Oh, boy, do I have a rant.

When you say that people behaving badly aren't *real* Christians, you're defining Christianity itself as goodness.

And by making Christianity the gold standard for goodness, you're basically defining other traditions as morally inferior. https://twitter.com/C_Stroop/status/1250522265910800384

We already live in a Christian supremacist society. Priests and pastors without any training in ethics outside their own tradition are ethics consultants for the government, for major medical organizations, etc.

Christianity is America's assumed ethical standard.

And the thing is, Christianity isn't inherently good. It might encourage *individuals* to be good, but the current state of America, the Christian superpower, is pretty clear empirical evidence that it doesn't create moral societies.

It should not be a societal ethics standard.

And every time you express shock that a Christian could behave selfishly, every time you claim that people who identify as Christian and harm others are "fake" Christians, you reinforce the idea that Christianity is The Natural Standard Of Goodness, rather than simply a religion.

The thing is, everything about Christianity that *works* as a societal standard of goodness is shared by almost every other moral system--religious or not--out there.

Humans have understood--not necessarily *followed*, but *understood*--basic interconnectedness forever.

To equate Christianity with "treat other human beings like human beings" is both to tacitly denigrate--and misrepresent--every other moral system that says the same thing AND to reduce Christianity itself to banality.

Christians are human beings who believe certain tenets. They're no more consistent in adhering to those tenets than followers of other moral systems are to theirs, and Christianity is no more closely related to "recognize other people's humanity" than any other major system.

And while I do have a whole rant about why I think Christianity is useful for making moral individuals but bad for making ethical societies, the vast majority of what one can criticize about American Christians has more to do with hegemony than actual doctrine.

But Step One in breaking that hegemony is to stop granting Christianity special moral status in our societal imagination.