Thread by @Delafina777

Another big part of why Christian atheists have trouble seeing how 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. (1/x)

https://twitter.com/RGarfinkleSFF/status/1419953900027846657

So 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 just also be Christian.

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.

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.

And so 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.

So 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 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.

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) and not seeing how Christianity *itself* is colonial.

It's not just a tool, it's a driver.

So 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.

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 more subtle, of course, when Christianity didn't come in explicitly as the result of military conquest.

So 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.

And 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 isn't something you can just pull out of a culture.

Because 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. You just pull out the Christianity module and are left with a neutral, secular society.

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

But 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, which has always, always been a lie.

The secular, "enlightened" culture 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.

And I 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.

But until you've done the work of deconstructing how normative Christian assumptions are, you haven't actually LEFT Christianity, whether or not you believe in God.