Tag Archives: Christian hegemony

Religion

A polytheist’s thoughts on “universal salvation” and Christian hegemony

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Note: This post is heavily based on a Twitter thread I posted. I’ve edited and added to what I said there to flesh out a few more thoughts in this post.

The other day a Christian’s post about universal salvation came across my Threads feed and I decided to post something to my social media accounts1 about it:

I got a wide range of comments in reply to this, including strong agreement with my point of view, like a friend who shared a tweet from a couple years ago where they expressed very similar sentiments.

Then there were those who offered a different understanding of universal salvation, like this one:

Some were curious and expressed genuine curiosity about the point I was getting at, even asking clarifying questions. Overall I ended up having a number of thoughtful conversations with people. Oh sure, there were the naysayers. One person condemned the whole idea of universal salvation. A couple people simply said I didn’t understand universal salvation or what heaven would be like.2

There was also the fact that people didn’t get the deeper message that I was going for: the Christian hegemony that’s often inherent in many models of universal salvation. Now, I grant you, that’s at least partly my fault. For the sake of brevity, I said something and a lot of people focused on the details of my words. In retrospect, I should have done a better job of explaining my broader point.

But the reality is that many Christians’ idea of “universal salvation” seems to amount to “our understanding of god is still the right one, but our god will still let you into the party despite not believing in him.” In many ways, that still invalidates those of us who honor other deities or practice other religions.3 Josh Scott, lead pastor at Gracepointe Church in Nashville Tennessee actually addressed this when I asked him a question about Christian supremacy during one church service:4

I appreciate Josh’s willingness to point out that Christian supremacy and Christian Nationalism go hand-in-hand and that the former is just the most extreme and most toxic manifestation of the latter. I tried to make this point in a question in one of my follow-up tweets to the universal salvation conversation(s):

I also think it’s important to notice an important phrase uttered by the Jewish journalist in Josh’s story: “[You believe that] I’m okay with God because of Jesus.” The fact is, the very premise that we need to “be made okay with God” upholds Christian hegemony. A lot of us already see ourselves as right with the Divine or numinous. Or if we need to get right or reconnect with the Divine or the numinous, we believe that is a matter for us to take care of for ourselves, not some external savior. So in this sense, many Christians who espouse universal salvation5 push a model that still says we (1) need to be reconciled with the Divine and (2) need a figure from their religion to handle that reconciliation.

This is why I’d encourage those Christians who espouse universal salvation and/or universal reconciliation to dig a little deeper and consider how their understanding of those concepts might still be problematic, especially to those of us who are not Christians.

Post History: I started the first draft of this post on September 6, 2024. I completed that draft on September 7, 2024. I proofread, revised, and finalized the post on September 8, 2024.

Footnotes

  1. I included the tweet in this post. The same post can also be found on Threads and BlueSky however. Similarly, while there were some responses on Threads, I will mostly be showing responses received on Twitter, as that’s where I got the most feedback and engagement. ↩︎
  2. I mean, that may be a fair assessment, but just stating that with no further comment does not actually keep the dialogue going. Tell me where my understanding is wrong, maybe? Many thanks to those who chose to keep the dialogue going, even if they disagreed with me. Of course, I’ll note that I never set down a rule about what universal salvation was. I specifically said “if this is your definition, then I have an issue with it.” ↩︎
  3. There’s a similar problem with claims that “we’re really worshiping the same god anyway.” I’m a polytheist and my deities are not the Christian (or any other monotheistic) god in cosplay., ↩︎
  4. I snagged this clip from the church’s YouTube video of the full service. This clip starts at about the 51:40 mark of the full video. ↩︎
  5. Note that I’m not claiming that all Christians who espouse universal salvation or universal reconciliation hold to such views. in fact, Josh Scott’s church makes it clear that all people are already valued and accepted by God and deny that this was the purpose of Jesus’s ministry at all. However, I think it’s important to discuss that even among “progressive Christians,” a lot of models offered for universal salvation do get pretty messy when viewed through a pluralistic lens. ↩︎
Paganism, Religion, Religious Discrimination

“Religion” and “Christianity” are not synonyms: Why it’s important we don’t surrender words the the hegemony

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Yesterday, I ran into the following image over on Threads:

For those who cannot see the image, it’s a lovely block of text written by Witch Joseph. The text reads as follows:

Dear Religious People…I don’t know what I believe and post about offend you…it’s not like I follow a book that teaches that you will be torture in flames for eternity for not believing as I do…now that would be offensive.

Over all, I think it’s a powerful statement and one that I agree with. However, the fact that it’s addressed to “religious people” bothered me a bit. You see, I’m religious myself. In fact, a lot of witches are.

Witch Joseph and I had a brief conversation about that fact and I think was a productive one. To summarize, he acknowledged that he too is religious and that he’s using “religious” in the context of the above statement to mean a very particular kind of religiosity. In many ways, I can respect that. After al, I’ve written more than a few answers about what people possibly mean when they say they’re “spiritual but not religious”1 over on Quora and those answers usually involve acknowledging that people using a very particular definition of “religiosity as well.”

And yet, I’m still personally uncomfortable with it. After all, I’m not convinced that people who read the text in the image are aware that the author is using a very particular definition of “religious people” or “religion” or that there are other definitions out there. As the title of this blog post suggests, it feels to me as though it helps to further embed the idea that “religion” and “Christianity” are synonyms. In a society where Christian hegemony is rampant and often goes unrecognized, I think that’s concerning.

I think it’s a bad idea to let Christians define what it means to be “religious” and surrender the word to their mechanizations. As someone who is a member of a minority religion, I think it’s important to point out that “religion” and “religiosity” comes in many shapes, sizes, colors, and flavors. Otherwise , we help pave the way for those who want to say that our religions are not “real religions” because they’re nothing like Christianity, the “gold standard” of religions in many people’s minds.

Relatedly, I want to draw people’s attention to Yvonne Aburrow’s series of videos in which they advocate for Pagans reclaiming certain words (including “religion“). I think it’s important to show that these words have other meanings and remind everyone that there are ideas in the “religious marketplace” that are substantively different than (a particular kind of) Christianity.

Footnote

  1. Personally, I find that phrasing troubling as well, and for many of the same reasons. I think this is important to note that my issue is not with Witch Joseph (in fact, I think he’s awesome). My problem is with a broader trend that I find concerning because it’s so common. Joseph merely provided a recent example of that trend. ↩︎