Atheism

I mean, sure, but what I'm cautioning against is prescribing any normative definition or configuration of Christianity, as it then implies an idealized version is real, and therefore that the problem is that people aren't following the religion the "right" way, not that there is something systemic that influences how the religion functions in society.

There were baptists in central Europe that allowed women to serve as pastors as early as the early modern period, which is markedly different than what Baptism is like in the US today. During the Second Great Awakening of the early nineteenth century, there were Christian denominations that practiced polyamory and collective property ownership. These were developments that coincided with Christianity as an institution of settler-colonialism and EuroAmerican imperialism, and they were certainly not accepted by larger or more formal denominations at the time; still wouldn't be today. It should also go without saying that they wouldn't reflect the churches in the period you're referring to even if just because they emerged in relation to what came afterward.

It is important to deny ownership of moral values by the institutions that configure and disseminate them for this exact same reason. Even though they serve a purpose within the system they exist in, they meet a need of the people who subscribe to them, and normativity is what stifles their ability to wrestle that utility away from these institutions.

But that's also like, the point. The practice of scripture is about having a shared tool to make sense of things as it is the faith that that tool is indeed the right one to do so. Everyone uses it for their own ends.

Doesn't the book of Genesis come from Judaism?

Colonialism and capitalism absolutely.

I'd argue patriarchy and slavery already existed with other justifications though Christianity was used to entrench them further.

I'm going to have to see a big ol'source for that one. You're saying that's a Christian thing exclusively, and not found in any of the cultural or religious influences on Christianity? How could you even begin to draw that line? Even more, you're saying that, despite roughly fifteen hundred years of change, that was a core value that existed in the exact same way from the beginning of Christianity to European colonialism? Not even translations effected something so fundamental? Why would Christian patriarchy do this, but not Greek or Roman or Iranian? Why was it absent in Judaism but present here?

Even beyond that, you just subscribed to a normative construction of humanity and morality by asserting that capitalism emerged through this religion, and not that specific property relations and systems of power influenced how both are understood within our culture over time. For example, domination and objectification of the living world are certainly elements in this, but it's difficult to argue Christianity is why that's so and not that that was so, and Christianity exists as it does as a result of that.

Edit: I'm also just going to add that, though I'm sure this wasn't intentional, this also ends up carrying deeply colonial and white supremacist notions of superiority by attributing that much gravity to the one religion that EuroAmerican imperialists happened to subscribe to. They got to have the religion that was so foundational, so world-changing that it marked a break in the entirety of human self-perception? I get were saying capitalism is bad, but exceptionalizing it in this way reproduces narratives that white supremacists find favourable.

I'm not sure if you meant to use "salient" here (as in you're using the word incorrectly), but I definitely wasn't trying make my writing that.

I'm also not sure about what else is said here either. Plenty of people behave immorally despite having role models; and I'd hardly say good people are in short supply despite how doomers insist the world is right now. I'd also caution against resorting to individualist explanations for this as well, and I was trying to discourage that by emphasizing the relationality between individuals and systems.

This is also by no means nothing even remotely new, but the specific form of normativity that people engage with this from did indeed emerge from modern European colonialism, and therefore Christianized notions of moral purity. But by, "nowadays" I reckon you're not positioning this as a centuries-long development.

And then, "holding us back," itself casts a normative construction of how things ought to be, which is exactly what I've cautioned against. I'd hardly imagine your understanding of a collective addresses decolonialism in a way that doesn't subordinate groups or values that are "holding us back," from some idealized, "proper" state that thing should be in by now.