Thread by @C_Stroop

1. “Fake Christians” do exist—I’d put Trump in that category—but they are people who fake piety, not people who regularly attend churches with bigoted theology and whose bigoted piety is very real. Not, in other words, most of Trump’s base.

chrisstroop.com/2017/05/03/abo…

#EmptyThePews

https://twitter.com/cindy_w_brandt/status/1029942187679612929

2. Is there such a thing as progressive/liberationist Christianity? Of course. But when we speak of a cultural system as vast as a major world religion, we have to realize that we are speaking of a wide array of concrete, communally and historically mediated instantiations.

3. A text-based religion’s history shows how praxis and interpretation of text and tradition vary widely—culturally, geographically, in terms of change over time.

Go back to the beginning. If there was a single“pure” Christianity, why was it necessary to fight over the canon?

4. Of course, people often like fighting over the “pure” or “true” version of a thing. It boosts our ego. But it also plays into tribalism, or what is more clearly defined in social-psychological terms as in-group/out-group consciousness. This cartoon makes the point:

5. Wherever you find a split in the history of Christianity (and other religions), people are fighting over the “pure” version. Of course, they are also advancing their own interests, whether that’s a deep-seated need to be right, even unto death, or a bid for imperial power.

6. There’s something seductive about the rhetoric of originalism and purity. We like stories of decay and revival. They’re everywhere, from the Garden of Eden to the Protestant Reformation to Lord of the Rings. Churches split over who’s holding to “the Truth” and who’s deviating.

7. Humans live through the stories we tell ourselves, but critical thinking about these stories is needed to avoid the pitfalls of authoritarianism. Questions about the “pure” version of a religion can’t be answered in an objective way. They require appeal to divine authority.

8. That’s true whether you’re asserting a claim to represent “real” Christianity based on supposedly unbroken apostolic succession or based on “sola scriptura,” which you read “correctly.” These are different types of stories advancing essentially the same originalist claim.

9. Looking to the supposed continuity of the papacy from Peter’s era(Catholicism), arguing the papacy committed schism when it added the filioque (Latin for “and the son”) to the Nicene creed (Orthodoxy), arguing human tradition corrupted the truth of scripture (Protestantism)...

10. All of these are culturally mediated strategies for grabbing ahold of that seductive claim to owning the “original,” “pure” form of Christianity. None of them can be empirically shown to be correct. In fact, all of them have empirical flaws in strictly historical terms.

11. “So what?” You’ll say. “Didn’t Jesus preach peace and love?Jesus’s teachings, QED.” Today’s popular feel-good narrative on the Left is that “true” religion reduces to progressive values. Empirically this is even more nonsensical than the claims I addressed above.

12. This “Jesus’s teachings, QED” claim is a sort of watered down ecumenism in the form of circular reasoning. It does nothing to advance our understanding of how religion works. It makes it more, not less, difficult to combat illiberal religion.

https://twitter.com/c_stroop/status/858718403439325184?s=21

13. Christians themselves have consistently been aware, historically, that a lack of unity undermines their claim to divine truth. When times have seemed particularly apocalyptic, this has driven attempts to reunify. WWI and the Russian revolution birthed the ecumenical movement.

13-a. If you want to read up on the twentieth-century ecumenical movement, I highly recommend Bryn Geffert, Eastern Orthodox and Anglicans:

amazon.com/Eastern-Orthod…

14. Today, there’s a global drive for unity among right-wing Christians fueled by apocalyptic rhetoric. This illustrates why ecumenism/interfaith dialogue and activity does not ipso facto advance pluralism and human rights.

academia.edu/27600336/Bad_E…

15. This is another reason I find the typical liberal American insistence that “real” religion is benign so unhelpful, even dangerous. America’s Christian Right is a serious theocratic threat to democracy and human rights. You want to know your enemy, right?

16. Well, guess what isn’t a productive starting point for knowing this particular enemy of democracy and human rights? Dismissing its own understanding of itself as irrelevant, that’s what.

chrisstroop.com/2017/05/03/abo…

#Exvangelical #EmptyThePews

17. I have some more thoughts relative to Christianity in the US specifically and the key racial divide, with white Christianity generally upholding white supremacist patriarchy and Black Christianity often taking a liberationist form, but I’ll have to stop here for now.

18. If you value and benefit from content like this and can afford to do so, please consider supporting my work via Patreon.

If you can’t afford to give, please don’t! This isn’t church, after all. 🙃😇

patreon.com/cstroop

#Exvangelical #EmptyThePews #ThursdayThoughts