I’ve been thinking about something at my job—not difficult, honestly, my job leaves lots of thinking time—and I have something I want to share with the folks who object to the label “culturally Christian.” I hope it may help you make more sense of the label and, perhaps, not be so angry about it, if you’ll indulge me for just two minutes.
I was born as a white gentile. While I later found out this wasn’t entirely true—I have Jewish ancestry and there is a small-but-non-zero chance I’m partly Black through my great-grandmother, which is a story too long to get into here—I am, for all visual intents and purposes, white, and count myself as such.
And the first time I heard myself included in the phrase “white supremacy,” I WAS SO FUCKING UNCOMFORTABLE. Couldn’t we call it anything else? Why are you including me in this? I didn’t ask to be born white. I don’t run around in a pointy hood burning crosses. I’m not even racist. Black people can do anything white people can do! I am NOT a white supremacist!
….except. I kinda am. And it is not a choice I made, it is a choice that was made for me 400 and 160 and 120 and 80 and 50 and 35 years ago. Slavery and deliberately-botched emancipation and “separate but equal” and killing of Black leaders and the simple fact both my parents were white. Textbooks that hold up Eli Whitney as a hero and promote the lie of The Great Empty Wilderness and never ask us to wrestle with what it means when the majority of a population is counted as only three-fifths of a human being. Redlining and even the fucking freeway system—I didn’t design any of this, but I live in the world where it exists.
G-d willing, I will not be a white supremacist until the day I die: G-d willing, the systems we are struggling against will have been replaced with better, kinder, more equitable systems. But I don’t get to opt out by saying “I’m not racist!” Yes, I’ve put in a ton of work to unlearn harmful racist behaviors and attitudes. But as long as a Black woman in my position with my experience makes less money than me, I’m benefiting from white supremacy. As long as I get the job, the car, the loan, the opportunity because someone else had locs and I “looked professional,” I’m benefiting from white supremacy. And yes—as long as people aren’t deliberately stupid about my name because they associate it with white cultures, I’m benefiting from white supremacy. The fact I’m white is morally neutral. What I choose to do with that fact is what matters.
And so: we come back to cultural Christianity.
The law of probability says if you’re on this site, you’re probably from a culture with a Christian hegemony. That’s going to cover the Americas, Europe, and to a lesser extent, portions of central and south Africa (both the creatively-named country and the continent). Even if your country mostly considers itself secular, if your answer to “what year is it” is automatically “2024” without having to ask “on which calendar,” you’re probably from a country with a Christian background.
THIS IS A MORALLY NEUTRAL THING. You do not choose which country you’re born in or what its centuries-old culture is. And that’s fine! And it doesn’t mean anything about your personal beliefs. You can be an atheist born to atheists, you can be Buddhist, it is literally whatever.
BUT, to an extent, the place you grew up will absolutely have an impact on your thoughts and morals, because it’s all you’ve ever known. Because the choice to be culturally Christian is not one you made—it was made for you 2000 and 1800 and 1700 and 1200 and 1000 and 800 and 400 and 200 and 50 years ago. Taboos, laws, unspoken rules you’ve never thought twice about, this is not stuff you pick. It’s baked into the world around you. And if you want to unlearn that, you can’t just say “well I’m not Christian so I don’t have Christian morals or values!” and leave it at that. It’d be a beautiful thing if we could, but that’s not the way brains work.
Which means—even if you’re satisfied with what you believe—you should ASK YOURSELF why you believe it, and HOW. One of the biggest things I hear mentioned by other Jews in relation to cultural Christianity is people being black-and-white absolutists. This is true, so that is a lie. That is wrong, so this is right. There is no space given to the idea that maybe everyone is telling the truth as they see it, or that something is right for some times/people/places but wrong for others. And this gets into the harmful territory of “it’s true so I believe it and because I believe it, it’s true.”
So ask yourself why. Start deconstructing your beliefs and learning about new things—and yes, make world religions part of those new things, because religions are major cultural shapers, and also you’d be stunned how many of us 1) do not proselytize and 2) encourage actual study and questioning over blind faith and obedience (hint: it’s most of us. These two things that are taken as universal constants by a lot of atheists ARE EXPLICITLY CHRISTIAN), and there is no harm in learning about our cultures. (You know who’d say there is? Say it with me, kids: evangelical Christians.)
I’m still uncomfortable with being referred to in the context of white supremacy. But part of unlearning racism and, yes, white supremacy, was learning to recognize that is not a discussion I get to steer, because it’s not about me. It’s about people of color explaining, quantifying, and discussing their experiences. So I will be uncomfortable if need be, because that’s a me problem, for me to work on. That is part of what being a good ally and a good neighbor means.
Please give Jews that same grace. Yes, it can be uncomfortable to realize that yeah, you WERE affected by this thing you want to separate yourself from, especially if you have religious trauma. (Side note: if you do, I genuinely and strongly encourage you to seek therapy for it. As an evangelical cult escapee I can tell you it’s helped me a lot.) But you owe it to yourself, and if you genuinely want to dismantle that hegemony, you also owe it to others. While you’re yelling about how you don’t like the words we have created to describe our experiences, we’re working to fix the hegemony you claim to hate.
So: stop focusing on the word. Your discomfort with it is a you problem. Focus on WHAT IT’S TALKING ABOUT, because truly coming to a level playing ground and rebuilding will require you to have allies—not burned bridges all around.
