this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2026
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Not to mention that the early Christians were nothing like what came several hundred years later.
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.
Oh sure, I think my point was more that they've cherry-picked what "version" they want to idealize.
Yes, I'm saying "cherry-picking" suggests there are bad and good cherries, when it's just cherries.
Well, it's arguable that some of these religious "cherries" are worse than others, but I don't find any of them to be crisp and delicious.
Yes, exactly, it is arguable, which why I'm saying that you can't say there's actually "good" or "bad" cherries.
Check out "postructuralism" and scholars like Derrida or Foucault. The role that language plays in our constructions and effects on things forces us to interrogate the reality of how we understand this thing to be "good" or "bad," as it is itself subject to the systems of power we are subject to. So, it's very hard not to reproduce the values we're trying to challenge when we don't address how those values are constructed.
Yes, we all know white supremacy is bad, but if it is only bad because it hurts people, then many people think that it only exists at the level of individual actions, like calling someone a slur, and not at a systemic level like how laws and knowledge are oriented around fundamentally devaluing certain groups of people; or why it is those groups of people in the first place besides "hating what's different." White supremacy does hurt people, and that is bad, but our understanding of how it does that changes how we understand what is needed to end it.
Is this not just lack of abstract thinking?
I think you think that I am failing to think. I also think you are mistaken.
I've read Foucault, and you've made a compelling argument. But I don't get what you're trying to say in this last comment.
So you think you have a better chance of fighting religion as a whole than to get people to follow an idealized version of Christianity, the one that they advertise as when they want to be seen as a force for good.
There is an idealized definition and configuration of Christianity, its Jesus Fucking Christ. Do you act like him and what he taught (or at least try your best to)? Christian. Do you do literally the opposite of what he did and taught? Not Christian. It not hard.
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