A lot of people hate to hear this, but they in particular really need to understand it.
If you were raised in the US, and you weren't specifically raised as a specific religion other than Christianity, then you are culturally Christian. Yes, even if you were raised atheist. Yes, I know you hate that idea. People who were raised in specific other religions in the US are usually still influenced by it, just not as thoroughly.
But specific Protestant values and attitudes have worked their way so far into US culture that we do not ever think about. (They've gotten into US Catholicism, too, Catholics elsewhere are frequently WTF at US Catholics, or so I'm told.) The "Protestant work ethic" is one of them, that "manager in your head" you should kill. Purity as a principle. The nobility of suffering (very Calvinist specifically). The prosperity culture (again, very Calvinist). A whole list. I'm honestly not good enough at Christian history to list it all. After all, I wasn't raised Christian myself. But I can see and acknowledge that I was raised in a culture with a Christian hegemony. If I pay attention, I can see where it's affected how I think. And when I do pay attention and look at it, I can change it. I can root out those patterns in my head. It's a lot of work, but it's well worth doing.
Denying that you are culturally Christian on the basis of your absence of Christian upbringing, or absence of Christianity now, just shows that you don't understand what cultural Christianity is. It is the culture that you have marinated in all your life, if you grew up in the US. The same way you've marinated in racism, classism, sexism, right on down the line (and generally they are all one thing). All of that affects you, and the only way to fix it is to acknowledge it and work on it.
This isn't a "hot take". It's just a fucking fact.
I'm posting at 10:30pm US Pacific time on a Sunday night, and fucking nobody is going to see this. Or reblog it. But I feel better having said it.
