#christian supremacy

[jessicalprice]

christian universalism strikes again

(Reposted from Twitter)

So a rabbi I know came back from LA pretty jazzed about a Jewish addiction treatment facility there called Beit T'shuvah and so we talked about their approach and that got me curious about non-AA approaches to dealing with addiction which, my friends, was fascinating.

I’ll admit that almost everything I know about AA is more or less from The West Wing. I'm fortunate in that no one in my immediate family has dealt with substance abuse issues, and as far as I know, none of my close friends are alcoholics. My knowledge is pop culture knowledge.

But hearing about Beit T’shuvah was very interesting to me because:

I'd heard that a lot of people who aren't Christian have a hard time with AA because it's so Christian.

The difference in philosophy was subtle at first glance but actually paralleled a lot of the differences between Judaism and Christianity if you dug into it.

Anyway, I got curious about whether success rates were different for Christians vs. non-Christians and started googling. I didn't find much in the way of the data I was looking for, but I did find something a lot more disturbing, which is that the whole 12-step thing is not science-based. At all. For example:

The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse compared the current current state of addiction treatment to medicine in the early 1900s, when there weren't a lot of standards for who could practice medicine. In order to be a substance abuse counselor in many states, you don't need much more than a GED or high school diploma.

A 2006 survey found "no experimental studies unequivocally demonstrated the effectiveness of AA or TSF approaches for reducing alcohol dependence or problems."

And I want to make clear here that I'm not saying AA is bad--clearly it's helped people. The problem is that it's touted as a universal approach, which is a problem when it's not based on any sort of actual science. 

AA claims that its success rates for people who "really try" are 75%. (And boy does that mirror gaslighting diet language.) But the most precise study out there that's NOT coming from AA (https://amazon.com/dp/B00FIMWI1O) put actual success rates at 5-8%. One of the major textbooks on treating addiction ranks it at 38th out of 48 on its list of effective treatments.

So just like most fad diets, it fails for almost everyone who tries it, and then blames the individual for its failure.

A glaring issue is that the 12 steps don't really acknowledge--or provide any guidance or structure for dealing with--other mental/emotional health issues. That’s a giant problem when people with substance abuse issues have higher than average rates of those issues. (Take a moment to consider how the victim-blaming approach of “if you didn’t succeed, it’s because you didn’t try hard enough” is going to intersect with someone’s major depression.)

Now, if 12-step programs were just one available treatment approach out of many, this wouldn’t be that big of an issue.

But 12% of AA members are there because of court orders. Our legal system is requiring people to undergo treatment that is: 

Christian-based

Not scientifically supported

A failure for the vast majority of people

I mean, here's a pretty comprehensive breakdown that talks about the lack of scientific support for it, alternative treatments (like those in Finland, and naltrexone), and the fundamentalist origins of AA. 

The founder was a member of the Oxford Group, an evangelical organization that taught that all human problems stemmed from fear and selfishness, and could be solved by turning your life over to divine providence, basically. Sound familiar? He based AA on those principles, and given that the only alternative was "drying out" in a sanatorium, and that AA members would show up at bedsides there and invite inpatients to meetings, it must have looked really enlightened to people. In 2022, it bears a queasy resemblance to evangelizing to people in prison, literally a captive audience. 

To be fair--to their credit--they were some of the first people out there saying alcoholism was a disease, and not a moral failing. But they didn’t treat it like a disease when it came to testing treatment options:

Mann also collaborated with a physiologist named E. M. Jellinek. Mann was eager to bolster the scientific claims behind AA, and Jellinek wanted to make a name for himself in the growing field of alcohol research. In 1946, Jellinek published the results of a survey mailed to 1,600 AA members. Only 158 were returned. Jellinek and Mann jettisoned 45 that had been improperly completed and another 15 filled out by women, whose responses were so unlike the men’s that they risked complicating the results. From this small sample—98 men—Jellinek drew sweeping conclusions about the “phases of alcoholism,” which included an unavoidable succession of binges that led to blackouts, “indefinable fears,” and hitting bottom. Though the paper was filled with caveats about its lack of scientific rigor, it became AA gospel.

And then Senator Harold Hughes, who was an AA member, got Congress to establish the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, which promoted AA's beliefs, and sometimes suppressed research that conflicted with them:

In 1976, for instance, the Rand Corporation released a study of more than 2,000 men who had been patients at 44 different NIAAA-funded treatment centers. The report noted that 18 months after treatment, 22 percent of the men were drinking moderately. The authors concluded that it was possible for some alcohol-dependent men to return to controlled drinking. Researchers at the National Council on Alcoholism charged that the news would lead alcoholics to falsely believe they could drink safely. The NIAAA, which had funded the research, repudiated it. Rand repeated the study, this time looking over a four-year period. The results were similar.

The standard 28-day rehab stay, prescribed and insured:

Marvin D. Seppala, the chief medical officer at the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation in Minnesota, one of the oldest inpatient rehab facilities in the country, described for me how 28 days became the norm: “In 1949, the founders found that it took about a week to get detoxed, another week to come around so [the patients] knew what they were up to, and after a couple of weeks they were doing well, and stable. That’s how it turned out to be 28 days. There’s no magic in it.”

The last sentence here (bolded for emphasis) is especially chilling. 

That may be heartening, but it’s not science. As the rehab industry began expanding in the 1970s, its profit motives dovetailed nicely with AA’s view that counseling could be delivered by people who had themselves struggled with addiction, rather than by highly trained (and highly paid) doctors and mental-health professionals. No other area of medicine or counseling makes such allowances.

There is no mandatory national certification exam for addiction counselors. The 2012 Columbia University report on addiction medicine found that only six states required alcohol- and substance-abuse counselors to have at least a bachelor’s degree and that only one state, Vermont, required a master’s degree. Fourteen states had no license requirements whatsoever—not even a GED or an introductory training course was necessary—and yet counselors are often called on by the judicial system and medical boards to give expert opinions on their clients’ prospects for recovery.

And, again, the idea that this is the One True And Only Way to deal with alcohol abuse leads to medical professionals ignoring research and treatment options that could be helping people. They are, in essence, taking all this completely on faith. 

There has been some progress: the Hazelden center began prescribing naltrexone and acamprosate to patients in 2003. But this makes Hazelden a pioneer among rehab centers. “Everyone has a bias,” Marvin Seppala, the chief medical officer, told me. “I honestly thought AA was the only way anyone could ever get sober, but I learned that I was wrong.”

Stephanie O’Malley, a clinical researcher in psychiatry at Yale who has studied the use of naltrexone and other drugs for alcohol-use disorder for more than two decades, says naltrexone’s limited use is “baffling.”

“There was never any campaign for this medication that said, ‘Ask your doctor,’ ” she says. “There was never any attempt to reach consumers.” Few doctors accepted that it was possible to treat alcohol-use disorder with a pill. And now that naltrexone is available in an inexpensive generic form, pharmaceutical companies have little incentive to promote it.

I'm not saying that AA is bad. I'm saying its hegemony is bad. It clearly is effective for some people--a minority of people. But it's not for the majority of people, and that's a problem when it's being prescribed by courts (and doctors) as if it's a one-size-fits-all approach.

It’s not an accident that a Christian approach to treating addiction presents itself as the One True Way For All Humankind, insists that courts and doctors privilege it, demands that people take its effectiveness on faith, and blames anyone for whom it doesn’t work for not believing/trying hard enough.

Hegemony is a problem. 

(Photo credit: Pixabay)

#christian hegemony #addiction #christian supremacy #aa #maybe courts should be recommending treatment with a better than 8% success rate and actual science behind them just saying

[newnitz]

I don't really see people talking about how cultural Christianity is applied to Jews.

In Christianity, Jews are the people who rejected and betrayed Jesus and are punished with statelessness and destitution, whose only redemption is accepting the Messiah and the Son of God. This is the basis of several antisemitic tropes, most prominently deception, religious supercessionism and the Wandering Jew.

In cultural Christianity, these tropes are considered tenants of Judaism rather than Christianity, as Judaism is considered Christianity without Jesus.

Christians see themselves as tortured saints, persecuted for spreading the truth of Jesus and God across the globe. Missionaries who go to non-Christian lands to try and get the people to convert by fearmongering with damnation to Hell see themselves as victims when they're rebuffed and asked to stop.

Cultural Christian non-Christians are usually atheists and adherents of folk religion revivalist movements who have suffered religious abuse, as many sects of Christianity normalize emotional abuse by instilling inherent guilt in the Original Sin and even physical abuse in "Spare the rod; spoil the child". These cultural Christians see the millennia of antisemitism and roll their eyes, to them we're just another sect of delusional religious people with a persecution complex.

To become a Christian all you need to do is accept the Father Son and Holy Spirit, to affirm your beliefs and confess your sins. To become a Jew you are either born a Jew, or you learn the Jewish culture and religion for months on end and must live half a year under the strictest restrictions of the Jewish lifestyle to show commitment. That is the difference between a universal religion and an ethnoreligion.

In a Culturally Christian world there is no room for ethnoreligions, and they do not exist. All religions are about your faith and which God(s) you believe in. So in a Cultural Christian's eyes, a country of Jews is a country that holds one faith supreme above all others and conditions rights with conversion, as that's how Christian countries have historically been.

Christianity's common ground with Jews comes from the Roman Empire appropriating the religion from the Cult of Jesus, and making it more appealing to the masses by introducing Greco-Roman and Germanic folk religion aspects into it. Xmas is Yule but with Jesus, Easter is a fertility holiday but with Jesus and so on. In the eyes of the Cultural Christian, Christianity and Judaism are two once-antagonistic sects of the same religion, no different than Catholics and Protestants.

Cultural Christianity erases and appropriates Judaism and is as inherently hateful of Jews as religious Christianity.

Now, when it comes to the elephant in the room: Islam.

Islam, like Christianity, is a universal religion. You must believe in Allah and accept the prophets, which include both Jesus and Muhammad. It is no more inherently violent than Christianity, though it's no less. In the Christian's eyes, Islam is the competitor, the enemy. The Muslims conquered Christian lands and converted them, and they've fought holy wars against one another throughout the Middle Ages.

To become a Muslim the Cultural Christian doesn't need to unlearn any of the core tenets of their culture. They can simply apply it to Islam.

Which is why many Cultural Christians, damaged by Christianity, are sympathetic to Islam. And since Muslims and Jews are no longer on good terms, they use this sympathy to give themselves a free pass to be antisemitic. Whether Muslims check their converts for bigotry, allow it or are powerless to stop them, that's another issue.

Jews are not diet Christians. We have less in common with you than you have with Muslims. Unlearn Christian cultural appropriation.

And no, I don't care that it's "offensive" to associate you with Christianity due to the religious abuse you endured. You still see the world through a Christian lens.

#cultural christianity #christian supremacy #Christian imperialism #religious supercessionism #wandering jew #wandering Jew trope #christian antisemitism #antisemitism #leftist antisemitism

[neurotypicalabusesurvivor]

#intergenerational trauma #christofascists #christian supremacy #sexism #racisim #queerphobia #neurodiversity #ableism #leftism #mental illness #medical model #child trauma #ageism

[fandomshatepeopleofcolor]

Not the same anon but thought I'd mention that the spinoff for Batman: Unburied deals with racism, islamophobia and racialized police brutality, due to the protag being the Riddler, who in this podcast is canonically muslim. Figured that your followers should know, in case racialized police brutality and fundamentalist christian violence are sensitive topics for anyone here. There is also a suicide, so tw for that.

Hey thanks!!! I'm gonna wait until I'm in a better headspace to listen to it then. Like please be careful followers!!!

mod ali

#riddler secrets in the dark #suicide tw #police brutality #fhpoc asks #Islamophobia #christian supremacy #podcast recs #recs tag

[pinewhisky]

It sounds like someone hurt you in the past. I'm sorry that's been your experience. I've been hurt by Christians too, but you need to know that what you're doing, painting all Christian people with the same brush, is just as harmful. You're doing the same thing that they're doing when they say "all gay people are bad" or "all trans people are bad" or "all pagans are bad." It really makes me sad that you're a pagan minister and you don't understand that. And for the record, I'm not that anon but I am a lesbian and a Christian. I don't believe in hell and I think the Evangelicals are horrible and Christo-facist. They are exactly the opposite of what I am, in fact I've had them send me death threats. It is incredibly insulting to lump me in with the people that want to murder me.

Ah, you finally grew some semblance of a spine.

Here's what it's made out of:

It sounds like someone hurt you in the past. I'm sorry that's been your experience. I've been hurt by Christians too, but you need to know that what you're doing, painting all Christian people with the same brush, is just as harmful

"Not All Christians," and "That's not True Christianity." You're parroting a narrative presented by people who don't want to address issues in their own religion, and have more interest in dismissing experiences while asserting their own, which is a very Christian thing to do, in that you're asserting the narrative that only things that agree with your perceptions of a thing are valid, and anything that challenges your perception is necessarily just misguided and ignorant and not worthy of consideration.

Moving on.

You're doing the same thing that they're doing when they say "all gay people are bad" or "all trans people are bad" or "all pagans are bad." It really makes me sad that you're a pagan minister and you don't understand that.

Being gay is not a choice. Being trans is not a choice. Being Pagan is a choice, and it's people like you that push people away by parroting this narrative. I'm a Pagan minister because I have voluntarily taken on the responsibility to do what I can to try and help repair the damage people like you cause by using a double standard such as this.

No, Christianity's "gay people are bad" is not the same as "christianity is bad."

And for the record, I'm not that anon but I am a lesbian and a Christian. I don't believe in hell and I think the Evangelicals are horrible and Christo-facist

There it is again, the "that's not True Christianity!" I didn't bring evangelicals into this. I said Christianity. I've read and studied the bible and have more knowledge of denominations and historical christianity than you're hoping I do, so you can somehow pin this on "that's just your experience" and "not all christians."

You're dangerously close to "no, REALLY study it, until you see it like I do!" that literally every denomination of christianity, as well as other supremacist religions push.

They are exactly the opposite of what I am, in fact I've had them send me death threats. It is incredibly insulting to lump me in with the people that want to murder me.

And yet, you're voluntarily identifying with a religion that claims your god created humanity with free will, but if we don't use it in a specific way, which includes viewing diversity, including diversity of thought and culture, as a bad thing, those people are going to be punished, or at least not rewarded.

And if it doesn't matter if someone is a christian or not, and everyone is going to "heaven," then there's no reason for you to be a christian or so offended at what I've been saying. On top of that, you have an extremely shallow and ignorant view of christianity if you agree everyone's going to be in some happy shiny afterlife, because your god says so.

I know more than you, which is why I have chosen not to be a christian. And if this offends you so much that you'd claim I'm an ignorant fool who should "know better," then I invite you to leave and never come back, if you're going to spout so much cognitive dissonance that you'd claim christians saying "god hates gays" is the same as me having decades worth of experience and study of things you're telling me I don't, just so you can make me feel guilty for hurting your feelings.

You're spineless and can't be saved from the christian supremacy koolaid if you're not willing to see the difference between a chosen religion and an involuntary nature. Which is what Christianity hopes of you, so it can use you to continue its parasitic supremacy narrative, and make me out to be the enemy.

I also don't believe you're not that anon, because you're already lying to yourself, why shouldn't you lie to me?

#christianity #ex christian #pagan minister #deconstruction #christian supremacy

[metalheadsforblacklivesmatter]

Whenever I was denouncing xenophobes that that attack Muslim women for wearing a hijab, all the white saviors wanted to attack me because "Encouraging women to wear a hijab is sexist!" (Even though many cultures wear face and hair coverings both for spiritual reasons and privacy reasons.)

But I don't seem those same white saviors speaking out when a Christian coach coerced his players into praying before the game. (By the way, the Supreme Court rules that it is completely okay for teachers and coaches to coerce their students into praying.)

I vote all the non-Christians in the school system start leading their classes with a prayer and see how quickly the Supreme Court realizes they fucked up.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/27/supreme-court-praying-football-coach/

-fae

#supreme court #white supremacy #Christian supremacy

[truly-fantastic-me]

"To respect all religions is to deny that Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the life."

My dude, if that's going to be your attitude, then I see no reason why I should respect your religion. I don't see why anyone should respect your religion. I'll tell you to your face that I think your religion is bullshit and that you deserve to go to your own hell and I hope others do the same. You deserve the treatment you give to other people. Learn to respect others or fuck off.

#fuck christians with this attitude tbh #like i will straight up deck them in the face if i hear one more Christian say some bs like that. #christian supremacy #like goddamn people like that are why i don't call myself Christian #christian hegemony #also this is probably a trauma trigger for me

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"PAGANISM STILL GRIPS INDIANS." Kingston Whig-Standard. May 22, 1933. Page 13. ---- HAZELTON, B.C. - Under the towering peaks of "Falling Rocks" mountain range, the native graveyard is a blend of Paganism and the New Faith. Though many of the Indians have been christianized, complete miniature houses have been built over many of the graves. Clothes and belongings of the departed are placed inside.

In one skirts, shoes, corsets and mirror, brush and comb are hung on the walls. In another an enlarged portrait stands against a trunk filled with garments and toilet articles. Over chiefs' graves stone poems symbolical of their clan are carved.

Food is placed in the houses almost daily. It is invariably carried away by wild animals such as squirrels and rabbits, but the Indians explain the spirits get the food through the wild life. [AL: This is possibly about either the Gitxsan or Wet'suwet'en First Nations, but it's a 90 year old news wire piece loaded with settler colonial racism so figuring out what group or community the story is describing will take further research]

#hazelton #interior british columbia #gitxsan #wet'suwet'en #settler colonialism #settler colonialism in canada #christianization #christian supremacy #first nations #indigenous people #indigenous history #anti-indigenous racism #religious syncretism #great depression in canada #british columbia history

[coconutlimeverbena]

Someone wrote an anti-choice fic on Ao3 and it is predictably awful, and unfortunately very much within Ao3's ToS (so please don't crowd their inbox trying to report it)

It gets worse!

Girl, what is this😂😂

I'll spare you the rest and post the audacious end notes

I cannot..."audiobook and paperback coming soon"?? Is that a threat

(Please note that I'm only posting this because they're Anonymous and the comments are off. While the story is awful, I still wouldn't intentionally set someone up for harassment)

Enjoy?

#ao3 #fanfic #fan fiction #anti choice #abortion #xenophobic #xenophobia #christian supremacy #conservatives #religious propaganda #my posts

[lilyliveredlittlerichboy]

do u guys wanna see the most ridiculous thing I've seen in at least a few weeks

a. it's a. it's a Ramadan advent calendar.

RAMADAN advent calendar.

cus, like, we all know Ramadan is all about eating chocolate everyday. smh

#ramadan #ramadan mubarak #eid mubarak #I'm told the chocolate is shit too #Muslim #culturally christian #christian supremacy #idk if anyone's ever told this to capitalist xtians but like. #not every religious holy time has to be christmas #Holy shit #i actually lost it when i saw this yesterday #so ridiculous #silly #capitalism #late capitalism #i need a tag for my own rambles

[jessicalprice]

cultural Christianity, Christian hegemony so pervasive that people don’t even NOTICE it

is people who claim to be ex-Christian or never Christian out here literally proselytizing that people should be like Jesus and no one seems to notice that that’s weird

like it’s baffling to me how often people who claim not to be Christian seem as invested as actual professing Christians in protecting Christianity’s brand

#cultural Christianity #christian hegemony #Christian supremacy

[nando161mando]

"🧵Christian supremacists' "parental rights" movement is actually a Trojan horse to smuggle in policies that would allow them to use state power to brainwash other people's children with Christian fundamentalist dogma.

These activists have stupid beliefs, but they are exceptionally cunning.

They cannot convert adults any more so they've resorted to reproduction and child indoctrination as their political strategy. More here:"

#christofascists #christofascism #christian supremacy #christianity #christian #supremacists #bigots #liberal hypocrisy #hypocrite #republican hypocrisy #gop hypocrisy #right wing hypocrisy #hypocrisy #hypocrites #parental rights #movement #trojan horse #indoctrination #brainwashing #grooming #groomers #dogma #atheist #atheism #childhood #children #child abuse #child #ausgov #politas

[neurotypicalabusesurvivor]

If your religion cannot survive without indoctrinating children then your religion should die off.

It is peaceful and consentaul conversion without genocidal intentions or extinction. Those are the only options religions have

#relgion #christian supremacy #christofascists #christian faith #jesus christ #christianity #spiritual abuse #religious extremism #religous trauma #child abuse #childern #childhood #children #childhood trauma #tw abuse

[fandomshatepeopleofcolor]

hey i just read the cassandra clare masterpost and i'm just gonna add here.

the shadowhunter religion, as a whole is purely based on christian & jewish religion/mythology with cc saying that muslim or hindu or any other religious shadowhunters can't exist. yet she takes up various mythological beings from these myths (especially hinduism) like the naga demons, the asuras etc. and wrongly depicts them as 'evil' when in real hindu mythology it is so much more complex than that.

there is the existence of institutes in various parts of the world like mumbai which begs the question how were those institutes established? and whether the shadowhunters of those places came to be because of colonisation & were forced to convert to the shadowhunter religion. how they have to remove themselves from their own culture which is exactly what happened under the 200 years of british rule in india.

i'm sure other people of colour will have this problem too with their own religions & ethnicities but i can only speak of india as i'm only knowledgeable of my own heritage & cultures. but it irks me so much.

Hey thanks for dropping by! I really appreciate your viewpoint. If you don't mind can you maybe link me to the masterpost? was it ours? I'm sorry the search function is a mess. In general I kinda get depressed by how thoroughly christianity has become the global religion. Like saying the shadowhunter religion is based on christianity and Judaism is kinda wrong because even though much of christiandom pays lip service to the torah sometimes christiandom is very antisemitic.

but yeah of course CClare is culturally appropriating from hinduism and other religions. its frustrating because so many people continue to read her books and giving her money. at the very least her show is off the air.

mod ali

#cassandra clare #shadowhunters #antisemitism #cultural appropriation #christian supremacy

[pinewhisky]

Cry harder, gay Christians exist and Jesus loves them

Christians only love gay people if they're Christian.

Which means no Christians love gay people unless they can get something out of them, and neither does your demigod.

I'd say cry harder, but you're already putting yourself through enough.

#ex christian #christian supremacy #this is why people hate christians #reading the bible: the leading cause of deconversion

[somanysoundtracks]

Love November-December, also known as “what if literally everything was fucking Christmas, even if it’s secular, like a fucking restaurant or a non-denominational grocery store or freebie shit you can’t refuse with a secular plushie you buy from a country that isn’t traditionally Christian”. Christmas decorations everywhere, Christmas music... like imagine if literally any other religion did this. And every year we’re told to get over it like it’s not FUCKING ANNOYING.

I’m not asking for other religions to be represented. I’d like secular spaces to remain secular. And for the fucking barrage of bullshit to slow down if not stop entirely.

#every year just makes me hate the holiday more #no it's not fun to be barraged by this crap #sure Christians have committed attempted genocide against my people multiple times but look at the cute reindeer and lights :3 #why don't you have Christmas spirit after listening to even more obnoxious Christian pop tunes every time you go into the grocery store :D #last time I was shopping for fucking spaghetti sauce in November music was like IT'S CHRISTMAS TIME #no it was fucking November #Christian supremacy #I'm happy people have a good time but insisting that people who aren't Christian should just shut up and enjoy it #like fuck you #my country doesn't have a national religion but you wouldn't think so if you ever went outside from the end of October to New Years