The "True Christians" Fallacy and Exceptionalist Language

There's a video going around that I am not going to watch because it sounds deplorable and as a queer man with mostly queer friends I am already aware of what coming out can entail in a supremely unfriendly family.  If you want to watch it, though, there's an article about it on The Advocate.  I'm not going to be talking about coming out, or really anything explicitly clear at all.  Instead I'm going to talk about Christian exceptionalism and how it relates to the way this article's title has been formed:

'Christian' Family's Terrifying Response to Son Coming Out

What 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.

The Telling Silence on Ferguson from White Pagans and ATR Practitioners

Last year I went to a Pagan Pride Day event where a friend of mine and a future friend were facilitating a discussion on social issues in the Pagan community.  One of the subjects that was dwelled on by the participants was the suggestion that white Pagans need to improve our record on race issues.  The discussion basically went downhill right from the start, with the majority-white audience consistently falling back on the idea that if we just stop acknowledging race it'll go away, so we need to "be the movement" as it were and stop talking about race.

At the same time, Pagans--especially Eclectic Pagans, but also Pagans practicing religions heavily inspired by the ancestral cultures of people of color--often have the mentality that all spiritual knowledge and art is necessarily fair game for us, with many Pagans identifying as being inspired at least in partly by Native American spiritualities.

I was thinking about this as the events in Ferguson unfolded, beginning with the murder of unarmed black teen Michael Brown, the unwillingness of any law enforcement body to arrest and charge Darren Wilson for his crime, and the extreme breaches of human rights associated with the police response to protests of the murder.  I was thinking about it because I noticed that literally none of the organizations and groups I at the time followed that were run by white people and focused on African spiritual or magickal wisdom said anything about Ferguson.

I looked.  I waited.  I saw post after post of white people talking about Vodoun and Hoodoo and Santería, and not one bothered to even mention the horrendous racist abuses taking place.

I want you to think about this whenever you scoff at peoples' accusations of cultural appropriation.  People practicing religious and magickal systems developed and maintained, either in Africa or by black people in the Americas, with traditions often steeped in an understanding of a history of slavery and intense racism, and they all went about their business, preferring instead to chatter on about what new kits they're selling to a predominantly white fanbase instead.

Because when people get angry about cultural appropriation, this is the sort of thing that really encapsulates the problem.

White people--including white Pagans--are great at saying things like "race doesn't matter, so we should be ignoring race entirely."  This provides a convenient excuse for white Pagans to take inspiration from Native religions, or from Hoodoo, or from Vodoun, or from Asian religions, all under the assumption that because race is a social construction race does not matter.

The simple fact of the matter, though, is that when we ignore race, it's more accurate to say we are ignoring racism.

Because it just doesn't matter whether or not you as an individual are tolerant of all ethnicities, whether or not you as an individual would shoot an unarmed black man or you as an individual would take a Native child away from their family to place in a white household.  These are things that continue to happen today.  You can't ignore this away.  You have to take action.

And if you aren't willing to take action, then you have absolutely no rightful business even beginning to demand access to those peoples' spiritual knowledge and belief, let alone profit from them.

Illusions of Ecology in the Pagan Community

"Obviously I'm an environmentalist, I worship nature!"

This is the gist of the mentality I have typically associated with my Pagan friends.  It's not that they don't care, mind you.  It's that--and this is not unique to Pagans--it's very easy to get wrapped up in the mentality of eco-friendliness without really acting on or even understanding where we are impacting the planet the most and how to combat that.

Just for starter's, I'm going to list a bunch of traits that are commonly found or promoted among Pagans.  Stay with me, here:

• Nature worship.
• Worshiping outdoors.
• Love of being outside/camping.
• Worship of nature-oriented Deities.
• Honoring of the changing of the seasons.

These are all well and good, but here's the problem:  Not one of these actually makes a person environmentally-friendly.

I read an article recently that in a nutshell argued that Pagan environmentalism is going downhill because the consciousness we had decades ago is degrading in favor of consumerism and narcissistic use of technology, especially the tendency to have too much of our Pagan organizing be online rather than out in nature.  There's definitely something to be said about the consumerism in the Pagan community (and I guarantee I'll talk about that a lot here), but it's a huge mistake to assume that going outside more, worshiping Gaia, being naked outside, and camping a lot make somebody an environmentalist.  In fact, I'd argue that these actions make it very easy to be complacent about major environmental issues because we assume that we aren't part of the problem.

I went to Pagan Spirit Gathering last year, and in retrospect it was a very crushing reminder for me just how complacent I had gotten with the entire subject of the environment.  This gathering is over 175 miles away from me, and at the time my only vehicle was a beat up Dodge truck that got 15 miles a gallon on a good day, which I drove there alone for almost three hours each way.  The entire trip for me used well over 20 gallons of gasoline, and this sort of drive (and longer) was not an uncommon situation for festival-goers.  But hey, most of them did stay the whole week and did not come alone.

While there, I witnessed many people doing the communing-with-nature thing and doing some reasonably eco-friendly things.  There were a lot of vegetarians, many had brought organic snacks, there were people constantly reminding each other to use recycling bins, there was even a woman who collected rainwater for personal use.

And you know what?  It was a fucking mess.  Really, it was.  The constant reminders to recycle led to so many people confusedly mixing too much non-recyclable stuff in the recycle bins, there was trash everywhere, there was loads of food waste from people trying to take too much fresh food for the length of their stay, and the dumpsters at the end were filled to the brim with perfectly usable camping supplies that people just hadn't bothered to bring along: tents that were decided to be too difficult to fold, chairs with minor scuffs on them, and so forth.

This led to a meeting-of-shame on the last day, with a few people lecturing the participants, some of whom were tearing up in the audience because as Pagans we want to have a deep respect for the Earth.  The recognition that you are not being as environmentally friendly as you think you are is seriously painful.

The problem is that crying over already-completed environmental devastation does nothing in and of itself.  It reminds me of people who pray over already-purchased scratch-off tickets.  OK, it might galvanize some individuals, but keep in mind that this event took place in 2013, and from what I hear things haven't markedly improved since then.

And no, the Internet didn't do that.  In fact, it's probably always been that way.  It's ridiculously easy to completely ignore very obvious sources of environmental impact just by performing a few surface actions, maybe even ones that aren't that eco-friendly anyway (again, and I hate to have to drill it in so much, but just "being in nature" is not environmentally friendly).  So we might promote recycling or buy organic vegetables but then ignore things like how much and what kind of meat we eat, how much we drive, and how much energy we expend promoting environment-preserving legislation.

The point here isn't that Pagans are environmentally unfriendly pond scum, but that we have just as long to go as everyone else and have no business hiding behind Gaia and Green Man as if these are inoculations against environmental criticism.