I think people really underestimate how fucking evil a large chunk of American Christianity is, when they try to say to antichoicers “well if you’re against abortion, at least you should support things like WIC and SNAP, so that women facing an unplanned pregnancy can still feed their future kid”
I’ll be blunt, to American Christians like this, “but single mothers and their kids will starve!” is the entire fucking point. Being ostracized by your family and community and left for you and your bastard child to starve alone in abject misery and deprivation is what they believe the Godly punishment should be for being “unchaste,” and that things like food benefits and contraception are destroying moral society because they let women have unapproved sex without being as controlled by the fear of being cast out to starve with an unwanted kid (this also heavily ties into misogynist racism against woc, especially black women, who are accused of being “welfare queens,” draining good, properly chaste white Christians with kids born from their supposedly mindlessly lustful and irresponsible behavior, that can only be kept in check with threats of starvation or violence).
“Women (especially woc) cannot overcome their base urges and live virtuous lives without being heavily trained and coerced by threats of deprivation, isolation, and violence” is one of the most important unspoken ground rules of reactionary movements, both religious and secular
Evangelicals have no long-standing theological problem with abortion. My parents have been married for longer than evangelicals have been against abortion. Evangelicals in the 1970s didn’t care about abortion. Being against abortion was a Catholic thing. Evangelicals thought abortion is unfortunate, but not evil.
What changed?
Bob Jones v. US (1983).
Bob Jones University, an evangelical school, had a segregationist dating policy. It means what you think it does – they wouldn’t allow white students to date black students. They also wouldn’t admit black students who supported interracial marriage. This was in the mid-70s. Loving v Virginia was nearly a decade in the rearview mirror. The government threatened to revoke their tax-exempt status as a university unless this Jim Crow shit stopped. The school sued, and this eventually went to the Supreme Court. The Court, unsurprisingly, agreed with the government.
What was clear to evangelical leaders, then, in 1983, was that out-and-out racism was no longer going to be tolerated. What could they focus on that would have the same effect? What could rally the base without openly espousing racist views?
Reagan, with his “welfare queens” dog-whistle politicking gave them a like-minded politician glad of their support. And Surgeon General C. Everett Koop was only to happy to tell people what he thought of abortion.
So here we are, thirty-five years later, with every evangelical doing their damnedest to pretend that evangelicals have always been against abortion. They’ve lied themselves into believing it, and now they claim they’re against birth control too. That’s even more spurious – If they actually thought life begins at conception, then birth control would be a necessity, because fertilized eggs being rejected is the norm. Most of what they want to call human life never even gets implanted in the womb, or lasts very long if it does. And if they cared about life, welfare programs ought to be the most important, to ensure everyone has a good standard of living worthy of human beings.
But they don’t care about those things, so the only conclusion is that they are not pro-life. They just don’t want to see family planning and health care go to women, people of color, LGBTQ folks, etc.
It was never about being pro-life.
(and incidentally – Bob Jones v US was an 8-1 decision. Who was the dissenting voice? None other than William Rehnquist. Who was elevated to Chief Justice by Reagan when Warren Burger retired a few years later. None of what has happened has happened by accident)
And it’s worth noting that Bob Jones University defended their policy exclusively on religious freedom grounds, but Rehnquist’s dissent was based entirely on procedural grounds. Even the one justice who was “on their side” didn’t buy their argument and had to justify it on other grounds. It’s been a long road from BJU v. US to the Hobby Lobby case.
I have a similar theory about why evangelicals fight so hard against believing climate change when supposedly humans are stewards of the earth. It’s all about evolution. Climate change is a proxy war. It’s all the same rhetoric about scientists being corrupt and only looking out for their own interests and trying to shove their research down other people’s throats.
For a group of people who supposedly believe that God charged them with taking care of the Earth, they really seem to have bought into the whole “I can do whatever I want to the planet because God put us in charge of it” mindset really hard. Of course, maybe this is just the 21st century version of manifest destiny.
I think another problem is that with a large chunk of US evangelicalism, the world ending is what they want. The apocalypse means that the chosen few get carried off to heaven as a reward for beating the shit out of their gay kid or whatever, while the rest of us who failed to give the true believers the obedience respect that they feel entitled to are left behind to die in slow agony before being cast into eternal hell. It’s really hard to get people to give a shit about the planet dying when they view literally would have the world end to own the libs
It’s ABSOLUTELY what they want. During the Bush years, they were pretty up front about it, too. The entirety of the Evangelicals’ support of Israel is explicitly so that the Jewish People rebuild the Solomon’s Temple; which is a prerequisite for the events of Revelations to happen. The sooner it’s built, the sooner the Rapture can sweep them up into Heaven so they can laugh as all the “sinners” suffer the End Times. They don’t ACTUALLY care about Israelis or the long lasting sociopolitical factors of the area; they’re literally just pawns for the most death cult aspect of American Evangelical Christianity. It’s legitimately terrifying that people like this run large sections of a nation already capable of destroying all life on the planet.
It’s a fatal but common liberal mistake to assume that evangelicals are motivated by (misguided) compassion. They’re not. They will watch you die and be pleased about it because youve gone to hell faster.
i would like everyone to stop blaming this on christianity. not because it’s an insult to the vast majority of christians, who are not like this, although it is. but because it allows evil people to use a major world religion as a meat shield.
please can we stop letting racist, misogynistic jackasses hide behind religion. please.
There’s a really good book on the current toxic strain of evangelicalism called “Building God’s Kingdom” by Julie Ingersoll. She’s got a Ph.D. in Religious Studies
and does a good of explaining both the history as well as different current strains of evangelicalism, plus how they grew to get a stranglehold on current american politics.
i go down this and break my legs landing in the shitty little pool with the acceleration from that twenty foot straight section and the people audience clap their fuckin asses off
The more I think about the garden of eden the more I think that God is just a real housewives star who gets bored and starts drama just for the gag of it. Like she did not need to create that apple and set up Eve and Adam with the serpent but she did and they were SHOOK when she pulled those receipts
Adam and Eve: *hiding after they ate the apple*
God: aye where yall at?!
A&E: dont come over here god we naked…
God: 🤔 how you know you naked??
A&E: ….
God: didnt i tell yo ass not to eat of the damn tree!
A&E: WE DIDNT!!!
God: LIE AGAIN
Isn’t God supposed to omnipotent? She already knew it was going to happen, she just needed the excuse to be messy
Nuestra Señora de la Santa Muerte (Spanish for Our Lady of Holy Death), often shortened to Santa Muerte, is a female deity or folk saint in Mexican and Mexican-American folk Catholicism. A personification of death, she is associated with healing, protection, and safe delivery to the afterlife by her devotees. Despite condemnation by the Catholic Church, her cult has become increasingly prominent since the 2000s.
The worship of Santa Muerte is condemned by the Catholic Church in Mexico as invalid, but it is increasingly firmly entrenched in Mexican culture.
Santa Muerte is also seen as a protector of homosexual, bisexual, and transgender communities in Mexico, since many are considered to be outcast from society. Many LGBT people ask her for protection from violence, hatred, disease, and to help them in their search for love.
Why is it that your family gathers on Christmas in order to celebrate peace? Why not Eid? Why not Rosh Hashanah? Why not a million different holidays from the literal thousands of existing religions?
The reason you’re celebrating on Christmas of all holidays is because you’re culturally Christian. It’s not something to be ashamed of – you just need to be aware of it.
Huh. I’d never thought about it that way.
I know, right?
To be honest, I hadn’t either, not on any bone-deep level, until I started seriously considering converting, and it was only when I started realizing it on a personal level. But, then, I am also lucky in that we live in a school district where Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah and several other non-Xian holidays are given days off, which is just not the norm anywhere but in those gosh darn liberal enclaves on the coast. 😛
This feels really relevant to me too. I stopped being Xian over a decade ago, and I felt…annoyed, honestly, that I was still expected, by family and friends both, to celebrate all of the major Xian holidays even despite being at that time an atheist/pagan. And that’s only increasing my discomfort now that I’m converting to Judaism.
I don’t even know if I can keep having conversations about religion with my parents anymore, our views on faith and holidays and deities are so different now.
My parents basically just ignore the fact that @dadhoc and @mistresskabooms and I all converted. I hoped right up until the last second that they would show up to our Adult B’nai Mitzvah, especially knowing I was giving the sermon, but, welp, they didn’t.
Our class has gotten close though so it was okay. My mispacha was there, and one of the other converts in the class, her dad came, so that was good.
Off topic, so anyway.
I’d also like to add (for the fellow Gentiles out there) it’s NOT just the “obvious” things like Celebrating Christmas, either.
It is so, SO many “little things” that you don’t realize ARE Christian-influenced, that you might not even if you stopped and thought about it, because they’re SUCH a part of “secular” culture that you just assumed That’s The Way It Is For Everybody.
I had no idea for example, that the idea you had to have a witness in order for a marriage between two people to be “valid” was something not all religions and systems shared, until a Jewish person over on the NaNoWriMo forums corrected me and said “actually, you can do it just by the two agreeing if they’re above a certain age, in Judaism; it’s still considered religiously valid”.
In the USA, for a marriage to be LEGALLY recognized by the State?
It HAS to have both an Officiant (not necessarily a Priest or Pastor of your own religion; sea captains, judges, and anybody who gets the right piece of paper, can do that), and a Witness. I know this, because I am Legally Married and it was part of the process; I had to get a friend to Officiate and a second friend to sign off as Witness on the paperwork.
And I knew on some level this was partly from “religions” “traditionally” requiring it…but I had NO IDEA this was really a Gentile thing, a Goy thing, in specific!
I just….assumed that since verifying it happened was “logical”, all religions would naturally require at LEAST an Officiant OR a Witness if not both, “though I could be wrong” I (very thankfully) admitted. Which in hindsight, is a big Assumption, thank goodness I left myself open for correction lol.
And see, I wasn’t even RAISED going to Church; my parents were ~liberals~ who basically raised me Agnostic.
But I was raised by a dad whose parents were Protestant, and a mom who went to Catholic school as a kid. I grew up in the American South. I grew up in America, and America is so darn Christianized, that it doesn’t matter that such things aren’t a requirement in Judaism, because they’re a requirement in Christian practice, so they become a requirement in the secular realm as well.
Even the very definition of “religion” is often mistaken for REQUIRING a “belief in the supernatural or a literal higher power” – not because this is in any way anthropologically accurate (not only does Judaism technically allow for the opposite, so do some variants of Hinduism; There’s posts on that blog that covered it better actually but you might have to dig for them; at least those both mention it), but – ding ding!
That’s still how many people in the West think it’s “defined” because that’s the requirements of the Christian religion. A belief in a literal higher power.
Like, I have seen Culturally Christian atheists INSIST that you cannot possibly be “religiously Jewish” AND an atheist/not believe in a literal higher power, only to be corrected by actual Jewish people that “uh, no? That’s not how it works, you’re thinking of CHRISTIANITY?”.
Because they were so entrenched in the Christian Definition of Religion, it never even occurred to them that there was such a thing as a “religion” that did it differently than that.
Because even “secular” society in the West usually defines it that way, because Christianity does.
Heck, the idea of “Judeo-Christian” is…heh, well. Ask a Jewish person or two and if they have the energy you’ll probably get a nice rant on why that term is a serious misnomer; but it’s VERY common to treat Judaism as if it was just the “precursor” to Christianity, as if Christianity is just an extension of Judaism with an extra set of Books, and it’s…it’s not. It’s REALLY not. That thinking stems from Christian cultures trying to simultaneously erase actual Jewish culture (where it actually differed from theirs), and pretending that theirs ~supplanted~ it and ~took its place~ like the New and Improved version, which… of course, being that most Christian sects insist that Christianity is The One True Religion, of COURSE they did.
Even the idea of weekends is pretty much derived from the habit of most Christians to make Sunday a Sabbath and “day of rest” (some Christians do actually use Saturday instead – much like Jewish folk do – but Catholics and a majority of Protestant sects use Sunday).
Even some Really Big “little things” are more Christianized than you think though.
There’s…I mean off the top of my head, that’s it, but there’s definitely more I’m not even remembering and I’m sure quite a few that I’m not even personally aware of yet.
Personally, I’ve found that the more I learn about other cultures, religions, history, etc, the more I realize how very insular and Very Specific and perhaps even culturally weird in the grand scheme of things, my own upbringing was. That’s not a bad thing though! As far as I’m concerned, it’s just helping me learn what my biases and assumptions are, so A+ 10/10 recommend expanding your awareness of this stuff. ❤
Lol I’m pretty sure the sole overlap between Judaism and (only a couple branches of) Christianity is that fish isn’t meat.
Donald Trump is exactly the kind of person that Jesus would have thrown out of the temple and beaten with a stick, and the fact that so many self-identified Christians want to put him in office tells you pretty everything wrong with white American Christianity.
Because Jesus had authority at temples and beat people.
I 100% can’t tell if you’re joking here but he actually did chase people out of a temple at least once for using religion for their own selfish gains, complete with literal table flipping and improvised whips
So really it’s not that he would have trump thrown out as much as he would storm in and accuse him of turning his father’s house into a den of thieves before upending a table on his head
Dude, Jesus not only chased them out, he broke stuff they were selling, let loose all of their animals, and fucking flipped all the money-changing tables.
Jesus 100% would have been chasing Trump out with a table leg.
Canon Jesus 10000% better than fanon Jesus
Canon Jesus did some very weird shit. Like, just before throwing the market out of the temple, he stole a donkey, then cursed a fig tree because it didn’t have any fruit on it. The next day, or possibly immediately, everyone was amazed that the fig tree he had cursed was withered. He must’ve been in a fuckin weird mood. Going through a Dark Period. The Chaotic Mage of Light losing his shit just a little bit.
“So, what the fuck was that, Jesus?” someone asked as they’re all looking at the horribly withered corpse of the poor cursed tree.
“The power of prayer,” Jesus said absently.
“… wait, is cursing literally a form of prayer? Because some Wiccans are going to be really upset about that, like, they have a whole threefold law thing, is this… okay?”
“Listen,” said Jesus, “If I tell a mountain to get back in the sea? The mountain will get in the fucking sea. Do you want me to tell you to get in the sea?”
And they were all like, “Good demo, Jesus. Good lesson.”
Meanwhile, he was having the aforementioned public brawl in the temple.
Just keep that in mind during this election cycle – viable answers for What Would Jesus Do include flipping tables, stealing animals and striking down shrubbery with magic, all in one week.
Before Holy Week in the church calendar comes the lesser-known festival of Christ Doesn’t Give A Fuck Week
I now have a mental image of Jesus as Negan from the walking dead, dolling out justice on religious heathens with a table leg studded with nails.
The fig tree incident happened because he was hungry and couldn’t find any fruit on it. Anyone who’s experienced low blood sugar can relate to that tantrum.
Jesus was hangry.
I believe this is my favorite post ever.
My favorite part of the “flipping tables at the temple” story is that before any of that went down, Jesus went out and wove his own whip with which to drive these people out.
I like to imagine him being just so angry, muttering under his breath while he braided together the scourge.
christian thought in its original form is about defending and sympathizing with the most powerless members of our society and i think its one of the greatest tragedies in human history that something like that was so thoroughly corrupted and weaponized by the very people it was supposed to fight against
– this is the jewish new year, we are entering the year 5778. It comemorates when adam and eve were created.
– If you see someone jewish, or have jewish friends and family, say “L’Shana Tova (Le-Sha-Nah-Toe-Vah). It’s a greeting and a wish for a happy new year!
– We dip apples in honey to remind us of the sweetness of life and to bring sweetness into ourselves for a new year
-We eat a circular challah to symbolize the cycles of time, the challah often has raisins in it to add extra sweetness
-This is a happy holiday, full of joy
Beginning on Friday, September 30th is Yom Kippur:
– This is the jewish day of atonement, when we think about our wrongdoings of the past year and think about how we can commit to doing better in the next year.
– Many Jewish people fast, abstaining from food and water from sundown to sundown. The fast is roughly 25 hours. HOWEVER, if you need to eat, you may. There are lots of reasons that people may not fast, like recovering from an eating disorder, a medical condition like diabetes, or having to take medication with food. The elderly, children, and pregnant people should not fast.
– This is a solemn holiday, many people spend all day in synagogue in deep prayer.
– On Yom Kippur, wish someone a peaceful or meaningful fast. Some people may take offense to the concept of having an “easy” or “enjoyable” fast because Yom Kippur is not about ease or comfort.
– There is a breaking of the fast at sundown, this is usually a joyous event
Together, these make up the High Holy Days, the most important week in Judaism.
lovingdread 