one of my least favorite things as a Christianity-hating (and, indeed, Christianity-practicing, but that's for another day) heathen is that I CONSTANTLY find myself needing to defend Christianity and other Abrahamic religions from bigoted pagans, because their reasons for hating those religions are not only nonsensical but objectively unfounded. I don't WANT to have to defend Christianity, not by any stretch of the imagination, and by the token of hating highly misogynistic and colonial power structures I'm often just as negatively inclined toward Islam and similar*. But y'all's dumbass fake ass tiktok takes on Christianity are perpetuating ACTUAL WHITE SUPREMACY!!!
Like, if you're gonna hate on these religions, maybe hate on their:
- intrinsic mechanisms for the consolidation of power;
- extreme hatred, suppression and exclusion of women;
- violently ethnocidal, colonial development;
- philosophical inconsistencies and fraudulent scriptural inclusions;
- agenda-motivated dogmas taking precedent over historic teaching;
- perpetuation of capitalist and classist systems;
- history of interpersonal abuses on religions grounds;
- ongoing hoarding and secreting of resources;
- failure to uphold their own values;
- etc.
Instead of such bullshit as:
- "Christianity STOLE [insert made up pagan holiday]";
- "Christianity converted EVERY SINGLE EUROPEAN BY FORCE";
- "Pagans are oppressed under Christians to this day1!!";
The hatred that internet pagans have for Christianity doesn't spring from a sound historical and philosophical analysis of it. If it did, they would extend many of the same critiques to other religions, and moreover they would have actual historical, philosophical, statistical facts to support their argument with. But in reality it's completely reactionary. Not uncommonly the reaction is to the immediate environment (unsupportive religious parents, for example), but on a broader scale it's just the oppression pissing contest rearing its hideous head again.
The narrative people want to spread is that pagans are a monolith that is fundamentally oppressed under Christianity, and it's REALLY really really giving reverse racism. It's painfully obvious that people are seeking a scapegoat onto which they can offload all of their white guilt, so they don't have to confront that we are not, in fact, systemically and unilaterally oppressed on religious grounds, because we are not even a single group, and the constant attempts to flatten 'paganism' into a single group is just white supremacy once again trying to homogenize all white people into a single set of identities. It's gotten to a point where instead of becoming class-conscious and feminist, which would help people understand why they carry those feelings of intense oppression, people are looking for ways to explain that feeling through cultural features like religion. White pagans hate Christianity because they feel like doing that brings them closer to the indigeneity that would justify their sense of oppression, and put more distance between them and the whiteness that they're ashamed of.
You don't NEED to LARP being systemically oppressed by Christianity. You don't NEED to flatten the fight for liberation into Christians v. Pagans, thus making the struggle for liberation once again one that only goes on between white people on the internet.
You ARE systemically oppressed, and Christianity even had and has a hand in it! Just NOT BECAUSE YOU'RE A PAGANNNNNNNN
*my hatred of said power structures NOT to be confused with hatred of culture nor people.
