Thread by @mcjulie

I woke up with another couple thoughts on the notion of Christianity as “transformative” possibly based on seeing Jesus Christ Superstar in Seattle last night

https://twitter.com/mcjulie/status/1445992620539269121

Background: When the JCS movie came on TV we watched it as a family, and I remember having the general impression that it was “controversial” and that my family were the “rebellious” evangelicals because we were watching it.

My parents made a point of talking about places where the JCS story differs obviously from evangelical orthodoxy, most notably: no resurrection. They would also say “well, in the text it’s like this, they took a few liberties…”

Which was, honestly, great! I wish my parents had been on top of the stuff *in the church* in that same way.

It was also a bit ironic that they accurately pegged one thing: the church objected to it more for *being rock & roll* than for being doctrinally suspect.

I say “ironic” because this was still a few years before the anti-rock Satanic panic, which my parents were not into, exactly, but they didn’t fight that hard against it, if that makes sense.

Anyway, I liked JCS the musical a lot & would be lying if I didn’t admit that its take on Jesus — where he comes off as a doomed, brilliant, radical social reformer/rock star — informed my personal take on Jesus, the one I had when I was baptized at 12.

It was YEARS later when I realized “wait, JCS was written in the late 1960s, the *writers of the musical* intended to make a connection between Jesus and people like Martin Luther King.”

(I had previously come to a similar realization regarding The Crucible and the McCarthy trials.)

This phenomenon — where we tell stories about the past, filtered through the present, but the filter is invisible to us, so we think we’ve seen the real past — pops up in a lot of places.

One of the most toxic places this pops up is people who think racial diversity in historic drama is “artificial wokeness” when the opposite is true — their own view of the past was warped by the artificial whiteness of Hollywood.

Our view of EVERYTHING is shaped by the stories we tell about it, which is more or less to be expected — that’s how humans are, after all. But some of our stories are lies, and shape us to believe lies.

Evangelical Christians, maybe other kinds of Christians, tell their own story in a way that perpetuates a simple, but enormous lie: that Christianity is somehow DIFFERENT from what’s already here.

You know, “in the world but not of it”
But, my dudes, you MADE this world. You’ve been in charge of huge parts of it for almost 2,000 years & you’ve certainly dominated the USA for the entirety of its existence.

You know, Christians have been freaking out for the past few years because their numbers are in steep decline, but the decline is from something like 80% to 50% and it’s pretty recent.

Our culture has already been thoroughly shaped by Christian dominance, and that shaping remains even if there comes a day where the number of actual practicing Christians is almost zero.

Even in their current decline, Christians still have most of the money, most of the political power, most of the institutional power, and most of the cultural power.

Christians will tell you that they are losing cultural power, which is true, but “We used to have ALL of it, now we only have SOME of it” is still very Christian-dominated.

So the thought I had was this: if you think Christianity is supposed to be “transformative” what do you imagine people are transforming FROM?

Like, what do you imagine people are doing BEFORE they become “transformed” Christians?

When I was in Indonesia (Jakarta — Muslim majority, Bali — Hindu majority) in 2004 around Christmas, I got asked “religion” sometimes by people who were basically wondering if they should say “Merry Christmas” to me.

There was an idiom that I picked up in Jakarta, where the culture seemed to make a distinction between “Muslim” and “devout Muslim” — where, like DEVOUT Muslim women would wear head scarves, but not other women.

I started saying “Christian but not devout” when people asked my religion and everybody seemed to pick up immediately what I meant by that.

That’s when I realized how much certain aspects of being raised Christian, in a Christian-dominated country, are just there in my head forever. Just like I have a native language, English, I have a native religion, Christianity.

What evangelical Christians don’t want to admit is that most of their “converts” are already Christian. Maybe they’re not devout, or maybe they come from another Christian tradition, but they’re Christians. That’s why the ideas resonate.

And that’s also why the idea of Christianity as “transformative” is flawed. Because right here, right now, 2,000 years on in a majority Christian country, the transformation is usually from one kind of Christian to another kind of Christian.

That’s the end of the thought, have a good day everybody!