So many popular "resistance" accounts repeat this gaslighting Christian supremacist rhetoric and it's so exclusionary to non-Christians and people harmed by Christianity, and they push back so hard when people protest that it's hard to tell the difference btwn ignorance & malice https://twitter.com/TheRealHoarse/status/1319795181567303684

so for the 198261015th time, the "fake Christian" rhetoric positions Christianity as inherently good in a way other religions are not, and absolves Christians from having to examine the way their communities reify hegemony and hate by pawning it off on a few bad apples

As usual, @C_Stroop does a great job of breaking it down: https://twitter.com/C_Stroop/status/1319813740322189312

Christians, especially liberal Christians, want to distance themselves from all the millennia of bad shit Christians have done, and are still doing, without grappling with it at all, by treating it as someone else's ("fake" Christians) history and someone else's current actions

And the closest parallel I can see is whiteness, and the refusal to grapple with our history and the way everyone who's white still benefits, whether we want to or not, from white supremacy. Western Christians, whether they want to or not, benefit from Christian hegemony.

And Christians don't get to pawn off dealing with their religion's history on "fake Christians" any more than white people get to pawn off our white privilege on slaveholders. (Especially since the two are deeply entwined.)

Christians want to hold up a nebulous ideal ("just be NICE to people" basically) as the only "real" Christianity, which is inside baseball. If you're not Christian, if you don't already believe, Christianity is what people who call themselves Christian, in aggregate, do.

And whenever you say this, Christians immediately get their backs up and claim you want to define Christianity by what the worst people calling themselves Christian do.

And, like, no. I am defining it by what ALL of you do.

And if, on aggregate, that definition ends up being really negative, the ethical solution isn't to attack anyone who's not Christian and is side-eyeing the behavior of the majority of people calling themselves Christian.

Like, if your house is dusty, the solution is to clean it, not attack any visitor who sneezes.

I also think that when Christians are citing all the good Christianity has supposedly done for the world, they need to grapple with how much of that "good" was done to further colonial aims.

And yes, I am aware that non-Western Christians exist, but given that they don't have hegemonic power over my society, they're not really relevant here.