{"version": "1.0", "type": "rich", "title": "when I lived in New York I decided to see if I could pass myself off as a traditional but apolitical Christian despite knowing...", "author_name": "kontextmaschine", "author_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "provider_name": "kontextmaschine", "provider_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "url": "https://kontextmaschine.com/post/188852480353/", "html": "

norsecoyote:

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kontextmaschine:

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rustingbridges:

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ponteh2dhh1ksdiwesph2tres:

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balioc:

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ponteh2dhh1ksdiwesph2tres:

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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\u2019s surprisingly easy, at least in New York

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\u2026I would imagine so, given that your standard traditional-but-apolitical Christian also knows next to nothing about Christianity, especially in the US.

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Do they not? (Maybe if you don\u2019t count Protestantism as Christianity, or if you do count Unitarianism, but Bible study classes seem pretty common.)

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I mean I wouldn\u2019t know any more about christianity if I hadn\u2019t 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.

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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\u2019s spinal pain

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And she gave him like a Baby\u2019s First Evangelism guide to what they were doing and honestly this was what he hung up on, \u201cdoes she think I don\u2019t know who Jesus was?\u201d

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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

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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\u2019s biblical commentary, and a week after a TA pulled me aside after class and gently asked if I was a Christian

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I wasn\u2019t and I don\u2019t 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\u2019t 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\u2019t 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

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I teach a philosophy class to high school seniors in a fairly affluent Silicon Valley suburb, which means that my students are like \u00bd Indian and 1/3 Chinese but almost all grown up in modern American West Coast culture.

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A few weeks ago, most of the way through our unit on the Divine Arguments, one class ground to an absolute screeching halt\u00a0because I referred offhandedly to Jesus being God, and it turned out that the vast majority of the class had never heard this before.

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Like they knew of\u00a0Jesus, that he was the son\u00a0of God, sure, but I had 17- and 18-year old students genuinely saying that their minds had just been blown by this revelatory information.

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I don\u2019t know what the moral of this story is.

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