Maybe. I was raised Methodist, which isn’t evangelical (or wasn’t . . . it arguably half is now? . . . schisms are fun!), and I’m a pretty chill atheist. Like, I really don’t care if other people believe or not. As long as you don’t impose your beliefs on me, or try to convert me, you are welcome to believe in Zeus. I don’t care.
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I will try to watch it someday, although I´m not a big fan of the director.
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Before they became the missionaries, inquisitors, witch burners, colonizers, and slave traders, white Europeans were once the colonized. They were pagans, animists, and ancestor-venerators. They worshipped in forests, danced around bonfires, honored goddesses and spirits, followed the moon, and buried their dead with ritual and reverence. Their bodies were sacred. Their gods lived in rivers, trees, and stars, not in cathedrals. They didn’t worship a white man on a cross. They didn’t believe in heaven.
In Celtic lands, they honored Brigid and Cernunnos. In Scandinavia, they praised Odin and Thor. In Germanic and Slavic regions, they lit candles on rivers, worshipped gods of thunder and fertility, and protected their homes with spirits. Even in Greece and Rome, the divine was everywhere, in wine, sex, music, death. These weren’t fringe beliefs. They were Europe’s dominant spiritual systems for millennia.
Then came Christianity, not as a gentle gospel, but as empire. Rome didn’t adopt it for holiness, it adopted it for power. It fused church and state, crushed resistance, and declared that loyalty to God was loyalty to Caesar. Villages were conquered, altars destroyed, ancestral rites outlawed. Pagan gods were recast as demons. Folk healers became witches. Children were taught that their ancestors were evil, their desires were sinful, and their salvation required submission.
The same Europe that would later sneer at African religions as “primitive” had already erased its own.
Christian colonization didn’t start in Africa or the Americas. It started in the forests of Germany, the highlands of Scotland, the farms of France, and the backroads of Italy. It began by convincing poor white people that their natural ways of knowing, of healing, of honoring the land, of connecting to spirit were dangerous.
By the time ships crossed the Atlantic, Europe had been spiritually gutted. Its gods were buried. Its matriarchs burned. Its peasants broken in by religious law.
And the Bible was colonized too. It wasn’t handed down whole. It was assembled by councils, edited by kings, and weaponized by empire. What began as oral tradition was cut, redacted, and rewritten to crown monarchs, justify war, and crush dissent.
So when enslaved Africans were handed a Bible, it wasn’t a message of liberation, it was a plantation manual. Hollowed out. Rinsed in empire. Designed to keep the enslaved obedient and the enslavers divine.
the rest
The very people who forced Christianity on us, white colonizers and slaveowners, had it forced on them first. So the tragedy is double-layered.
We inherited a religion that was already a tool of conquest. We were handed a Bible that had already been redacted by kings, sanitized by empires, and weaponized against the poor. We were told to trust the same cross that had crushed entire cultures long before it ever reached African shores.
And yet, we made it ours. We found rhythm in the chains. We whispered resistance into hymns. We turned a tool of submission into a source of survival. That’s the brilliance and the heartbreak.
But the irony still stands: we are worshiping inside a house built by people who were spiritually colonized, before they ever colonized us. We took comfort in a doctrine that once robbed them of theirs. We were handed a gospel of obedience that had already been used to domesticate white peasants, to silence their grandmothers, to demonize their gods.
And now here we are, descendants of the enslaved, still clutching the colonizer’s Bible, still calling on a name that came to us not through revelation, but through chains.
That doesn’t make our faith illegitimate. But it does demand that we tell the truth about how it got here.
Because only when we name the irony can we begin to untangle the trauma. Only when we see how colonization moves through spirit as much as land can we begin to reclaim what was taken from us.
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UGH, there is an ATL connection, too, with In Touch Ministries, who has an association with my sister’s church…
Her pastor is that guy’s son.
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Yeah, and it has an ATL connection, too… I’m so sick of these fucking colonizers. Go away, dipshits, no one wants your shitty version of god.
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This is legalized work place relligious-based bullying.
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Its ok if the other person can turn around and talk to them about Baphomet
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Of course, that’s not how that’ll work. The Satanist (or Muslim, or Jew, or Pagan, or Hindu, or Buddhist, or even Catholic/Lutheran/Quaker/AMC,etc who isn’t properly right wing) will end up fired for violating the “religious rights” of the far right, white supremacist evangelical, while the Evangelical will be allowed to spout all manner of bigotry with utter impunity.
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Even if they allow that, majorities have far more power to harass minorities than the reverse.
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Also, it’s an executive order. A smart employee knows it will get rescinded by the next Democratic administration.
In my experience there aren’t a whole lot of career civil servants chomping at the bit to tell you about their religion.
(Of course, I’m in the DC area, so YMMV.)
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Evangelical Co-worker: “hey, brother, have you heard the good news?”
Me: “what? you’re leaving? well, that is good news!”
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In which year is this scheduled?
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OK, finished the The Kingdom Power and the Glory. interesting cast of horrible characters. Still, as someone who would reject the teachings of Thomas Road Baptist Church theologically, this was not really my kind of book.
The descent into madness is chronicled, as well as the scriptural justifications-- or perhaps excuses-- for doing so. Trumpism packs the pews; the Gospel does not. (Ironically, I was reading it alongside Gospel by Wilton Barnhardt, which is pretty irreverent.)
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I have a suspicion that this will applied very differently in cases of Christian evangelism vs. Muslim or Hindu or anything else. Tjere is so much unspoken in these rules. Just like Republican presidents will enjoy presumed immunity, white, conservative Chrstians will enjoy a very different level of “religious freedom” than everyone else. We are well on our way to a multi-level citizenship regime.
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