Idea

CW: Christianity, abortion, rape, abuse, militarism, police brutality, food, pregnancy, childbirth, white supremacy, eugenics, basically everything tbh


I've mentioned several times that I grew up Christian, and fewer times that I also incorporate some Christian ideology and mythos into my religious beliefs today.

I'm still pagan, of course. I'm polytheist, don't believe in the devil, don't believe in the Fall of Man, and don't believe that Jesus was the Son of God.

But at the same time, I just have a lot of respect for Christianity. Like...if done correctly, it can embody so many of the values that I already aspire to. It revolves around a possibly-gay, working-class Palestinian Jewish man conceived out of wedlock to a teen mom whose best friend was a sex worker. Said Jewish man fed millions of hungry people, provided free healthcare to the poor and disabled, chased capitalists with a whip, blessed a gay couple, and told the rich they had to give away all their money in order to get into heaven.

That's the antithesis of everything conservative Americans stand for.

But like...I've heard of this one kind of Satanism that involves Eve being worshipped as a goddess of feminism (I forget what it's called, but I'm pretty sure Mod Roman knows) and of gnostic Christianity, which involves worshipping a mother goddess. Which is a weird combination, but it's also just really interesting and somehow works for me, especially as a Hellenic revivalist because being an Aphrodite devotee sort of combines all the best things of Christianity and Satanism.

This is the weird shit I think about when I leave work an hour early because of flooding and wander around the nearest grocery store until I have to leave for night school (I bought juice and brownies, if you're curious). And I was just thinking about how there are so many powerful women in the Bible, so I started thinking about doing some kind of feminist writing on them.

So now that I'm actually at school and have two hours before my class starts, I'm in the library writing this post on one of the desktop computers there and trying to better organize my thoughts on this project.

First of all, what do I want it to be? Poetry? Vignettes? Short stories?

Second, I need to make a list of all the women in the Bible. So here are all the ones I can think of off the top of my head:

• Eve
• Lilith
• Naomi
• Ruth
• Sarah/Sarai
• Hagar
• Martha
• Mary (Martha's sister)
• Mary (Queen of Heaven)
• Mary Magdelene
• Esther
• Rebecca
• Rachel
• Leah
• Anne
• Elizabeth
• that one woman who almost got stoned to death
• Veronica

And, like, about this Christianity thing, I think I should address it.

So I was raised as a good little Catholic girl, going to Sunday school, getting confirmed, all that. I can still recite a lot of Catholic prayers on command.

And when I was in kindergarten, first grade, anything before that, I just...I didn't really get the concept, but my parents told me we were Christian and that meant we believed in God and Jesus was the Son of God and God loves us and we all go to heaven when we die as long as we're good and love Jesus.

Actually, purity culture and heteronormativity were just really weirdly tied into this, because when I was five and wondering where babies came from, I just assumed that a baby just instantly popped into the mom's stomach when people got married. Not her uterus, her actual stomach. I can actually remember sitting in my bath one night and wondering how she didn't shit the kid out whenever she had to go to the bathroom. Did she just not shit for nine months? Was there something holding the kid in place? (Note that I was born via C-section and the way this was explained to me was "the doctor cut Mommy's stomach open and took all her guts out", so at seven years old, I was shocked when we all had to draw pictures of the day we were born and the kid next to me drew a picture of him coming out from between his mom's legs.)

So after my dad died, we still went to church but it was a lot less often than before, unless we were with my maternal grandparents. At that point, we moved from a small rural town in Minnesota to a relatively diverse suburb near Detroit, which also lead to me discovering that not all my classmates were Christian. And I was told they were wrong and that Christianity was my religion and what I should believe, but also that I shouldn't tell other people that their religion was wrong.

And it was fine and I didn't really care, but there was still this sense that Christianity was the best religion, the superior religion, and that if you weren't Christian you were bad and probably going to hell. That wasn't as strong for me as it was for other people. Like, if you look at how my cousins were raised or how Mod Roman was raised, my own upbringing was pretty tame in comparison. It's definitely not to the point where I can be openly pagan at home, and I was also told that abortion is bad and that sex was for marriage only and that Good Girls Are Modest And Do Not Show The Sinful Thighs, but it really wasn't any worse than what most other Christian kids grow up learning. Like, just moderately sexist and heteronormative and Christian supremacist but not Mike Pence shit.

Sort of libertarian or neoliberal, I guess? Like, "respecting people's beliefs" could mean not outright being an asshole to gay people (as long as they were cis and didn't "shove their sexuality in people's faces") and non-Christians, but it could also mean "respecting the beliefs" of someone who supported conversion therapy and wanted people to be forced through unwanted pregnancies.

It could mean condemning rape, but also voting for a child molester and blaming victims for their own assault. Helping abuse victims, but staying quiet if you knew someone who was abusive.

Volunteering with the homeless, as long as they were "respectable" (meaning they weren't a sex worker or an addict). Condemning slavery and Jim Crow and not using racial slurs, but also condoning police brutality and the deportation of refugees. Being condescendingly sweet to disabled people and encouraging them to "beat the odds" (this lead to a lot of internalized ableism for me), but also supporting eugenics and doing nothing for disability rights.

It could mean uncritically supporting the military and police while quietly ignoring how racist, homophobic, transphobic, and sexist both institutions are and not doing anything to help survivors of military rape, victims of police brutality, people of color who have been harmed by the military industrial complex, LGBT veterans who were forced into the closet or de-transition, and disabled veterans who were injured in service or turned to drugs and alcohol to cope with their trauma - like, my mom would aggressively support casualties of military action in Asia (while probably doing very little to actually help them), but if she knew that my friend Stephen hates the military because they destroyed his dad's hometown in Iraq, she would be just as aggressive about yelling that he was ungrateful, racist (toward white people), un-American, anti-Christian (he's Christian himself, actually, but that's beside the point), and probably a supporter of Isis and/or the Taliban.

I, thankfully, began to see through this bullshit at a young age. When I was about eight, I realized - while sitting in church, of all places - that I had never been given concrete proof that Christianity was true. How did I really know? I couldn't see God. Sure, people had actually lived in Jesus' time, but back then we didn't know as much about science as we do today so they'd probably gotten facts wrong because they couldn't explain it with science. Given this revelation, I decided that I was an atheist. If given proof, sure, I'd be Christian, but until that happened...why should I? Was I supposed to buy into this belief system that I disagreed with just because it was written down in a book and adults wanted me to agree with them?

But I was also smart enough to understand that I should probably keep quiet about this. So I went through the motions. Went to Catechism, had my first Communion, etc.

Then some other shit happened that I'm not going to get into here, and around eleven years old I decided I believed in God again. So I just identified as Catholic by default, given that it was the religion I was raised with. I didn't have a word for it, but I was basically Unitarian Christian. Maybe Unitarian Universalist or agnostic pantheist.

And it worked and I was fine, but that changed after I went on my first mission trip when I was fourteen, the summer before ninth grade. Speaking of - I feel like I should explain these mission trips. Yes, they were run by my church and most of our clients were Christian and they were probably an example of Christian privilege, since Christians had easier access to our help than non-Christians. But they consisted mostly of going to old people's houses and doing their gardening, rather than, say, going to India to build a church while taking poverty porn pictures with the poor unenlightened brown people.

The point is, I was basically "born again" at that point, and I was more than eager to share my spirituality with the world, whether they wanted to hear it or not. I wasn't as conservative as some of my family - I didn't have anything against gay people, I mean. My stance on trans people hadn't really changed for better or worse. And while I disapproved of premarital sex and "immodesty", it was also a relatively low concern. I did believe that Christianity was the only true religion, though.

The catalyst for me getting out of that was my Spanish teacher in sophomore year, who was probably the most progressive teacher I had in high school. She was the "spiritual, not religious" type and considered herself a feminist, but she was also definitely a libfem. Like, supporting gay rights, but also being transphobic. Being pro-choice and supporting sex education, but calling everyone with a vagina "female". Remember my post "The Privilege of Cuteness", when Alex talked about how middle-class cishet abled white women tend to be drawn to white, liberal feminism? Like, they'll be progressive, they'll be all about "girl power", but they're also really cutesy and noncommittal about it and really dismissive of antifascism and leftist intersectional feminism because they're living in a privileged bubble and don't really have much to fight for? My teacher was like that.

I'm bringing her up because of how, when we were talking about Moorish Spain and how she'd been on the Camino de Santiago, she explained her religious beliefs and they just resonated with me, which made me think about my own. Which lead to me identifying as a "Christian spiritualist" and eventually becoming pagan.

Now, remember that sophomore year was also the year I came to terms with not being straight - and started dealing with a ton of shit from conservative Christians for that. So when I converted to paganism and realized even further how fucked-up so much of Christianity was, I was understandably not feeling all that warm and fuzzy toward it and everything that had to do with it. I had a lot to heal from.

But eventually, through the pagan/witchcraft/occult community (there's a lot of crossover between them), I was exposed to things like gnostic Christianity, christopaganism, Christian witchcraft, and leftist Christianity. It was Christianity the way I felt Jesus would have wanted it.

And while I didn't actually become Christian and don't ever intend to, it did make it easier for me to explore Christianity on my own terms and select things I agreed with to incorporate into my beliefs. Mary and the Saints, for one thing. And Bible verses that I agreed with. I explored my thoughts on Jesus and decided that I revered him as a spiritual teacher and ethicist, but not as the Son of God. I explored my thoughts on God themself, deciding my concept of God was animist (believing that there is a life force in everything) and pantheist (believing that the universe is God and that everything is connected).

And I was still pagan. I followed the Nine Rules of LaVeyan Satanism. I prayed to Aphrodite and other pagan gods, celebrated the changing of the seasons, and worshipped in nature rather than a church. My religious beliefs have evolved and changed, and they're continuing to do so.

In the pagan community, this is called christopaganism. It's not Christianity, and most Christians will probably never warmly welcome a christopagan into their church. Most Christians and many pagans don't believe that it's valid and just see it as a transitional religion, expecting us to just pick a side once and for all. Or they think it's the same as Christian witchcraft, even though they'll yell at the top of their lungs that paganism and witchcraft are two different things.


When I was first converting to paganism, I made a post about my religious beliefs. I'm not making a link to it because it's from our first URL, and most of the posts on there are really cringe-y and were mostly written during my MOGAI phase or when I was first getting involved in feminism but was still really liberal. I'm going to make a post like that again - in fact, it will be the next one on the list.