(Image transcription/ A tweet from Bradley Onishi saying “we’ve been analysing the toxicity of White Evangelicalism for decades and they just tweeted it out” with a picture below seeming from the account “desiringGod” (their account title spells this as “Desiring God, in the full image from this tweet you can see a section saying "article by Joe Rigney, May 31st 2019”). The image focused on large text saying “The Enticing Sin of Empathy: How Satan Corrupts Through Compassion”/ end transcription).
In addition, after having researched this a little, you guys should read these articles:
The original article. These articles. Make my blood boil. I cannot fucking fathom that there are people out there that believe this shit.
Reading this, it’s literally all mental acrobatics so they can justify clinging to their hatreds while dressing it up in a costume of righteousness
for my health, i don’t think i can read these, but the concept is too wild not to pass on
Abrahamic religions and their “sins”…
This is not “Abrahamic religions,” this is Christianity. Empathy and feeling the pain and experiences of others is a central tenet in Judaism, especially with regard to the Passover seder. Leave us the fuck out of this.
Same goes for Islam, which is built off compassion and the understanding of one another. Our prophet stresses a mercy for all creatures. Leave us out of this too thanks.
“This is also specifically Evangelical Christianity, too which is a branch of Christianity that evolved to legitimize white supremacy and black slavery. Not that other branches of Christianity are innocent, but Evangelical Christianity is the closest thing to a full fledged Religion Of Evil you’ll find in real life.”
Edgy atheists really need to stop equating evangelical Christianity to “Abrahamic religions” as if that’s remotely the same thing.
Dude I’m a follower of Jesus and this makes my blood boil (I don’t identify with White Evangelical Christianity in any way shape or form). Like literally, Compassion and Empathy are what Jesus was all about. Anyone claiming otherwise has lost the plot concerning what they are really worshiping.
Something I’ve noticed though…American Evangelical Christianity has become much less about the things Jesus actually stood for and much more about personal freedom (for themselves) and intolerance for others’ freedoms. One place I read someone actually commented “I can do whatever I want [regarding Covid, masks and vaccines] because Jesus means freedom.” Where’s that “freedom” when it comes to lgbtq+ love and womens’ rights, huh? Honey, I think you’ve forgotten to read your bible recently… That’s not what Jesus was about.
The thing that baffles me about Evangelicals is that their God is actually a very weak god.
Let me be clear that I’m talking about Evangelicals, not all Christians. I’m talking about the people that absolutely believe that Michelle Bachman, Sarah Palin, and Donald Trump were the candidates chosen by God. Except, God was defeated.
I’m talking about the people that think that a child hearing a backward message in rock music will be denied heaven, because the music corrupted their soul beyond the redemption of Christ somehow. God can be defeated by a guy with a guitar and eyeliner.
Their God will intercede and send tornados and hurricanes to places that are sinful– but can’t keep the GOP national convention from being recheduled or cut short due to the weather. And this same god– who will kill thousands of people because their local government won’t stone queers to death– is powerless to help individual people.
They spend all their time trying to protect their God.
Personally, I think it has something to do with their unwavering belief in Satan. They genuinely fear Satan; one might even say that they believe, in their heart of hearts, that Satan is every bit as powerfulas their God, although they’d never admit, of course.
I remember being an Evangelical child. I remember just how terrified I was of Satan. I honestly believed that simply seeingHis Infernal Majesty would instantlydamn me to an eternity in Hell, and that somehow not even God could or would save me. I’m genuinely puzzled now, of course, why exactly I believed that, but I doubt I was alone in that belief.
I mean that’s just it. Ignoring the fact that Bible!Satan is a distinctly different character than Evangelical!Satan, they’ve built a culture where the world God created has been twisted and perverted so that if you experience anything that is not specifically part of evangelical culture, it will destroy your soul and take you away from God.
I continue to be confused as to whether secular people have just that confused of an idea of Evangelical teaching, or whether the Evangelical branch of Protestantism is just that bad.
I think all of you are painting the entirety of Evangelicalism with a broad brush and are using the bad theology of a few to discredit the whole.
No. I will allow one caveat– I’m referring specifically to the Evangelical Movement in the United States; I’ve heard some iffy things about Evangelicals in Canada and the UK, but I can’t speak with experience there. But aside from that, I’m calling bullshit. I’m calling TRICERATOPS shit.
I’m not talking about “a few.” I’m talking about every experience I have had with any group calling itself Evangelical in my almost fifty years of living in the South. I’m talking from the perspective of someone who was considered a prime target for recruitment by multiple churches, in multiple cities, and has had these people come to my home with a conversion plan. Once I got tricked into going to a Christian Rock concert by a friend’s mother who just told my mom “it’s a concert,” and let me tell you, that is a terrifying place to be an apostate, particularly when they refer to you as such. (That same friend’s mother later abandoned her daughter to join a traveling ministry.)
I live in a country that is held hostage to their beliefs because the base is whipped into a frenzy of “If the Democrats win, Satan Wins!” and can be reliably counted to show up for every election– local, state, federal– by the busload, and genuinely believe that in the world that God created, in the country where they have a stranglehold on the government, every instance of them not getting their way is a loss for God.
These are not a “few” people. This is not a small minority. Any attempt to dismiss them as such is disingenuous, rooted in staggeringignorance, or both. Your statement basically amounts to “You’re only saying that because you know an overwhelming number of people who have been personally traumatized by the mindset you’re talking about, and that’s coloring your judgment.”
Now, I will cede the point that I am part of several subcultures that could be argued to have a higher than normal number of victims of the American Evangelical movement– Pagan, Kink, and most of all Queer– but the absolutely terrifying thing is if you just go ahead and deselect the stories from my friends in those communities, you’re still left with a large enough statistical sample to make predictions with a probability approaching One.
I’m talking about my co-worker at Domino’s Pizza who noped out of the church one of her friends was trying to recruit her with, and they sent in someone to talk to the manager about making sure she had Wednesday nights off because she kept telling them that she had to work. (Bless the manager, he said he had a serious scheduling problem and would see what he could do without mentioning that the girl had never been scheduled for Wednesday nights, smiled them out the door, and called her to let her know she had a problem.)
I’m talking about how, for most of the late eighties and early nineties, I could not walk into a shopping mall by myself without having someone walk up to me and ask if I’d heard of their church. You might argue that my young, solitary, mentally ill, neurodivergent, and queer ass was like a klaxon call to these people– and that is probably both true and a terrifying statement in of itself– and therefore my picture has been colored, but again… I am not being figurative. I mean that if I walked into a shopping mall by myself in Hunstville, Decatur, Birmingham, Hoover, Montgomery, Dothan, Enterprise, or Boaz, I would have someone talking to me about the Word within fifteen minutes. Every. Time. This implies either a frightening organized monitoring system of public spaces, or more likely (and at least slightly less alarmingly) just an overwhelming prevalence of such people in the general population.
I’m talking about my co-worker at Domino’s Pizza who noped out of the church one of her friends was trying to recruit her with, and they sent in someone to talk to the manager about making sure she had Wednesday nights off because she kept telling them that she had to work. (Bless the manager, he said he had a serious scheduling problem and would see what he could do without mentioning that the girl had neverbeen scheduled for Wednesday nights, smiled them out the door, and called her to let her know she had a problem.)
I’m talking about when I was training to be an EMT and working in the burn ward, and there was a woman there whose husband had literally doused her in gasoline and set fire to her for disobeying him, and they had to bring up a security goon to screen visitors to the entire burn ward. See, after she started refusing visitors, members of her church would pretend to be coming to visit another member of the burn ward to sneak in to appeal to her to try to be a good wife, forgive her husband, take him back, and not press charges, because that’s what Jesus would do. And if you’re wondering, the point at which the woman snapped and started refusing visitors was when one of them compared her experience to the Fires of Hell.
I’m talking about the guy I went to high school who dropped out of school because his church told him that his passion for acting was actually sinful, and the only way God would allow him to pursue it was to act in plays that were SPECIFICALLY Christian. Not just “had good moral values” but “had to explicitly be on the subject of Christ or Christianity”. And since they dropped this on him four weeks into rehearsals on the play he was acting in for his final semester grade, they had him convinced that HE was a victim because the head of the theatre department wouldn’t change the play to one his church approved of. (The fact that this also had the effect of torpedoing his college plans? Pitched as a good thing, because Jaysus had a better plan for him.)
I’m talking about my daughter’s father (technically, I’m the stepdad, but thank a Goddess I was her parent for most of her post-puberty childhood) telling her that she could never get a job in politics because God didn’t want women to have any authority, and a million other paper-cut degradations experienced by women. And I must stress that this is a man who loves his daughter deeply, and on two separate occasions told me that she spoke highly of me and thanked me for being there for her.
And I honestly don’t feel like leaving out the abuse suffered by my Pagan friends, and I particularly don’t feel like leaving out the traumas of my Queer friends. The fact that there are communities packed with victims of the Evangelical mindset, in and of itself, obliterates your suggestion that it’s “only a few.”
If there’s a silent minority of Evangelicals that recognize that all of this is Not Acceptable, then they need to speak up. Loudly. Now. Otherwise you’re coming at me with the No True Scotsman fallacy in a country AWASH with Fake Scotsmen and not a True Scotsman to be heard from.
Worth noting that the person who tried to “not all evangelicals” this is one of those people who says Kyle Rittenhouse should have murdered more protestors. Seems like they have a consistent investment into dismissing the perspectives of marginalized people in order to maintain conservative domination over them
It’s entirely possible, likely even, that the evangelicals engaging in these behaviors are a minority of evangelicals, but only in the same way that the people who regularly go to the gym are a minority of gym members.
While in theory my general idea of religiosity would lend itself to the concept of a nondenominational church, the reality of nondenominational churches is that the vast majority of them exist to cast a wide net and get as much money from as many people as possible because that way they don’t have to limit their demographic.
How do nondenominational churches even work? I feel like it would be pretty hard to come up with even a single sermon that doesn’t contradict the doctrines of a single denomination. And that’s not even getting into all the issues with the structure of the service, which I understand can vary quite a lot.
(I went to a nondenominational Christian school, but that’s a bit different, since the doctrines and structure aren’t nearly as central to the way a school functions.)
In America, at least, “nondenominational” means in practice “Evangelical Protestant”. This is partly because the self-conception and project of low-church evangelicals is explicitly to brand themselves as “mere Christianity”, and they like to pretend that their practices and doctrines aren’t historically informed and contingent. They often have a lot of strong feelings about doctrine and liturgy in practice, but they don’t belong to formal structures that establish and enforce these.
There is a broader sense of “non-denominational” that refers to cooperation across actually, substantially different denominations, which usually has to limit itself to like “Hey, Jesus was cool, right?” But you’d be hard pressed to hold an actual service in this style.
Non-denominational just means that absolutely nobody outside of the police is going to tell church leadership to stop their nonsense, and IME non-denominational churches are even more prone to fuckery than other churches.
Non denominational churches were originally the ones that broke off of mainline Protestantism when most of the mainline churches began teaching their pastors the historical critical method of biblical interpretation
something something the way my evangelical coworker would talk about how the sinfulness and degradation of others was an opportunity for people like him to gain closeness to god, that the existence of a suffering sinner provides the means for a good christian to secure approval from god and gain entry to the beautiful afterlife. sinners constituted a domesticatable and farmable resource for the benefit of christians, as did the children of sinners, who ought to be removed from the homes of non-christians and given to christians to raise for them. also how he was obsessed with talking about how you needed to restrict the sinner’s awareness of their choices to a simple split between choosing to do something difficultandhumiliating, or something easyandgood. The easyandgood thing to do was to form a relationship with a church that would sustain you in return for your service and compliance with christian doctrine. The difficultandhumiliating thing to do would be to ask any non-christian entity or organization for help. He loved the humiliating bureaucracy of collecting disability payments or unemployment or alimony. It served them right.
I heard this metaphor growing up, and in my case, it backfired supremely, because I went out into my neighbor’s backyard where a rose bush was growing, and the one I tested had like 30 petals (it was yellow, but definitely a rose of some kind), and as a very logical lass, I came to the conclusion that you could have premarital sex AT LEAST ten times before your future husband would even notice something was up. Moral of the story? Test your metaphors on the weirdest and most neurodivergent child you know before writing your weird religious propaganda.
[Image capiton: a small plastic envelope with a little gold-colored rose pin, and a card reading, “You are like a beautiful rose. Each time you engage in premarital sex, a precious petal is stripped away. Don’t leave your future husband holding a bare stem. Abstain.” End caption.]
the thing that strikes me about this latest wave of anti-trans hate and legislation in the U.S. is that it feels like it’s *kind of* about trans people but really about a fear fundamental to all conservatives that a day will one day come when they will no longer be able to completely control their children
american conservatism is a death cult. trump made this incredibly obvious but it’s been trending that way for a while. it is spiteful, bigoted, cruel, morally bankrupt, and all evidence in support of it has either been fabricated, forged, deceptively edited, or disproven. being conservative goes against a fundamental human desire to be kind to those around you and I think on some level conservatives know this, and thus, they know that the only reason children would subscribe to these values is if they are indoctrinated into them with cult-like single-mindedness
Conservatives have been pushing for homeschooling for decades, they’ve been raising concerns about teaching evolution in schools since the early 20th century, they’ve made wedge issues out of sex ed, history textbooks, and now gay and trans teachers. They want a world in which children are taught to be conservative from birth and any attempt to teach them anything else is a literal crime. They want this because they know, deep down inside, that most children would not agree with them unless they were literally brainwashed into it.
also worth pointing out that most child abuse (sexual or otherwise) takes place within a “traditional” family structure or a “traditional” religious institution and I have to wonder if people who want to abuse kids have a fundamental investment in preserving strict hierarchies in which adult men have unquestioned authority over children
Like I’m not saying *every* conservative is like this but perhpas their emphasis on “groomers” is a wee bit of projection
Anyway abolish the family trans rights are human rights institute fully automated luxury gay space communism now
