Given the cross-section of my friends group, I would not be at all surprised if part of that Mr. and Mrs. Noah and Joan Ark crowd were selecting that answer just to be humorous, and to fuck with the results. It's a shovel-ready subject for meme aficionados.
4 weeks ago
russell - But which Christianity? There are a lot of them.
From the point-of-view of the christian nationalists, the answer to anyone capable of asking such a question is "clearly not yours." It's a very pluralistic, humanistic, Post-Enlightenment sort of question, and anyone who thinks that way is clearly an apostate and a victim of liberal delusions.
4 weeks ago
I think "breezy" captures a bit of the pejorative, since it is so often deployed as a collocation with "indifference."
I'm not going to bother trying to suss out the origins of Western Civilization as a concept because it is absolutely clear to me that the vast majority of the people who are acting as Western Civ chauvinists don't really mean Western Civilization when they deploy that term; it's just a bit to on-the-nose for them to say what they really mean: "Christendom."
They'll keep Judaism as a poor relation, and they have to baptize Plato and Aristotle posthumously (à la Aquinas) to keep their philosophical pretenses, but neither of those are truly in the line of succession. And if they can finally undo all that Enlightenment blather about pluralism and rationalism, they'll sure as shit go right back to calling it Christendom. Western Civ is just its nom de guerre.
Given the cross-section of my friends group, I would not be at all surprised if part of that Mr. and Mrs. Noah and Joan Ark crowd were selecting that answer just to be humorous, and to fuck with the results. It's a shovel-ready subject for meme aficionados.
russell - But which Christianity? There are a lot of them.
From the point-of-view of the christian nationalists, the answer to anyone capable of asking such a question is "clearly not yours." It's a very pluralistic, humanistic, Post-Enlightenment sort of question, and anyone who thinks that way is clearly an apostate and a victim of liberal delusions.
I think "breezy" captures a bit of the pejorative, since it is so often deployed as a collocation with "indifference."
I'm not going to bother trying to suss out the origins of Western Civilization as a concept because it is absolutely clear to me that the vast majority of the people who are acting as Western Civ chauvinists don't really mean Western Civilization when they deploy that term; it's just a bit to on-the-nose for them to say what they really mean: "Christendom."
They'll keep Judaism as a poor relation, and they have to baptize Plato and Aristotle posthumously (à la Aquinas) to keep their philosophical pretenses, but neither of those are truly in the line of succession. And if they can finally undo all that Enlightenment blather about pluralism and rationalism, they'll sure as shit go right back to calling it Christendom. Western Civ is just its nom de guerre.