Thread by @the_wilderless

lot of y’all are v optimistic about christianity and Christians

Reality check: what most of you say about your Christian faith would get you excommunicated from the majority of Christian churches. Just because you see yourself as Christian doesn’t mean they see you as one.

one of the Lutheran synods started allowing women to be pastors when I was a kid. People in my church made death threats.

There’s something fascinating here about one-way brotherhood/sisterhood.

We can see ourselves as part of a massive brotherhood, a shared heritage and community,

Even if almost no one in that brotherhood agrees that they share anything with you

Can a large society function at all without these dense networks of one-way communities?

I’ve had some very very racist pieces of shit see me as a brother because my spiritual practice involves Oðin and Freyja.

More benignly, I’ve had a lot of new age people be warm and fuzzy with me because I don’t scoff at chakras.

This sense of false warmth seems to have a lot of functional use, which dissipates if you examine it any more closely.

Scrutiny necessarily dissolves this type of relationship.

The further down this type of warmth is, the harder it is to scrutinize (easier to put “vegetarian” under a microscope than “Christian”; easier “Christian” than “human”; etc)

How many sets of human relations rely on all of us agreeing to not look too closely at them?

And how much is gained by agreeing not to look at them?

Almost all the Christians I know take comfort in the fact that it is the largest religion on earth, billions of followers. “2 billion people can’t all be wrong. Our dominance is a sign from god that we’re right.”

But if any of them examined closely, almost none of them would define all 2 billion as “real” Christians.
By the definition of the fundamentalist sect I grew up in, maybe a few tens of millions of people qualify.
Yet they still find comfort in the 2 billion false brotherhood

Same with brotherhoods from the past. Ancestors, heritage, tradition.

Any one of the traditions we find ourselves in, we take comfort in the millions who have come before us, the long path we are privileged to walk along for our allotted time.

And yet. Almost no one before us would recognize us as a part of their tradition. We would not recognize almost anyone after us as a part of our tradition.

And yet. And yet and yet.

Something real *is* added by this feeling. Something real would be lost without it.

Each of us is “going it alone” far more than we’d like to think, in reality. But there’s something necessary about the *feeling* that we are part of a tradition, a brotherhood, a sangha.

Grace is involved here. I can’t exactly articulate an important point here—but traditions are maybe held together by grace.

And one part of this grace is a willingness to not inspect too closely our connections to others in certain arenas.

By close inspection, there are maybe 20 million “real” Christians. But by Grace, there are 2 billion.

By scrutiny, my spiritual path resembles that of maybe 20 other people. But by Grace, I am guided by long hermetic tradition, by sangha, by my Northern ancestors

The function of tradition is only partially to preserve and pass on knowledge. It has always failed in this function and will always fail at it. That function is just an excuse to bring people together.

More so, the function of tradition, or brotherhood, of shared space is to keep us warm in the cutting cold.

To make sure that though we are alone, we are not abandoned.