Thread by @Delafina777

I mean, I want to parse this out a bit more:

Jeff Sharlet's mother was Pentecostal. His father is from a "secular Jewish background." I haven't seen anywhere that Sharlet is a practicing Jew, or even identifies as Jewish. 1/x

https://twitter.com/Delafina777/status/1175602723674345472

The closest thing to a racial definition of Jewishness that *Jews* actually accept is the Orthodox take on matrilineal descent. That is, unless you actively convert to another religion, you're Jewish if your mom is Jewish, the end.

For non-Orthodox Jews, you're generally Jewish if you have at least one Jewish parent, are raised with some Jewish identity, and choose as an adult to identify as Jewish.

So unless I missed somewhere where he identifies as Jewish, Sharlet doesn't really meet any of the Jewish definitions for being Jewish. He's certainly of partial Jewish descent, but hey, his mom's Pentecostal, so he could just as easily be identified as Christian.

So let's be absolutely clear: this "Christians for Truth" site, in claiming that The Family is "Jewish-written," is using an explicitly white supremacist/Nazi definition of Jewishness, in which any Jewish ancestry makes you Jewish, regardless of how you identify.

Christians, tbh, y'all should get a group together and sue that site for defamation.

I'm moderately serious. Liberal religious groups have gotta stop letting hate groups claim the title of religiousness.

And the general trend of liberal religious groups deferring to conservative religious groups in who gets to loudly claim to be genuinely religious isn't limited to Christianity.

Conservative religious groups almost always present themselves as being That Old-Time Religion: that is, representing traditional religious practices and values that more liberal groups, in modernizing, have moved away from.

And look, I've done it myself. I've tended to see Orthodox Judaism as the classical music of Judaism--something that, even if you don't want to practice it, is the wellspring, the thing you look to as the textbook of sorts.

And honestly, I think most people who practice progressive forms of spirituality tend to have this baked-in deference for conservative religion, as if it's at the very least a part of our history, as if they're preserving the letter of the law so we can explore the spirit.

But look, it's *not true.*

Fundamentalism is largely a *reaction* to modernity, not a leftover that's survived it.

And most religions throughout history have been endlessly adaptable and fluid.

But we've got enough baked-in respect for "religion" (intentionally fuzzily defined, I think) in America, and enough of a general pop culture mental picture of "religion" looking like 1950s church (an image fundamentalism has largely monopolized these days)...

...that we're unwilling to look at any fundamentalist cult that's big enough and say, "nope, they DO NOT get to share any labels with us" because--

well, it's like the whole thing where Twitter won't ban white nationalists because then they'd have to ban GOP politicians.

And it feels like mainline/liberal Christianity is a parallel to the Democrats, where it's largely playing by political rules that conservatives abandoned decades ago, and it's a Lucy and the football situation.

And I'm going to quote from Katherine Cross's ever-more-timely essay on fascism, here, because evangelicalism, the GOP, fascism, white nationalism, and so on are all in bed together and using the same playbook:

theestablishment.co/why-punching-n…

"It was specifically engineered to attack the weaknesses of democracy and use them to bring down the entire system, arrogating a right to free speech for itself just long enough to take power and wrench it away from everyone else."

"This is not because [they] love democracy or free speech, but because they know how to use this strategy to unravel them."

They are trying very, very hard to make "Christianity" a synonym for "white nationalism."

And the only people who can push back on that effectively are Christians.