I realize this may be a tad out of your ambit, but from my research, Christianity has been responsible for a heck of a lot of the authoritarianism that has caused a lot of harm from conservative logic. How did this come about, and why doesn't it show up in (many) other religions? Or at least not as strongly?
so I’m gonna say something Controversial Yet Brave here: the problem isn’t Christianity, the problem is religious fundamentalism + the Roman Empire.
religious fundamentalism is what happens when you mix religion (value-neutral, not intrinsically a force for good or evil) with traditionalism, which…
if you’re playing along with your The Earl Longpost Bingo Card at home, this is the space marked ‘childhood trauma’! But Bret Devereaux’s series on Sparta got me thinking about this, so you get to hear the rant.
people who’ve been traumatized from a young age often only feel safe when they’re in conditions that are similar to the conditions that traumatized them. if you’re used to the world working a certain way, it can be jarring and even painful to discover that in most of the world, it doesn’t work like that. it’s like… if you were used to gravity being upside-down, so you walked on ceilings, and then suddenly it goes back to “normal” and you have to get used to walking on the floor.
I genuinely believe that most political traditionalism comes from people who were traumatized as children trying to force everyone else to live in the world where they feel safest. and unfortunately for all of us, the world where they feel safest is ‘a world where things work the way that they do when you’re a small child being mistreated by your parents’.
most self-described traditionalists want everyone to live by a set of rules laid down by a semi-divine, parental authority figure- whether that’s God, Lycurgus, Odin, or a modern guru. These rules are inherently full of contradictions and non sequiturs- no one can properly follow them, even if they want to.
But the consequences for not following them are as harsh as they are for not obeying an abusive parent, and applied just as arbitrarily. so you must perform the arbitrary and pointless tasks your authority tells you to perform, adore the authority upon command, and- of course- hate the people your authority figure tells you to hate, without question.
there is a reason why most forms of religious fundamentalism look more like each other than they look like the religion they’re based on. a religion based on giving to the poor and breaking down power structures becomes a religion about hoarding whatever you can and begging your authority figure not to smite you; a religion of peace becomes about striking down those your authority figure hates… because it’s not about the religion anymore; it’s about making the world feel safe for people who only feel safe when the world is arbitrary and cruel.
child abuse is, unfortunately, ubiquitous. there are traumatized people everywhere, because there are people who should not be parents everywhere. it’s not unique to the USA or to the Anglosphere or to the Christian world… and so neither is religious fundamentalism.
there are fundie Muslims. there are fundie Orthodox Jews, and fundie Hindus, and fundie Buddhists. from what I understand, there are fundie Confucians and fundie Shinto. there are definitely fundie pagans and atheists, though they’re unlikely to use the label because of its connotations.
the reason that it seems like Christianity is so much worse is that … well… Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. it just so happens that one of the ‘arbitrary rules’ that fundie Christianity tends to keep over its original incarnation is “go ye to all the world and tell them what happened here”… because it’s convenient for both the people who need the world to be trauma-safe and the people in power who need others to do what they say.
The Romans, and the empires that inherited their legacy and worldview, spread Christianity to every place they touched. between Rome, Byzantium, British/French/Spanish colonialism, and American hegemony… there are Christians everywhere, and in the Anglosphere, Christians are a majority.
and of course there’s a lot of factors that go into whether the fundie strain of a religion is the majority. but in general- fundies with the power to do so traumatize their children, creating a new generation of fundies, who seek more political power so that they can feel safe and traumatize their children because It’s The Rules, henceforth and forever. so a lot of the time there are at least a plurality of fundies in any religion, and…
you’re more likely to hear about Christians behaving badly if you live in, well, Christendom, because there are simply more Christians than anyone else. and when fundie Christians specifically are the majority… they have the power to make everyone else live in Trauma City.
I suspect that if the Roman Empire had embraced Mithraism as its primary religion, we’d be sitting here talking about whether Mithraism is uniquely terrible and likely to foster authoritarianism; if they’d stayed Dodekatheist we’d be arguing if worshiping Zeus or Ares was more likely to make you an authoritarian asshole, and if they’d somehow gone atheist, we’d be discussing whether believing in a god makes you less authoritarian.
Because it’s not about the specific religion; it’s about the political hegemony + the fundamentalism.
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