'Christian' Family's Terrifying Response to Son Coming OutWhat I want you to notice in the use of quotation marks around the word "Christian." I often have heard these referred to as "scare quotes," but I prefer to think of them as "sarcastic quotes" or "sarcastiquotes" if you're in a portmanteau kind of mood. They refer to the quotation marks people put around a word not to suggest an actual quote or to refer to the word rather than the concept, but to imply that the word is inappropriate in the context it's being used.
It's really quite common when used to refer to bigoted Christian behaviors. The implication is that bigotry is not natural to Christian theology, and because of that anybody who acts that way isn't really a Christian.
And I want you to quit doing that. Really. I do. And here's why.
People brought up in the West, especially in the United States, more often than not separate Christianity out from all of the other world's religions as being exceptionally special in some way. Even those of us who were ostensibly raised to be tolerant of other faiths can easily get wound up in a trap where we assume that Christianity generally speaking results in good things, therefore people who do bad things are just pretending to be Christians. Hence, we call them "Christians," using quotes to separate them from the "real" Christians.
This extends heavily to the way people talk about the Bible, with critiques of bigoted behavior often stemming from the assumption that the Bible is all about loving one another and being a good person. What's lost in this is that--like it or not--the Bible is in fact loaded with sexism, racism, homophobia, and the endorsement of scores of oppressive behavior.
And the insulting part is that this isn't arguable. Bibles are abundant. You can get them at any bookstore, you can order them for free, and you can even read the whole damn thing on the Internet in various versions and translations if you feel like it, and I have yet to read any convincing evidence that Christian bigots are actually wrong about what the Bible says. Instead, people assume that--because we raised to believe Christianity and the Bible are exceptional and special--it must automatically support our own beliefs in justice and right, and the fundamentalists must be wrong.
So we denounce as un-Christian beliefs that are obviously Christian, in order to avoid the messy business of ever having to be perceived as denouncing anything to do with Christianity.
And this is rampant. I mean, not too long ago professional transphobe, biphobe, and terrible sex columnist Dan Savage helped found a group called "Not All Like That," which exists specifically to tell queer people that not all Christians hate them without acknowledging either the privilege involved in being Christian in a Christian exceptionalist society or the immense amount of harm Christians as a collective community, not as individuals have done to queer people, trans people, women, and people of other faiths.
In addition to forcing non-Christians to tiptoe around the way we talk about Christianity and Christians to avoid hurting their fragile exceptionalist feelings, we also remove accountability from the Christian community in favor of focusing on a few bad apples who "aren't really Christians anyway."
In the West, this is something very specific to Christianity. When people talk about abuse and oppression within Islam, they don't typically put quotation marks around "Muslim" to make it clear they don't mean all Muslims. And when they put quotes around "Pagan" or "Witch," more often than not their motivation is to demean the existence of Paganism and Witchcraft rather than to specify that some oppressive Pagan jerk doesn't really represent all Pagans.
And unfortunately, this is something that spreads all throughout our language as well. In reference to Christianity, the word "God" is practically always capitalized, whether it's used as a title or not; this is a gesture of respect that is rarely used for polytheistic religions. It's considered perfectly acceptable to use Christian holidays as generic indicators of season and sentiment, and people fight at great length to make sure nobody ever suggests that a Christian should show a little respect and not say "Merry Christmas" or "God Bless You" to somebody whose religion is unknown to them. And any non-Christian of faith* can easily tell you that "nondenominational" and "multi-faith" in the context of a prayer before a town hall meeting or a meal at summer camp means "generically Jesus."
What we need to be doing--as Pagans, and perhaps as people who are not Pagans but may have stumbled on this blog for some other reason--is being mindful wherever possible of the ways our language releases the Christian community from accountability and the ways it systematically denies linguistic equity to non-Christian minority faiths.
* -- Many atheists would understand this, too, but I've found that a lot of atheists interpret Christian-specific terminology and practice as being "generally religious" rather than Christian exceptionalist.
