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There isn't a bright line between "religion" and "worldview," and just because you've stopped believing in God doesn't mean you're not still operating from a Christian worldview. https://twitter.com/EmExAstris/status/1294728735027953664
And not only is Christianity not representative of "religion" full stop, it's actually arguably *anomalous* in its attempt to be modular (and thus universal to all cultures) rather than inextricable from culture.
Now, of course, it hasn't actually succeeded in that--the US is a thoroughly Christian culture--but it does lead to the idea that one can somehow parse out which pieces of culture are "religious" versus which are "secular". That framing is antithetical to most cultures.
E.g. you can't separate the development of a lot of cultural practices around what people eat and how they get it from elements of their worldview that Christians would probably label "religious."
But that entire *framing* of religious vs secular is a Christian one.
But that entire *framing* of religious vs secular is a Christian one.
Is Passover a religious holiday or a secular one?
The answer isn't one or the other, or neither, or both. It's that the framing of this question is wrong.
The answer isn't one or the other, or neither, or both. It's that the framing of this question is wrong.
And that inability to see culture outside a Christian framing means that American secularism is still *shaped* like Christianity. It's basically the same text with a few sentences deleted and some terms replaced.
And the same Victorian Christian framing, that religious practice (and human culture in general) is subject to the same sort of unilateral, simple evolution toward a superior state to which they, at the time, largely reduced biological evolution, is deeply white supremacist.
It posits religious evolution as a constantly self-refining process from "primitive" animism and polytheism to monotheism to white European/American Christianity. For Christians, that's the height of human culture. For ex-Christians, the next step is Christian-derived secularism.
And in this worldview, Christianity is "normal" religion, which is still more primitive than enlightened secularism, but more advanced than all those other primitive, superstitious, irrational beliefs.
But as I was saying above, while Christianity *posits* itself as modular, as independent of culture, in practice it brings culture with it, as does any practice.
But while that culture is inherently tied to Christianity, those ties usually go unexamined because they're so normalized in cultures where Christianity is hegemonic.
So when your average American atheist is envisioning a secular, enlightened, rational society free of the primitive, irrational grip of religion, the society he's envisioning is one that looks pretty close to where we are now, except people don't go to church or talk about God.
And when we talk about American atheism having a white supremacy problem, it's because if you subtract going to church and believing in God from American society, you don't get a society that's somehow neutral.
You still have a white Christian-shaped society.
You still have a white Christian-shaped society.
And their view of what's "rational" and "objective" and "neutral" is people behaving like white Christians, except not believing in God.
That is, the elimination of most worldviews and cultures that don't match that model.
That is, the elimination of most worldviews and cultures that don't match that model.
And when they do try to make room for cultures that aren't white and European-derived, the tacit demand is "okay, but you have to separate out the parts of your culture that the Christian sacred-secular divide would deem 'religious.'"
So, for example, you have ex-Christian atheists who are down with pluralism trying to get ex-Christian atheists who aren't to leave Jews alone by pointing out that you can be atheist and Jewish.
And that's really the only effective way I've seen to *start* breaking people out of a wholly Christian definition of "religion," but "this culture is ok and not something that we need to eliminate because you can be atheist within it"...
...is still defining what culture is "okay" by a white Christian framework.
