when I lived in New York I decided to see if I could pass myself off as a traditional but apolitical Christian despite knowing...
when I lived in New York I decided to see if I could pass myself off as a traditional but apolitical Christian despite knowing next to nothing about Christianity, and it’s surprisingly easy, at least in New York
…I would imagine so, given that your standard traditional-but-apolitical Christian also knows next to nothing about Christianity, especially in the US.
Do they not? (Maybe if you don’t count Protestantism as Christianity, or if you do count Unitarianism, but Bible study classes seem pretty common.)
I mean I wouldn’t know any more about christianity if I hadn’t decided to be an atheist. I went to sunday school when I was a little kid but not as a medium kid. I went to church roughly 2x per year as a christian, so.
In my freshman dorm a hallmate heard weird sounds next door and it turned out to be our RA and her bible study group trying to cast out demons of someone’s spinal pain
And she gave him like a Baby’s First Evangelism guide to what they were doing and honestly this was what he hung up on, “does she think I don’t know who Jesus was?”
She probably came from a kinda bubbled missionary tradition and he was Asian maybe, tho on an Ivy League campus it was the Asians most likely to have a Christian identity
Also I took a history of American Protestantism course and in doing one take-home exam question interpreting a sermon on slavery I cited Matthew Henry’s biblical commentary, and a week after a TA pulled me aside after class and gently asked if I was a Christian
I wasn’t and I don’t know if she was but she made clear that as someone who engaged with American Christianity at a postgrad level she was astounded by the share of students in the class who were but didn’t know shit about it, who had a strong identity that was scripturally ignorant Real Mericanism that was even Americanally sophomoric, that a lot of the responses hadn’t even noticed the biblical references and tried to bullshit it as connecting to a Black uplift tradition that happened decades after the sermon and regularly confused Booker T. Washington with W.E.B. DuBois
I teach a philosophy class to high school seniors in a fairly affluent Silicon Valley suburb, which means that my students are like ½ Indian and 1/3 Chinese but almost all grown up in modern American West Coast culture.
A few weeks ago, most of the way through our unit on the Divine Arguments, one class ground to an absolute screeching halt because I referred offhandedly to Jesus being God, and it turned out that the vast majority of the class had never heard this before.
Like they knew of Jesus, that he was the son of God, sure, but I had 17- and 18-year old students genuinely saying that their minds had just been blown by this revelatory information.
I don’t know what the moral of this story is.