Christianity, as I've said before, is both a wild and playful thing, turning up in folk beliefs and syncretic religions and who knows how many lively and tremendous works of fiction, and it's also a dying authoritarian juggernaut. This die was cast a long time ago, unfortunately. Christianity began questionably, with St. Paul's dubious interpretation of the Incarnation (which I am assuming, for the sake of argument, actually happened—I'm Catholic you know! kinda) and his determination to make the new cult both radically distinct from Judaism and more palatable to professionals like himself. From the start, Christianity was cursed with the disease that's presently almost about to kill the patient: Christianity wanted desperately to be NORMAL. The lurch to embrace Roman tyranny a few centuries later sealed the deal. You can't get much more failed, as a transformative moral and social force, than merging with the Roman Empire.

Now look at Christianity, especially in the United States, which has been preening itself as the New Jerusalem for a while, while hypocritically claiming to honor the old. This terrifying trope of "Western civilization" lives on, like an even more poisonous and maddening version of the older-fashioned myth of descent from ancient Troy. The Romans most famously tried that one out but Great Britain did as well and I'm pretty sure there's other instances of European national founding myths which somehow go back to Troy or at least to Æneas. "The West" is still hagridden by ancient Greece, as hagridden as Rome was. "We conquered you, and yet you are better than us, whyyy" seems like an eternal mystery for many Europeans and persons of European descent.

Hence there's no shortage of prideful Americans claiming to be the prophets and priests of a deathless Christian faith, and at the same time they don't seem to know what they believe any more. They shout about Jesus and the Lord in one sentence, accuse trans people of killing God in the next sentence. How did this happen? It's pretty simple: NORMAL smothered Christianity. St. Paul's objections to adhering to Jewish practices seems almost like laziness. It was an impediment to facile conversion. "You mean I have to worry about what I eat now?" and so forth. St. Paul, like any cynical salesperson, was selling canned Jesus, simplified salvation, a simple formula for businesspersons to adopt into their lives while going on doing what they're doing, just as St. Paul himself did.

It's always been a MASSIVE issue with St. Paul. If he really believed in Jesus then where was his humility? He had none. He wasn't repentant and reflective and thoughtful about his previous mistakes, the things he supposedly repented of. Instead he did what every toxic Christian today still does, in mimicry of St. Paul: they say, "Whoops, my bad, I won't sin again I promise!" and then get straight to pretending that their conversion now entitles them to special social status. St. Paul was the first obvious Christian hypocrite, a fake Apostle, and now Paul's shittiness is baked into Christianity.

Everything since then feels like a creeping paralysis or wasting disease slowly spreading through Christianity, killing belief, killing the mystery that Christianity was supposed to embody, reducing it to a dead litany that corporate executives intone from time to time while they're scamming money. Christianity may still be a religion (though I'm not sure how I'd even define it, because so much of Christianity now exists as independent offshoots and syncretisms) but public Christianity surely isn't. It's a political label, a badge of membership in an evil society. Any politician or boss who conspicuously wears a cross or makes a point of saying "I have Christian values" might as well be saying they're in S.P.E.C.T.R.E. or something.

Well, now what

~Chara of Pnictogen