed American Jews have elements of being culturally Christian as well. Which makes sense!

I think it got turned up to 11 because the concept of cultural Christianity comes from a fundamentally Jewish understanding of religion and culture, and can’t really exist in a Christian or Christian-informed one. Then that combined with people’s trauma, and then it also combined with people’s residual weird ideas about Jews (as sort of… simultaneously Wrong and also The Most Christian) that they haven’t deconstructed.

I'm an American Orthodox Jew and let me tell you, spending time in countries that aren't predominantly Christian was such an eye-opener. Christianity is baked into every aspect of American society and culture-- the language, the calendar, the role of the community and the individual, what makes someone "good" or "bad", what an ideal society looks like, what an ideal government looks like, the definition of religion itself... There was so much I'd internalized without realizing it, and I bet there's still stuff rattling around in my head that I'm not aware of.

This isn't saying that I'm "really a Christian" or whatever. It's saying that I've absorbed ideas from the world around me. And again, I'm an observant Jew, I'm decidedly not a Christian anything-- but I am a product of American culture, and that culture is pretty damn Christian. It's not a moral judgement. It's just something to be aware of.

I don't think anyone's really disputing that people who grow up in a largely Christian culture will be affected by that in some way. The disagreement is over whether "culturally Christian" is the appropriate term for it. It kind of sucks having people apply a label to atheists, including ex-Christians, that they have explicitly rejected (and I say this as a lifelong atheist).

Just call it "Christian hegemony" or "Christian-normative" or point out specific behaviors and beliefs that stem from Christianity (like the last poster began to do); but applying "culturally Christian" to individuals who reject Christianity just seems imprecise to me, not to mention potentially offensive, as other people have said.

Am I - a person who has never been to church, does not understand most things about Christianity, and grew up in a very unreligious community in the US - the same as a person who went to church every week as a child but left Christianity as an adult? No. And the person who went to church every week but ended up rejecting Christianity may or may not have unlearned the various beliefs and assumptions that came with their Christian upbringing, and you will only really know if you talk to that person. Everybody is different.

Why don't we talk about the ways in which Christian normativity manifests itself, instead of labelling individuals as this or that?

But the specific point is that it’s the culture. “Culture” is the most accurate term for the whole constellation of concepts we’re trying to describe: collective norms, behaviours, notions of time, cosmologies, spatial relations, shared symbols and systems of meaning, social hierarchies, traditions, and other communicated collective programming.

The normativity most people are usually talking about is a result of the hegemony attained by various Christianities around the globe. Christian hegemony needs to be understood as related to many of our experiences of cultural Christianity, but they’re not interchangeable. Hegemony is about the primacy and breadth of influence one culture attains. But culture is about culture. An atheist raised in Mongolia is culturally Buddhist, an atheist raised in Indonesia is culturally Muslim, and an atheist raised in East Timor will have a different kind of cultural Christianity than one raised in England.

Culture doesn’t mean that we all share the exact same ideas. As an image: Lots of different kinds of tropical fish live will live in the same lagoon. Everybody is different—in the diverse context of lagoon. But the shared symbologies and values philosophies of Christianity are our cultural environment as the tropical sea is for fish. And either you’re a tropical fish or you’re a fish from, say, the North Atlantic. No one is a blank slate, devoid of culture—and since culture and the social data encoded in religion are profoundly interrelated, no one should be surprised to learn that they are a product of their culture.

Normativity doesn’t cut sufficiently deep into the heart of the matter because cultures are what produce norms. In a culturally Christian society, it is normative to express a strong disbelief in Christian doctrine by not attending church. In other cultures, attending regular rituals presided over by religious specialists may indicate nothing about your spirituality either way. The culture determines the symbols and acts of the norms of atheism, starting with notions of “religion” as pertaining to individual belief or disbelief. That’s not just hegemony—that’s culture shaping the fundamental way a person interprets the world and their interactions with it. They may never have even heard of Jesus, but the cultural Christianity will be there.

If you’re a white American you have white privilege, even if you’re aren’t racist and went back in time to personally kill Jefferson Davis, because you still have white privilege under white supremacy. You can hate everything about the culture, but the objective nature of it exists independent from any individual, and the individual is inextricable from the culture.

Just amazing to see people claim that the discourse around cultural Christianity is very America-centric, like "ah yes, America is very Christian, unlike Europe."

Like, Sweden automatically registered its citizens as members of the Church of Sweden at birth until 1996. The Church was officially government-sanctioned until 2000.

Now that membership in the Church of Sweden isn't automatic anymore, and only 18% of Swedes say they believe in God, almost half of newborns are still getting baptized. 75% of funerals still take place in the Church. Swedish kids still attend "confirmation camps." The 3rd largest political party in Sweden insists that Christianity is fundamental to Swedish identity and wants to drive out members of non-Christian religions.

And this is in one of those European countries famous for being "secular."

That is, yes, cultural Christianity.

And don't get me started on England. Or on France.

Was reading on wikipedia about how lots of ancient cultures had beliefs and traditions where you had to offer prayers and/or sacrifices if you wanted to cut down a tree because you were basically killing the spirit that lived within the tree and if you did that without good reason bad stuff would happen to you

we should bring that back. if you want to clear cut a forest you have to pray and sacrifice on behalf of every single tree

The more I learn about ecosystems, the more I realize that characterizing "animistic" belief as superstitious and primitive is one of the dumbest lies ever told

I, as well, am an animist (knows what a soil microbiome is)

Now I don't know all the details about these religions all over the world with beliefs and practices like this.

But this way of believing says that a stream or a tree isn't just a Thing, you can't just use it however you want, it's a Life and you owe it respect. And if you want to cut down a tree, you have to think really hard about whether you really need to use that tree, because there's a Process, and you have to really think about and dwell on the fact that you're killing something that's alive and that gives life.

And the important thing is, if you see the trees and plants and rivers as sacred and living, dumping toxic radioactive waste in the water and clear cutting the forest is an unthinkable act of sacrilege. If you see that the mountains are sacred and have spirit, you can't rip them wide open to blast and dig out coal with dynamite and pickaxes.

You know that if you violate the water, or the forest, or the mountains, with such destructive greed, something terrible will happen.

But animism is not a metaphor and it’s literally not true…

Unseen forces must have evidence to be believed in, not mere vibes!

Trees are literally alive and the welfare of forests literally affects us directly

That’s not what animism is!

thude, animism is literally an anthropological word, and describes general beliefs about nature being alive. it's a descriptor, like "pagan," not a strict set of beliefs and values.

also animism can be used as a metaphor, because, uhhh. that's how the English language works. *thumbs up*

animism is not a metaphor for cell theory; ‘nature’ is not alive! that is not a true statement except via wordplay that does not conform to the broader standards of use in the world—

—animism is concerned with souls (not real except by metaphor) and overwhelmingly includes inanimate objects such as rocks or phenomenon such as weather; neither of which are alive (contain living cells)

animism can only ever be redundant or incorrect; if it’s just a fun way of saying certain actions have consequences, it’s redundant—

—if it’s taken literally; then it will cause untrue conclusions; such as spiritual pollution from cutting a tree down being the cause of human suffering rather than a chain of material changes that can be accounted for

a common effect of the conflation will be the injection of ethics into material questions—whether it is possible to do something becomes synonymous with whether it can be done ethnically (in accordance with at bare-minimum quasi-spiritual framework)

1) You are willfully ignoring the fact that 'alive' means one specific thing in cellular biology and has different technical meanings in other fields. Using the wrong framework on purpose makes you seem less informed, not more.

2) You are citing outdated, disproven and incorrect information, again seemingly rooted in cellular biology rather than anthropology, theology, ecology, zoology, botany, or any other applicable field.

3) Putting in your tags "I know what I'm talking about because I almost went to school for it, but chose not to" also doesn't make you seem well informed or add any weight to the sense of authority you are trying to speak with.

4) That's also not how the words 'metaphor' and 'animism' would be used by someone approaching this conversation in good faith from a modestly informed perspective.

It's fine to be ignorant about things! We all are!

But you're using that ignorance to condescend to other people in an attempt to cut off a discussion you aren't comfortable seeing. That's uncool.

If you have questions, then ask them. But giving unprompted and unwanted "corrections" that are themselves untrue and outdated is NOT the same as 'trying to overcome discomfort or ignorance.'

1. There is no scientific field in which alive means invested with spiritual energy.

2. Theology is not an applicable field! This is exactly what I’m talking about: theology is only relevant to the study of beliefs, not material reality.

3. It clearly tagged personal lore because it’s just a bit of characterisation for my personal blog and to counter any claims that I lack appreciation for the field. Even so, multiple years of study is still greater investment than the vast majority of people ever will spend on a subject. It is certainly above a Wikipedia scroll-through.

4. Words are either being used in a real way or metaphorically or in a provocative (philosophical if feeling charitable) manner in which the gap is muddied by playing around with the definition of real.

Clinical to call me condescending in the same post as:

'Theology is not a relevant field of expertise in this theological discussion.'

Yeah, okay, you definitely know the first thing about any of this. I was being nice. I'm done now.

The fact that you keep calling it "science" instead of cellular biology is a dead giveaway of your stunning ignorance. Every "real scientist" knows that "science" is the application of reproduceable testing to reach data backed conclusions.

And even in scientific fields which discuss the interconnectivity of the biosphere have been acknowleding since the 1960s that our technology and understanding of that interconnectivity is limited.

Your insistence on universalizing the cellular biological technicalities of one term to apply to all other fields, scientific or otherwise, is at best more of the presumtuous, colonial attitude being discussed.

You are in no uncertain terms a moron.

Unlike the glee you took in describing your ignorance and then making a coy joke about it, I actually AM a sociologist, and a statistician.

I actually do have training in relevant fields.

You are not only mistaken about cellular biology, but about every single field I listed previously. Because every one of them has more valuable data and insight on animism than cellular biology alone.

But I'll meet you at your level, you wanton and cheerily ignorant fuck.

CELLULAR BIOLOGY ALSO HASN'T DEFINED LIFE LIKE THAT FOR DECADES.

The while "life is reaction, growth and reproduction" model hasn't been meaningful outside of children's schooling for so fucking long that even referencing it in this way makes me doubt you're actually a biologist either, no matter how much you keep using their vocabulary.

You are speaking out your ass.

You are lying about all kinds of scintific fields so you can piss all over cultures and religions you don't understand.

You're a bad scientist, and a bad human being.

Try the fuck again.