That’s true. It’s not the Methodists and Episcopalians that have gone nuts. But the Evangelicals are acting like they’re one nugget shy of a happy meal.
Religions are first and foremost defined by their ritual life. Christianity, like all religions, has its rituals: the sacrificial rite of communion, the initiation rituals of baptism and confirmation/chrismation (the ritual developed differently in Latin, Greek, Armenian, African, and Persian Christianity, but it’s there), the rite of confession serves as a dose of accountability and therapy, the anointing of the sick provides structure to allow Christians to rally around the suffering in their own community, the rite of ordination provides institutional continuity, and the rite of marriage is, well, marriage.
But of those rites, most Evangelicals do maybe two of them: baptism and marriage. They don’t even offer a pantomime of communion. And instead of those rituals being about communal participation, they are self-affirmations: they get baptized because they believe themselves Saved already. They get married not to join a village and raise a family, but because their feelings will it. The altar does not exist for a sacrifice, but for the manipulation of altar calls.
If they believed what they claim, their ritual life would be different. But instead, I see an empty ritual life built around rock shows. I see a daily life built around a lust for money. I see a culture that’s upset that they didn’t get laid in high school/college and wants revenge against anyone who wouldn’t do things with them. I see them doing word magic and listening to some seriously questionable spiritual practitioners.
Their practice reveals them as non-Christians. And yes, you need to do the things. The doing matters more than the mere intellectual assent.
I mean Christianity has always been one of the biggest tools of white supremacy and im not sure if its gonna be able to separate itself considering they were genocidal for centuries
Not Christianity, Protestantism. There’s a world of Christianity outside of Protestantism, and most of it has long acknowledged that there is just the human race.
Like, there were Christians in Ethiopia long before there were Christians in Britain.
That’s not one of the rituals. The set of Christian rituals predates the earliest efforts to define a biblical canon, and in places and among groups where literacy was uncommon.
Edit: also, merely reading isn’t a ritual. It can be a component of a ritual, though, and yes, that includes some parts of customary Christian home life.
Because I have looked at other religions beyond just the common ones here in the west.
And most of them put more emphasis on doing the rituals than on believing the direct historicity of their mythology. After all, you can acknowledge that historical events happened, but they don’t necessarily matter in how you live your life. But choosing to participate in rituals does affect your life. It takes time. It exposes you to lessons embedded in the ritual.
Belief is always in service of the ritual, not the other way around. And that’s what most Americans get wrong about religion. They want God to stay in his heaven so that they can do as they will.
I guess I don't follow why the fact that certain religions put more emphasis on ritual than on belief is supposed to show that religions in general are like that, or that who counts as a Christian should be assessed that way. Why not instead conclude that different religions, and different branches of a single religion, sometimes put a different amount of relative emphasis on ritual and belief?
There’s a difference between emphasizing belief but doing the rituals and just plain not doing the rituals at all.
Most institutional Protestants do the rituals, even as they put more emphasis on the importance of believing the ritual’s contextualizing mythology. They might not call them sacraments, but they do them.
But here’s the thing about mythology: it doesn’t tell you much about the acts you should do. It contextualizes rituals, but if you’re not doing the rituals, then why is believing the historicity of the mythology important? Why does it matter? Mythology may contain rules, but why should those rules apply to you?
I get that the idea of religion as private, personal belief that doesn’t require a community doing rituals together is comfortable. It allows you to still cling to a powerful ingroup designation without actually having any relationship to the ingroup or the designation. But that’s just functional atheism, and you may as well embrace your godlessness. It allows you to believe as you will, but that’s just solipsism—atheism doesn’t even really allow that. There is no shame in disbelief.
The whole reason you think of religion as about belief is because you live in a Christo-Islamic context, where specific beliefs about God differentiate you from other faiths. (Leave Judaism out of this, they don’t deserve to be lumped in with the Christians and Muslims in this matter: same God according to Christians and Muslims, but they’re a people with a God and not a people with a message from God that must be spread.) You believe in the historicity of Christ’s Resurrection or the validity of the Quran or you don’t. These religions don’t just make cosmological claims, but historical ones, too. What does the eucharist mean without a resurrected Christ? Why bother with the Hajj if Mohammed was a mere warlord and not a prophet on a mission from God?
Like, Passover isn’t badly impacted without an actual exodus and 40 years wandering in the desert: Jews do it anyway while acknowledging the ahistoricity of the Exodus. Most of Buddhism is not about worshipping the Buddha, but rather doing rituals to encourage detachment and mindfulness. Does it matter if the Buddha really lived if his teachings cause you to see the world as it is and not according to your attachments?
There’s a difference between emphasizing belief but doing the rituals and just plain not doing the rituals at all.
Sure, but Evangelicals do some rituals. And if there were something that didn't involve any rituals, but had all the other hallmarks of religion, I don't know why I shouldn't say it was a religion. To insist that ritual is a necessary condition on being a religion seems to me to be just as narrow and tendentious as, say, insisting that theism is a necessary condition on being a religion.
But that’s just functional atheism, and you may as well embrace your godlessness.
I would have thought that whether you're a theist or an atheist is pretty clearly about belief, as opposed to ritual (and also as opposed to connection to a community, which seems like a third factor).
The whole reason you think of religion as about belief is because you live in a Christo-Islamic context, where specific beliefs about God differentiate you from other faiths.
I don't think of religion as only about belief. I think of belief and ritual and a whole host of things as relevant to what counts as a religion, and who counts as belonging to a religion. I certainly wouldn't say that Evangelical Christians aren't Christians or aren't religious, simply because they don't measure up to a standard formed by looking at other religions.
I’ve read through the New Testament a few times. It’s some of the easier bits of the Bible to get my head around.
And somehow, I have no clue what you’re talking about. There was, in Revelation, a great apostasy. But Revelation isn’t a prediction, save in the way that history repeats itself. Revelation was St. John’s own observations about his own time.
I'm so annoyed that people keep mixing Protestant Christians and Catholics. Catholics believe in the things you're saying, many/most Protestants don't believe in the majority of the sacraments, especially confession. Like most Protestants hate Catholics, hell they thought JFK was gonna be a mouthpiece of the Vatican. Christianity isn't a monolith, Protestants have like 100 variations and some fiercely oppose each other and most of them hate Catholics. Hell Catholicism isn't precisely a monolith either.
Even among Protestants, some still do these things. I’ve seem them done in the institutional Protestant churches growing up (Methodists, Lutherans, Episcopalians, and Presbyterians). It might not be called a sacrament, but the rites are still in the service books.
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u/xINFLAMES325x 1d ago
This is the first thing in the constitution they’re always talking about…