If you’re trying to unpack and heal from Christian religious trauma, a thing you really need to understand (if you don’t already) is that you were probably misled about Judaism a lot. Christianity generally tries to paint itself as the self-evident successor of Judaism, and one of the ways it does this is by painting Judaism as Christianity Without Jesus.
In reality, Judaism is practiced very differently from Christianity, and Jews have a very different relationship to their Bible than Christians have to theirs. Just about everything you’ll hear about Judaism from Christians is total hogwash - literally, it’s Christian propaganda. Christianity as most of us know it was shaped by the Roman Empire’s political agendas, and that’s a huge reason why it’s the way it is.
Not just the Roman Empire’s political agendas, but also the Roman Empire’s religious structure.
There was a secretive Roman cult where the followers ritualistically consumed the blood of the god in the form of wine.
Am I referring to Christianity or the Cult of Dionysius?
There was a Roman religious cult where the primary theological belief structure is that there is a god of light and good in an eternal conflict for the fate of the world with a god of darkness and evil.
Am I referring to Christianity or Zoroastrianism, in its form of Mithraism?
There was a Roman-era religious cult where the main worshipped god was murdered and brought back to life, and it is through this god that his followers can achieve eternal life, but non-believers will be judged and punished.
Am I referring to Christianity or Serapis (Hellenized Osiris)?
The point is that a massive amount of theology and religious ritual practice in Christianity is not derived from Judaism, but from cross-pollination from other sources, brought in by Roman converts in the early decades and centuries.
This, and the Ishtar/Eoster/Easter discussion reminded me of something I want to talk about, and that is how Roman religious syncretism worked, and how it still works, as something baked into almost every branch of Christianity.
So Christianity has this story it tells itself about its origins and way it works that goes like this: all of the good parts of Christianity come from Jesus, who is the bestest most compassionate boy, and all the bad parts of Christianity, whatever an individual Christian might decide those bad parts are, come from Judaism. Those bad parts are the result of failing to properly follow Jesus’s teaching, and to prune away bad Jewish ideas. If you’ve heard anyone talk about the cruel Old Testament God, or about how Jesus was like so Progressive compared to those Pharisees, these are manifestations of those ideas.
Of course none of this is true, Christianity and Judaism, while both are flawed, those flaws tend to be very different, and very very few of Christianity’s flaws have their roots in Judaism. But what this does is, as you might guess, fuel antisemitism, and also what it does, is become an assumption that can easily remain in a person’s bloodstream, after they have stopped being Christian, or get into their bloodstream if they’ve never been Christian, but had lots of contact with Christianity.
And this is how you get neo-pagans, wiccans, and even people from extant, contiguous, polytheistic cultures, who will say things like, “those ancient Israelites are responsible for Christianity’s burning need to convert everybody, and destroy all other religious cultures”. Or more subtly they might say that this is the fault of monotheism. The idea here is that in the halcyon days of the pagan world, nobody cared what you believed or worshiped, or was trying to force anyone else to believe or worship anything, because gods were permeable and worshiping one god did not mean that you did not worship another. This absolutely not true; conquering people’s frequently tried to impose the worship of their gods over the conquered, stamp out local traditions, or co-opt the gods of the people they’ve conquered. The Persian Empire was pretty famous for not doing this kind of thing, in contrast to most other empires of the time, and meanwhile the Jewish people are not a universalist religion, don’t care what non-Jews do as far as religion and worship, and don’t seek converts.
But the idea that monotheism and the intolerance of those ancient Israelites is what caused Christianity to become the juggernaut of cultural destruction that it would eventually become, is really common, and really annoying, so it behooves us to examine where this tendency in Christianity actually came from. And the answer is the Roman Empire.
As @athingofvikings rightfully points out, Christianity shares a lot of its DNA not with Judaism, but with the Roman religious system, and at its most basic level, it’s a creature of Roman syncretism. The Roman Empire really liked its syncretism. The Romans famously syncretized their gods with the Greeks so hard that we refer to it as the Greco-Roman pantheon, and the Latin and Greek names for those gods are frequently used interchangeably in the Western world. And to be fair to the Romans, Roman syncretism probably developed as a means to deal with the fact that as the Roman culture was getting its feet under it, the dominant player in the region was in fact first Classical Greek city-states, and then the Hellenistic states.
But anyway, the Roman Empire really had two ways of aproaching the religions of the newly conquered, or really any of the religions that they came into contact with. The first is the one that said, “hey, you have a cool god or goddess, who is new to us, and we want in on this, so we’re going to take this god or goddess back with us and worship him in Rome now, and anyone else in the Empire who wants to worship them too totally can”. This is the kind of syncretism that people who want to claim that the pre-Christian polytheistic world was a haven of religious tolerance, like to talk about. But Rome had another kind of religious syncretism that they were also big on, and this was the kind that said, hey we see that you are worshiping your god, and that god is really our god, but you’re worshiping him under the wrong name, and with the wrong rituals, and if you’ve been worshiping him under the right rituals you wouldn’t have lost to us, so now that we have conquered you, we are going to teach you better, whether you like it or not.
If that sounds familiar, yeah, we’ll get there.
As long as Rome stayed in the Mediterranean and Black Sea basins, this worked out pretty well for them, because almost all the people they encountered had already either had extensive contact with the powerful Hellenistic states, or were part of a Hellenistic state, meaning that just about everybody that the Romans conquered for the early part of their empire, was to an extent, Hellenized. Which means, they were either already worshiping the Greek gods, or they had already synchronized many of their local deities with various Greek gods, so they already had practice worshiping their gods alongside Greek gods, and adding Roman names was basically Plug and Play. and it wasn’t that hard to add the deified emperors, and the divine embodiment of Rome to the register of deities being venerated. This got more dicey after Romans ran out of Mediterranean and Black Sea Basin territory to conquer, but Rome still stuck to this pattern and did mostly okay.
Except there was this one people, on the Eastern Mediterranean coast, right in the Greek Hellenized stomping ground, who were absolutely not down with Roman syncretism or their state religion. This isn’t a surprise, since they also weren’t down for the Hellenistic version of the same process. In fact, attempts to force the worship of the Greek pantheon onto them, led to a revolution, which you might know is the Maccabean revolt, in which the Judeans kicked out the Seleucid Greeks, founded their own Hashmonian dynasty, and ruled as a non Hellenized state, firmly asserting their own religious and cultural identity as what we now call Jews.
But then, the Romans exploited a succession dispute in Judea’s ruling dynasty to get all invadey, which caused the Jews to get all revolty, but sadly this did not work as well as it did against the Seleucids, and in spite of multiple revolts, Judea remained firmly conquered. But this whole experience gave the Romans time to do their whole “hey let’s all get syncratic with your gods and our gods” shtick, only for the Jews to give them a resounding no, and a “how about you shove your Greek pantheon and your deified emperors right up your asses”.
The Romans did not react well to that, but since the Jews had made it very clear that this was a hill they were willing to die on, and the Romans really weren’t, it was a lot more trouble than it was worth to try to force the issue. But this sure as heck didn’t make the Romans like the Jews, whose repeated revolts were extremely expensive, and their refusal to get on board with a Roman state religion, and insistence on maintaining their own separate religious identity, was really weird and creepy as far as the Romans were concerned and also they did this thing where they mutilated their penises.
Meanwhile, The popular cult of the Goddess Cybele, whose worship really took off in Rome, involved her priests ritually castrating themselves, which really brings home the fact that it was not actually about circumcision for the Romans.
But anyway, the Romans really did not like the fact that the Jews would not get all syncretic with them, and join the Roman State religion, and while they were putting down revolts, sacking the temple, killing this one kind of kooky preacher name Jesus, exiling us, and renaming our province after our traditional enemies, they also occasionally got all persecutey on religious grounds, about that whole refusing to worship the deified emperors thing.
Meanwhile, this little offshoot of Judaism, worshiping that kooky preacher, separated itself out from its Jewish origins, and started making its way into the Roman cultic marketplace. It had a major disadvantage, in that to be a devotee of Jesus, a prospective convert would have to foreswear worshiping all other gods. While for the most part, Romans didn’t expect everyone in the Empire to worship every god who was part of the pantheon, as previously established, they really didn’t like it when people foreswore worshiping the deified emperors, and participating in specific aspects of the Roman state religion that they believed insured Roman prosperity and continued military victory. Belonging to a specific cult dedicated to a specific god or group of gods, and spending most of your spiritual energy involved in worshiping as part of that cult, was all well and good, so long as you also did your bit engaging in the rituals of the Roman state religion. So periodically, the Romans also got all persecutey towards the Christians.
But unlike the Jews, the Christians were not adverse to new people picking up their god and worshiping him. While it was really difficult to convert to Judaism, and there were really stringent standards, the same was not true of Christianity, which welcomed converts, and so gathered a group of religious seekers, many of whom had previously belonged to other Roman cults, and they brought aspects of those cults into Christianity. In short, Christianity was becoming syncretic. if Christians wouldn’t worship Dionysus, they would give Jesus some of his aspects. if they wouldn’t worship Isis Osiris and Horus, ideas from the Isis Osirus Horus cult would get folded into the Christian holy family. If Christians couldn’t worship Mithras, they would bring Mithraec elements into their cosmology. If Christians couldn’t also belong to an Orphic cult, Jesus would start to take onsome very Orphic aspects.
So at this point, Christianity is one Roman cult among many, and it probably would have either stayed that way, or eventually fizzled out, if it weren’t for this guy named Constantine. a few years before, emperor Diocletian split the Roman empire into two, and then into two again, with each half being ruled by a senior Emperor called an Augustus, and then each Augustus having a junior Emperor called a Caesar, who ruled half of their empire. this was supposed to make it so that there was less for each Emperor to rule, and each Emperor could be more flexible, and try out new things, and then the best things could be spread to the entire empire, and also each Caesar and Augustus would be able to respond to military threats more easily, because they were four of them. But really of course what it did was make for lots of Civil Wars. But anyway, Constantine was the son of one of the Caesars, the junior emperors, and he wanted to rule the whole empire. strictly speaking, he was not entitled to become a Caesar just because his father was a Caesar, because Caesars were appointed by their Augustus, but he had an army, and he knew what to do with it. And right before his final victory over his last opponent, he made a fateful decision, to march under the sign of the Christian god.
It is unclear in retrospect how much he hedged his bets, and tried to play it so that he was marching under the sign both of the Christian god, and of Sol Invictus the unconquered sun. But either way, he at least made it so that praying to the Christian god would count as the same as participating in the traditional Roman state religion, and would eventually flat out replace the former Roman state religion with Christianity.
And once Christianity was the Roman state religion, it started acting like the Roman state religion. It had already started getting really comfortable taking on the elements of other religions, and now that the Church had institutional power, it was thrilled to go around doing that whole “we see you are worshiping the wrong way, with the wrong name for your god. we’re going to teach you better at the point of a sword” thing that Roman state religion liked so much. It started looking a lot like, “you can keep venerating Brigit, but she’s a saint now, not a goddess, and belongs to the whole Church”, or “You can keep worshiping Isis/Cybele/Pacha Mama, but now you have to call her the Virgin Mary”.
Meanwhile, the Jews were still kicking around, and the Romans, now calling themselves the Christians, went, “Hey, Jews, we made a syncretic version of your religion, will you join us now? Huh, huh, huh?” And the Jews were like, “No Roman State religion, we still don’t want to date you. Also that thing you’re doing, isn’t Judaism, and it’s really weird, and keep it far away from us.” And the Christians were like, “Yeah well you’re mean, and ugly and you smell bad.” Seriously, those are all actual antisemitic canards, and every time I hear them, I can’t help but think wow, you guys really cannot get over the fact that we wouldn’t go to prom with you. But anyway, the Christians had a very measured response to this refusal by the Jews, and by measured response, I mean over a millennia and a half of brutal antisemitism. Which was a continuation of several hundred years of Roman antisemitism.
And this is why Christianity is the borg, and also (one of the reasons it’s) really weird about the Jews. And when people blame the Jews for Christianity being the borg, it really feels a lot like the Romans mugged us and stole our clothes, and then ran around mugging other people while wearing our clothes, only for the victims to look at those clothes and go, “I have been mugged by the Jews,” meanwhile the Jews are standing here in our underwear going, “We were mugged too! What are you talking about?”
Reminder: trans Muslims and gay Muslims exist and we’re not going anywhere.
The amount of support that this post has gotten is, quite honestly, incredible. LGBT Muslims are constantly forgotten and ignored because people from both the LGBT community and the Muslim community view our existence as a contradiction or an impossibility. It’s time that people acknowledge us and our experiences with islamophobia and homophobia/transphobia because like I said: we’re not going anywhere.
people want doing the right thing to be like pulling the correct lever at the correct time but actually usually doing the right thing is more like holding a moderate weight at arm’s length continuously for seventeen years
I was working on sizing for the Pride Angels and thought I’d share the progress with you all. This shows Pride Angels I’ve redesigned so far, and the ones I have left to work on. If you’re looking for your flag, you can find the list here.
A few of these have been rotated to ensure the pin will be as big as possible in the limited size. I might make a few of these bigger than the others to capture all the detail.
Once I have all the first draft sketches done, I’ll work on refining and completing the designs.
Got an angel you’re excited for? Let me know in the replies!
Kai /kʰeɪ/ - pick a pronoun, any pronoun - this is my personal blog where I put stuff that interests me - 日本語で聞いてもいい - auf deutsch auch ok - as Gaeilge... I'll do my best 😅 -
ALT
