ok anyway i’m gonna draft this cus this might just be me getting mad about a thing that is very specific to me idk

basically i saw a post (and it really doesn’t matter who wrote it cus it’s more than a year old now and it didn’t even break 300 notes) which was making fun of people for claiming to have religious trauma when OP assumed they hadn’t been to X amount of catholic services. this by itself is a bit silly bc catholics gatekeeping religious trauma as being exclusive to them is obviously myopic, but one of the tags was like “you don’t have religious trauma you have ptsd from familial abuse that used religion against you” and im like. i fail to see how that’s not religious trauma?

like i’ve said before on this blog, my religious education was primarily reform jewish via my mom with smatterings of various christian denominations mostly via my dad; you could not measure any amount of “christian religious trauma” i have by continuous service attendance but like yeah my experience of christianity is still primarily one of punishment, alienation, antisemitism, supersessionism. and like sure, my dad is a dipshit who never stuck with anything for very long including going to any one church, so no that trauma does not include X hours of christian education or whatever. but boy oh boy did he still like weaponizing our “christian heritage” when i exhibited any proximity to judaism!

and i also feel like *part of* my difficulty with christianity is specifically not knowing what the fuck christians are talking about when they talk about concepts that are seemingly basic to them and having to piece it together after the fact from the random smattering of things i *do* know. and these concepts are just woven in the fabric of US society; everyone seems to understand them instinctively but me! or like i’ll be talking with my (ex-)christian friends about our various bad run-ins with christianity and then it’ll be my turn to talk and they’ll look at me like i have three heads because they can’t conceive of religious trauma that’s specifically centered around christian antisemitism. or i’ll be talking with my jewish friends and because *they* had a more rigorous or conservative jewish education, i won’t fit in with them either--and this too can be partially due to religious trauma on their part!

i guess the other thing too is, this post was kind of in keeping with a different post i saw about protestants appropriating catholic iconography when trying to make art about *their* religious trauma. and on the one hand it’s funny to me that we’re supposed to care about the trappings of a colonial institution being appropriated, on the other hand it’s funny as an outside observer cus i do think the iconography they listed as examples are more alike between catholicism and protestantism than they are different. like i remember some of the examples were stained glass and gothic churches (protestants also have those; i live in a city with many protestant gothic churches) and multi-eyed and winged angels (those are described in the tanakh; they are not exclusive to either of you).

and like maybe it’s corny but i do think they have become kind of signaling things for people with religious trauma to find each other and talk about their experiences. are these particular symbols necessarily 100% authentic to everyone’s experience? probably not, but 1.) they make cool art, and 2.) the looming and foreboding nature of some of these symbols (i’m thinking of the exteriors of gothic churches especially) can be evocative of the sense of alienation one feels when you’ve definitively decided you no longer want anything to do with the church, but it’s still ever present. imo these types are mad because they want exclusive use of the cool art symbolism more than they want to facilitate community. if you wanted to say that art symbolism is not a solid basis for a community, THAT would be an argument i’d respect, but that’s not what y’all said.