Thread by @Delafina777

There is a big difference between pluralism and secularism.

In the context of head coverings:

Pluralism: wear whatever you want
Secularism: no "religious" wear (i.e. you must dress like a white Protestant)

https://twitter.com/JustSayXtian/status/1336387923768295424

As people from non-Christian backgrounds/traditions/cultures keep telling everyone, the western idea of a "nonreligious" society is a white Christian society with the serial numbers filed off.

and it's funny, because every white New Atheist dudebro out there arguing that non-Christians need to drop their "superstitious" and "primitive" cultural practices and dead certain that he can distinguish between the "religious" and the "secular"...

...suddenly understands that there are religious practices that hold cultural meaning even for people who don't believe in the divine, or he wouldn't be arguing for keeping Christmas around.

But while he'll argue tooth and nail that wearing a wedding ring, even though it's something that came into Western culture through Christianity, is secular and therefore should be kept, he'll argue that wearing a Magen David is "religious" and should be stopped.

And their vision of what a "secular" society looks like is based on Victorian attempts to apply Darwin's theories to how societies develop. (In which white European society, or possibly white American society, was the pinnacle of evolution, natch.)

The idea was that humanity evolved from "primitive" animism to polytheism to monotheism to Christianity specifically and then to a post-Christian secular society.

But Christianity isn't more "advanced" than Judaism, and Judaism isn't more "advanced" than Hinduism.

There's nothing inherently more enlightened about Christianity or more inherently primitive about animism.

And as @JustSayXtian noted in the tweet I quoted to start off this thread, the very concept of "secularism" is itself based in a Christian worldview. Other cultures have other formulations of the interaction between belief and non-belief.

And ultimately, you're not going to be able to remove mythos from a society entirely, nor is it healthy to do so. Human beings crave ritual, and if your ritual isn't intentional, it will end up being unintentional. But it'll happen either way.

And when you attempt to completely eschew "supernatural" framings that give meaning to existence and offer organizing principles, you get other, just as irrational ones, like conspiracy theories.

And at some level, most of your New Atheist types know this, which is why they don't have the same sort of problem with, say, staid and almost tacit, long-established Christianity, like we see in a lot of the Nordic countries.

I mean, don't get me wrong, most of the reason they like it is because it's white and familiar.

But at some level, I think, they can look at cohesive, established cultural norms for a society and go okay, this cultural Christianity provides stability and order and most people don't really believe or prioritize belief in Jesus anymore, so this is "advanced."

And they're not entirely wrong there, but just because it's tacit doesn't mean it's not Christianity, and doesn't mean that it's inherently better than any other religious heritage that's similarly backgrounded.

When you get down to it, what they *don't* like is the messy, visible process of working out a pluralistic society. It's easy to have Christianity fade into a homogeneous, stable, quiet background when everyone's a white Protestant.

But when identities and belief systems come in contact with different identities and belief systems, they become visible.

And that's where a lot of the parallels between evangelicalism and New Atheism come into play.

They're both ultimately reactionary movements, in that they were birthed by the discomfort of white Christians at having to reckon with a pluralistic society, with people who were different from them gaining rights and visibility...

...and with the attendant pressure to realize that their identity and culture *was* identity and culture, and just one of many.

So if their identity isn't just The Norm, but one of many, then it must be the BEST one, the one everyone should aspire to, until it's The Norm.

All of which is to say, pretty much everyone who's not a member of the dominant religion can get together on the idea that government should be secular, that a particular religion shouldn't hold power over nonadherents.

A secular gov allows for a pluralist society.

But a pluralist society with a secular government (that is, a society that actually protects freedom of religious belief and practice and doesn't privilege any belief or nonbelief) is different from a secular society, which attempts to eliminate any religious expression in public

Because the truth of the matter is, religion has been intertwined with human culture for so long that you can't extricate its traces without getting rid of most social norms.

You can empty them of contemporary religious meaning, but they still have their history.

So any attempt to *remove* religion from the public square ends up being an attempt to homogenize society to a "nonreligious" norm.

But there is no cultural norm that is nonreligious, so it ends up being what the dominant culture considers "normal."

I.e. white Christianity.