We live in a world where as long as religion has existed, people in power have sought to control religion to use it as a method of oppression and control. Religion itself is not the cause, but its misuse is. In no religion is this more true than in Christianity, a religion tailor-made to oppress and control.
Particularly in America, but also elsewhere in the world, it’s impossible to avoid Christian culture. Even people who are raised in essentially secular households in the US are still bombarded with the “Protestant Work Ethic” and other Christian and primarily protestant ideologies. The US was founded primarily by Puritans, and Puritanical ideologies are baked into American culture.
Jesus wasn’t Christian. His followers were not Christian. They were heretical radical Jewish communists.
Christianity was a small but growing cult built by the followers of the followers, until the Roman Empire saw its potential. They took the religion and completely rewrote it. The Bible was quite literally written by the Roman Empire. They started with existing Christian and Jewish texts, chose which ones to include based on how useful their message would be to the empire, and edited them to fit their agenda.
Rome intentionally worked into the text methods to control people, and then they pushed it back on existing Christians. They made it mandatory that everyone at least pay lip service to the religion they created, and suppressed the forms of Christianity which were more in keeping with the actual teachings of Jesus Christ. That original religion of following Christ no longer exists. Like Hellenismos, modern progressive pastors try to reconstruct it in various ways, but like Hellenismos, it’s a dead religion.
The religion they made heavily emphasizes guilt, obedience, and the patriarchy. It demonizes the Other because the Other is a threat to the established order. It forces conformity and encourages people to punish anyone who resists. The only acceptable person is one who obeys without question and dedicate their entire life to whatever exploitative activity the people in power have set for them.
This oppressive culture is so ubiquitous in our society that many people who break free from it equate these oppressive ideas with the concept of religion itself. When most people criticize “religion” what they actually mean is “Christianity.” Because Christianity is the only religion most have ever experienced, and they simply don’t know that these ideas aren’t intrinsic to religion, and they’ve been taught their entire lives to hate without thinking.
Often, when these people leave Christianity, they don’t actually leave behind the habits Christianity instilled in them. So even while they preach openness and compassion, they’re still just as judgmental and unthinking as they were told to be. They just (sometimes) change who they hate.
That’s the core of the anti-theistic movement that erroneously calls itself atheism, in spite of being quite different from genuine atheism. It’s also the core of the gender essentialism in the Wiccan community. And it’s the core of the subculture of witches who violently reject the concept of religion as a whole. Each of whom just perpetuate their own brand of oppression and abuse.
Where atheists keep an opened mind and simply don’t believe in a god they haven’t seen, the anti-theists actively believe in (have faith in) the absence of the divine. They demean and denigrate people of all religions because there is a state sanctioned program of oppression wearing the corpse of Christianity, and they are too ignorant to know the difference, and too conceited to let anyone explain it to them.
Wicca rightly rejected the patriarchal oppression of the Christian church, but it was also infiltrated by bad actors whose goal was not to dismantle systems of oppression, but simply to take the place of the oppressors. These individuals carried with them the judgment, the bio-essentialism, and the elitism. They just made it matriarchal and put themselves in charge. Some sects, particularly Dianic Wicca, border on being the USSR of religions. They overthrew their own oppressor, cannibalized an older philosophy they barely understand and barely actually use, and used it to legitimize themselves as they simply imitated their oppressor but with a new target to oppress.
Z Budapest, who founded Dianic Wicca, is one of the original TERFs. Some years ago I was interviewed by a pagan periodical called The Wild Hunt for my thoughts on the scandal of a newly released book on Wicca which was little more than a TERF manifesto. The situation has scarcely improved since that interview, because for these individuals it’s not enough to reject the patriarchy. They feel the need to inflict the same harm which was inflicted on them.
Many of the witches who reject even pagan religion don’t seem to have a problem ripping off the rituals and practices of those religions without having any respect for their origins or the people who created them. Some of them even call on gods they don’t believe in or don’t worship, as if the gods themselves are tools to be used and discarded at their convenience.
This is not an attack on any particular group, but an observation that every group has its flaws and bad actors, and still carries the fallout of a legacy of abuse. This is a warning that we are all obligated to acknowledge those flaws and refuse to be a part of what makes the world worse.
Religious trauma, like any other trauma, isn’t an excuse to perpetuate cycles of abuse. It is incumbent upon us to reject the oppressive machinery hiding behind religious trappings, refuse to perpetuate the abuse, respect the enormous diversity of religions in the world which aren’t built on foundations of oppression, and have respect for the gods themselves, regardless of our personal practice.
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