Thread by @mcjulie

Most people in the thread are picking on the "no true Christian" fallacy, but I wanted to point out the "unfair to blame American degeneracy on Christianity" -- as if Christians haven't been in charge the whole time?

https://twitter.com/elvislevel/status/1440772219836067846

White evangelical theology & practice was designed to serve the needs of colonizers & slaveholders -- this is a historical fact (Which Slacktivist talks about quite a bit. ) patheos.com/blogs/slacktiv…

You can say, "there are other ways of being a Christian" and you're right, but the historical fact remains that American history has been very much dominated BY the white evangelical tradition.

The religious right, which I think in hindsight we can identify as primarily an authoritarian anti-democratic movement, was begun explicitly as an effort by white evangelicals to take control of the secular government.

This makes Christians not just sort of vaguely responsible for American degeneracy because they're the majority, this makes a specific Christian group DIRECTLY responsible: what's happening now is exactly by their design.

One of the things @C_Stroop has said a lot on this topic, that I think is particularly profound, is this:

"Christianity is what Christians do."

Simple and obvious. How how could you reasonably claim anything different? And yet people try to, all the time.

It seems like a variation on an idea I used to pick up from the evangelical church back when I was inside it -- this notion that "the Christian church" wasn't *really* the earthly church all around you, but rather, was some mystical "Bride of Christ" --

A church that perpetually existed in a pure, idealized state, not of this world, brilliant and shining and fully good and fully redeemed and also entirely imaginary.

In my own life, this ideal of the transcendent church seemed to be how my parents justified to themselves why they were sticking with the church, even when they saw some of the toxic elements in it.

I guess it's similar to believing strongly in any ideology -- every real-world failure is because people didn't do it right, or didn't do it enough, or they were defeated by outside forces, the ideology works! Even if it never HAS worked.

But in Christianity, the ideal of the transcendent church -- a living entity somehow greater than the people who make it -- is an explicit part of the theology. All that "Bride of Christ" stuff is actually there in the Bible.

Which, now that I think of it, is a pretty clever move: to build the "no true Scotsman" fallacy right into your theology from the beginning.

You can see this same thinking at work in most of those "still-evangelicals respond to the exvangelical phenomenon" essays -- this idea that we might have been IN church our whole lives, but we were clearly never part of THE church.

And I'll freely admit that! Sure, I was raised from infancy to young adulthood deep in the heart of the evangelical church, but I was never part of some idealized transcendent entity that doesn't really exist in this world.

Because, duh, it doesn't exist.

But our secular society has been deeply influenced by Christian culture.
I suspect this is where people get the impulse to defend Christianity in the abstract by appealing to some platonic ideal of what Christianity is *supposed* to be.

But who told you Christianity was supposed to be all that?

It was Christianity, wasn't it?

It was PR, friends. Propaganda. Like "Coke is the real thing"
Christianity tells you this hyped-up story about how great it is, and you believe it! Or at least, it sticks in your head and you hum along with the commercial jingle.

Christianity doesn't need you defending it. It's 2,000 years old, it's an adult, it can take care of itself.

And, as an adult, it is fully answerable for its misdeeds, both deliberate and accidental.

And I guess that's the end of the thought.