So I covered much of what I wanted to say in the article immediately prior to this one, but I wanna discuss the premise that is being discussed here. Video for reference, let's get started.
So...yeah. This has been something I've been slowly realizing itself. but seeing it as stark as I'm seeing it here is a bit shocking. Like...I was a Christian nationalist back in the 2000s. I went to a fundamentalist Christian school, and they did mission trips to like Africa, Asia, Oceania, etc, trying to convert people there. I never got any racist vibes from it at the time. I mean, most seemed interested in just...spreading the word of Jesus to the ends of the earth, believing that all would need to know about Christianity before the end times could begin.
But...let's face it, when I left the faith, I very quickly started putting some of the pieces together. Religion is the opium of the masses. The wealthy and powerful use it to dumb people down and to act as a sort of "matrix" or "plato's cave" to keep people subservient to them. Religion and its worldview messes with peoples' perceptions of things. It has these old and antiquated answers for why bad things happen to good people, and why suffering exists in the first place. And rather than address the real root causes of problems head on, it keeps people in a circle at sunday school acting like this is all some grand divine mystery and god knows all the answers, when, in reality, no, the causes of poverty and suffering are often mundane, and a lot more human oriented. And when we start ignoring those things, we kinda realize that we can just...solve a lot of problems that would otherwise be givens.
Heck, in my early days as an ex-Christian, I thought that the big problem was ignorance. And that the wealthy controlling everything with religion was just a current thing. I didn't realize how deep these attitudes went and how racist they were, etc. I thought that the problem was just a lack of knowledge, that the median person wasnt that smart, and yeah, some bad actors wanted to use that stuff to their advantage, but that a lot of people were well meaning, and that with people leaving religion, we can begin improving society. Like i looked at it like the enlightenment. Yeah, it made us realize there are scientific reasons for things like disease. That plagues werent afflictions from god, but caused by microbes, which spread in part because of the unsanitary conditions at the time. So instead of seeing like the black plague as something from god, we realize it came from a rat problem and that we need to control the rat population to solve the problem. Like this crap seems common sense for us today (although we're losing that in the days of RFK Jr being our health secretary), but it really was a big deal. And I thought a lot of social problems were like this. We've only realized how screwed up things are relatively recently, and sometimes progress is slow because people are stupid. It wasn't until later I realized these systems were literally DESIGNED to basically enslave us.
And they are. As I dug into history, primarily to provide an account for how we got from the state of nature to where we are, it seems pretty obvious that since we've settled down and formed "civilization" as we know it, wealthy and powerful interests have used things like religion to enslave and subjugate the masses.
And a lot of the modern iteration of this from 1500 onward is explicitly racist. There was this idea of cultural superiority among whites, and the need to go out and "civilize" the world, basically by imposing colonialism and later capitalism on them. They need to be taught the "right" way of doing things. Otherwise, they're "savage", we need to "civilize" them, and Christianity was often a tool used to domesticate these people and make them accepting of their servitude. The most successful evil empires in history dont succeed through raw force, they convince the populace that their enslavement is a good thing. And thats what religion does. It makes people submissive and subservient to authority, it dumbs them down, and as the decades and centuries progress, people only realize the world they live in now and believe it came from a fallen state. Christianity offers this huge "plato's cave" or "matrix" style worldview to convince people that their enslavement is a good thing.
Evangelism in the modern era DOES have colonialist aspirations in it. It's the belief that their "western culture" (keep in mind, the bad, unenlightened version) is superior and that the masses of the world need to learn it for their own good. It's the idea that other peoples and cultures are inferior.
I dont doubt, in some cases, that this could be a thing. I think as progressives, we walk a tightrope on that subject. Go too far in one direction, and you're a sneering imperialist, to make a new vegas reference, go a bit too far in the other and you're just defending barbarism. SOMETIMES native cultures are violent and barbarous. I dont doubt that. Sometimes people do develop cultures with horrible cultural practices like, say, child rape, that shouldnt be acceptable. I'm not gonna defend obviously crude and barbarous practiced by natives. But....at the same time, I'm also not going to say that "western culture" is all that enlightened, especially when those who scream loudest about it are often representing the most barbarous aspects of it. Like on the child rape thing, look at who was in the epstein files, look at who just voted against banning child marriage in Oklahoma, for example. "Muh culture", F U, republicans, F U.
And that's the thing. We're not that enlightened either. And often times, and this is where Im very critical of the modern right, but they end up being just as barbarous as the people they criticize a lot of the time. Like take Israel again. When Hamas committed October 7th, I agreed, yeah, this is uncivilized bullcrap that shouldnt fly, and Israel seems more reasonable and civilized. 2.5 years later, here we are, with me condemning Israel for committing a genocide and grossly influencing US politics in a bad faith way. Did MY values change? Did my perception of "western culture" change? No, I've been consistent. What changed was the fact that Israel is flat out betraying that culture and being barbarous themselves. I just believe some accountability should be held there.
The same goes with MAGA in the US. We love to act like our western culture is so great. Freedom. Democracy. Rule of law. Constitutional rights. Well....MAGA wants to destroy all that to defend THEIR version of "western culture" which is...fundamentalist religion and the protestant work ethic, which just serve to enslave us to the wealthy and powerful. And that's the thing. When I talk western culture and civilized and uncivilized, I dont have this inherent "western countries good, white people good, christianity good" mindset these guys have. Im quite a critic of the west in some ways, not because i wanna destroy it, but because I wanna improve it and make it NOT suck. And on topics like racism, wage slavery, and religious authoritarianism, I flat out condemn that stuff as "uncivilized." What makes us better is those values. Without those values, what are you left with? Just rank tribalism and authoritarianism. But that's the hill MAGA and the right wanna die on. Destroy the good aspects of western culture, the actual high minded ideals that actually DO make us better, and replace them with....the same regressive crap that does the opposite.
Same with slavery. For the amount of white southern Americans who act like the confederacy is "their culture", what are you defending? The institution of slavery? I mean, the south has some nice cultural elements sometimes. Southern hospitality, good food, architecture and music unique to the area, but no, they're not out there defending their country music or right to have BBQ, they're going all in with slavery. No. Those parts of our culture can die out for all I care. It's better that they do.
But that kinda brings us back to GMS's point. Christianity is part of this underlying capitalist megastructure. The megastructure was designed to enslave the world to a handful of people who hold all of the wealth. Christianity is just part of it. Racism is another. People used the racial hierarchy to keep blacks and whites divided and fighting amongst themselves so that the system would chug on unexpected.
And this is one of the reasons why I despise the democrats today. Sure, the republicans are the party of white supremacy either implicitly or explicitly (it was more implicit during the 6th party system), but the idpol of the left is just...the opposite of that. But we saw how it was executed by centrist democrats to defang the Bernie movement. They literally did all the "OMG T3H BLACK VOTE" stuff to do that. It was by design. They used identity politics, to keep us fighting amongst ourselves. Which is why it's taken me so long to adjust to the new reality in the 2020s where open racism is a thing again that we gotta deal with. Because I honestly didnt wanna have to open up that can of worms. It's not helpful, it's divisive. But honestly, that can of worms being opened has exposed deeper rot in our society where now it seems like all of those GOOD aspects of western culture seem to just be pretenses that the power people dont actually care about and now we got a fascist movement on our hands that wants to throw away the good parts that I and any reasonable people should agree with...to defend the bad parts that should be eliminated.
Again, what do you get with "western values" if you throw away all the high minded stuff about freedom and democracy? You're left with rank authoritarianism and slavery, the exact opposite of that. But that seems to be the part of the culture that the power people really care about. Because they're just like the nobles of old, we've just been living under the pretense that our society is more complex than that and that any leftover elements of that are just strange holdovers of bygone generations? But no, it seems like that stuff is just the main feature, and all the pretenses dont really matter.
With me, since I left christianity, I went in the opposite direction, where those values ARE what matters, while the more regressive elements should be done away with. Keep in mind, I'm not a revolutionary. I'm a reformist. I look at where we are, and I'm like "let's keep the good and get rid of the bad", the far right is like "let's get rid of the good and keep the bad." All while acting like they have ownership over the idea.
Racism is bad. Imperialism is bad. Slavery is bad. I think we gotta take a good look at ourselves and think "are we the baddies" right now? Because to some degree we are. Put another way. Christians have a saying "what would Jesus do?" I think, when it comes to looking at the bad, we ask "what would hitler do?" And then we do the EXACT OPPOSITE. Because we can all agree with THAT at least? i thought thats what we thought, post 1945, that hitler was the epitome of all that was evil and we should strive to be the opposite, right? Like authoritarianism bad. Racism bad. Genocide bad. Slavery bad. Those are supposed to be BAD things, right? So why does the modern right look more and more like fascists, if not outright nazis? What the frick is wrong with these people?
Really. We're at a point in our history, where we're gonna have to take a hard look at ourselves, and either go in the good direction or the bad direction. Sadly, because most of society is run by the wealthy and powerful, and they hold all the cards, we're going in the bad direction and descending into fascism. The good is being stamped out. We're being ignored, thrown to the side. Hell, they might even throw those of us who are too educated to believe in their nonsense in camps one day. I literally wouldnt doubt that, given what trump is trying to build here in the good old US of A.
But yeah. I appreciate the work GMS is doing and it's very good and thought provoking stuff. I just wanted to highlight it and give my own concurring opinion.
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