Attack of the TRUE CHRISTIANS™: Christians’ struggle to out-Jesus each other continues apace

No matter how many people Christianity loses or how much cultural power erodes away from it, TRUE CHRISTIANS™ still feel the same drive to invalidate each other. It’s a stunning refutation of Jesus’ prayer that his followers would astonish the world with their sheer unity and single-mindedness, but they don’t care. Their need to feel like the prettiest princesses at the ball overrides any other consideration. Today, I’ll show you what TRUE CHRISTIANS™ are, how they define themselves, and why they love the damage they’re doing to their own tribe.

(From the introduction: The Angola paper. Archaeology News. The Cretaceous shoreline. How our modern politics might flow from that ancient ocean’s course.)

(This post originally appeared on Patreon on 4/27/2023. Its audio ‘cast lives there too, and both should be available by the time you see this! <3)

The incompetent godling who created TRUE CHRISTIANS™

In the all-too-brief Gospels of the New Testament, the character of Jesus forgets to tell his followers any number of important—one might even say crucial—details about the religion he was starting.

He also forgets to tell them to stop practicing slavery and treating women like property. He also forgot to mention the importance of hygiene in disease prevention. I’m not even getting into the stuff he told them that is completely false, like demons and thoughtcrimes (“sin”) causing physical and mental illness—or about his followers’ future unity of purpose. But regarding his future religion, he forgets a great many details.

Future Christians have never stopped arguing about those details. They never will stop arguing about them.

One of those details involves exactly what one of his followers should believe and do to be counted as his follower in the first place.

Sure, sure, Christians hand-wave away this little detail. Gosh, I have heard them declare with their kitten-wide eyes, He knew already that some of his followers would require more rules and strictness than others! What a wise and generous god he is to us!

However, that’s nothing but post hoc reasoning, at best.

Worse, nothing that Christians claim can be supported with objective, credible evidence. So those claims must be evaluated only through subjective evaluation. In other words, the claim rises or falls depending on how Christians feel about it.

Sidebar: Defining TRUE CHRISTIANITY™

Very few Christians will ever admit that they believe an inferior set of claims. Even fewer will concede that their chosen flavor of the religion fails to do what Jesus said his followers should do, but that a competing flavor does that and better besides. The kinds of Christians who buy into TRUE CHRISTIANITY™ definitely won’t.

So when Christians start going off about fakey-fake Christians or calling themselves the real deal, then, know that they are setting their own beliefs as the standard by which all other beliefs should be judged. This is the definition that TRUE CHRISTIANS™ are going by when they judge fellow Christians:

1. Beliefs that more or less align with the judge’s own
2. Customs, culture-war positions, and devotions that the judge likes and feels are appropriate
3. Scandals and behavior that aren’t completely out-of-bounds to the judge

The third also includes deconversion, heresy, and apostasy. That’s why, when an ex-Christian lets TRUE CHRISTIANS™ know their status, the TRUE CHRISTIANS™ will invariably declare that person’s former belief set invalid and false—and insist that holding false beliefs is exactly why the ex-Christian deconverted. Similarly, when a megapastor scandal hits the news, TRUE CHRISTIANS™ are likely to blame the scandal on that pastor’s inferior beliefs or teachings.

The source of TRUE CHRISTIANS™

Because of the religion’s glaring flaws and omissions, Christianity has always fractured along fractal lines. Over time, it’s developed more and more variations. And it does this instead of streamlining. It can’t streamline, because nobody in the religion can point to any objective reason for anyone else to adopt their set of claims. At best, they might browbeat or manipulate a few competitors into accepting different claims. Or they might accelerate the spiraling of a few wingnuts who aren’t as far along on an extremist path like biblical literalism.

The only times in history that this fracturing has slowed down have been when some flavor of Christians gain temporal power. If that happens, they can and do trample competing variations—and often, the people holding them—to death.

Lacking that, they all just fling emotional abuse at their competitors for holding subjectively-inferior beliefs. If they are TRUE CHRISTIANS™, after all, that makes competing flavors not-true! It’s a really mean way to treat others, but it’s possibly Christians’ very favorite pastime. Even otherwise-nice Christians do it.

This abuse fulfills two important goals.

First, it reinforces the abusers’ own sense of tribalistic superiority and belonging.

Second, it allows the abusers to praise themselves and their tribemates as the truest Christians who ever Jesus-ed.

Spotting TRUE CHRISTIANS™ in the wild

To find TRUE CHRISTIANS™, just look for Christians using that or a similar phrase to describe themselves. They’ll be doing it to invalidate any Christians who hold different beliefs, if not to rip away their entire right to use that label. They’ll also be trying to make themselves sound like Jesus’ very favorite pretty princesses.

In today’s case, our TRUE CHRISTIANS™ use the euphemism “Bible-believing Christians.”

Today’s OP (original post; discussion spark; OP can also contextually refer to the “original poster” who wrote the OP) comes to us from the subreddit r/TrueChristians (archive). The first time I encountered it, I thought that subreddit (or sub) name was a sarcastic, ironic joke. But no, they’re serious. They really think they are TRUE CHRISTIANS™. (I note, however, that their super-official TRUE CHRISTIAN™ Bible study has garnered exactly zero comments 20 days after being pinned.)

The folks who frequent this subreddit selflessly provide countless examples of every toxic Christian trope in existence. From using threats to try to gain compliance (from, presumably, all the non-Christians frequenting their sub) to callously Jesus juking their peers’ expressions of very normal, human fears, this sub has got it all.

(A Jesus juke is when a Christian pompously Jesus-es at other Christians to shame them for not Jesus-ing hard enough, instead of just participating in the conversation like a normal human being with compassion and feelings.)

What’s hilarious is that if you peruse the main page of the sub, you’ll quickly notice that many topics garner almost no comments. It’s clear that these TRUE CHRISTIANS™ avoid difficult topics or overly obvious attention-seekers. But they glommed right onto today’s OP—for reasons that will become obvious very quickly.

An OP that’s nothing but an invitation to circlejerk about their superiority to other Christians

Today’s TRUE CHRISTIAN™ titled their OP “I didn’t realize it, but there is a difference between Bible Believers and Christians.”

Reaction from most of them: You don’t say?

See, this particular TRUE CHRISTIAN™ had had a run-in with an atheist. The atheist mentioned rampant Christian hypocrisy, and so this TRUE CHRISTIAN™ had to hand-wave away that problem. Thanks to their belief in TRUE CHRISTIANITY™, it was easy-peasy. I’ll reprint the entire OP, because various commenters replied to different parts of it:

All Bible Believer are Christians. But not all Christians are Bible Believers.

I actually had to explained this to an atheist that the Christians who don’t actually follow the Bible, but either practice or believe things that contradict the Bible such as idolizing passions or fornication, are not Bible Believing Chrisitians.

So when I’m trying to be specific I say Bible believing Christians to help atheists understand that all Christians who don’t follow the Bible aren’t Bible Believers.

The reason why this is important because nonbelievers can get confused when they witness Christians constantly contradicting the Bible.

I used to not be a Bible believing Christian. I believe in Christ, but I did not believe what He preached or what the Bible preached. I picked and chose what I liked about the Bible. I guess that would be called a lukewarm Christian, right?

So maybe the correct terms would be Bible believing Christians and lukewarm Christian.

I’m just looking for the correct terms to explain to Nonbelievers and even Believers who see Christians contradicting the Bible whether that be Christians practicing fornication or practicing greed.

See? They’re just trying to figure out how to explain rampant Christian hypocrisy to the unwashed heathens of their world! That’s all!

Yeah, no. This OP is nothing but a self-serving invitation to circlejerk. And largely, that is exactly how OP’s commenters took it.

(In online jargon, a “circlejerk” is just a go-nowhere, do-nothing discussion that exists only to fluff up the narcissistic people having it. My mom would have called these discussions a meeting of the Mutual Admiration Society. See also: Sunday morning services in almost every Christian church.)

TRUE CHRISTIANS™ pity those poor, misbegotten cultural Christians who are nowhere near as TRUE™ as they are

The top comments expressed pity for anyone that doesn’t Jesus as hard or as correctly as TRUE CHRISTIANS™ do.

[T]here are those that are Christian just because that’s what thier family was or surroundings dictated but they never really gave much thought or reason, while they’re are those who are more zealous in thier practice and try to follow doctrine more closely. [Far-Resident 4913]

[Y]ou are not actually a Christian just because you are surrounded by it. It starts the day you realize GOD loves you and you disobey anyway, and you feel remorse for that grace. [Thin_Professional98]

This is what 1 John is about – The difference between a true Christian and a fake one [Guwop1017jb]

Others clearly felt hard-done-by in being judged by these obviously inferior Christians.

Yes, the world tends to judge Christianity based on bad or lukewarm Christians, not the true believers. [christmas__rose]

Yeah I see your point. Just like prosperity Gospel preachers don’t present all Protestants. [Sanchez326, replying to christmas__rose]

Poor dears. It’s just so unfair!

Yes, this was a topic these TRUE CHRISTIANS™ could get behind

One commenter offered quite a novel theory about where the name “Christian” came from, and they use it as a way to invalidate other Christians:

The new believers in the NT were so much like Jesus in terms of their love for God and for each other and for the lost that the term “Christian” was coined. If you don’t have that kind of love, you aren’t Christian. [SwiftwindAlacorn]

The OP expressed a little confusion there, which another commenter tried to answer:

I totally get what you saying. But how do differentiate those who claim to be Christians but don’t follow Christ or the Bible? [shamystrawberry]

professed. nominal. CINOs? [problypoopinrn]

Got it [shamystrawberry]

I’m sure the OP did indeed “get it.”

(CINO: Christian in name only. A popular way to invalidate Christians with competing beliefs.)

Some wild pushback appears!

But a couple of commenters pushed back, first in that subthread and elsewhere as top-level comments to the OP:

I think the debate is less about following the Bible and more about how people might interpret the Bible differently than you. Jesus himself said what was required of us. We, all Christians, should be concerned with spreading love and kindness, not division or differences. We have to focus on what we have in common. [ARPoker, replying to “I totally get what you are saying”]

There is a real risk here. In theory, it sounds good, but in practice, it often means: only people who interpret the Bible exactly like me, are true Christians. [SeredW]

While I think I can agree with what you’re saying, I don’t really find it beneficial to figure out who’s a real believer and who isn’t. Jesus wasn’t so concerned about correctly identifying “who’s in and who’s out” as he was with loving other people. While yes, there are many that will call themselves Christians that will not enter the Kingdom of God, that’s not stated for us to try and figure out who’s who. It’s for us to look at our OWN hearts to see if we ourselves are loving servants of the King. [ShanMan42]

But someone replying to ShanMan42 took umbrage to that fairly reasonable statement:

Do you attempt to witness to unbelievers to hopefully bring them to Christ? Why wouldn’t you attempt to bring decieved [sic] “believers” to a better relationship with Christ? [TeaVinylGod, replying to ShanMan42 above]

Aren’t you even a little worried about the eternal fates of those ickie fake Christians who aren’t TRUE™ like us? OMG, dude, what is WRONG with you?!?

And then, what always happens when TRUE CHRISTIANS™ circlejerk

Further downthread, ItaySeven got into the nitty gritty of establishing TRUE CHRISTIANS™ as “disciples of Christ/followers of Christ” and piously declaring that iT’s NoT a ReLiGiOn, iT’s a ReLaTiOnShiP. Don’t miss the Jews-for-Jesus posturing in that subthread.

Eventually, the comments devolve into loftily proclaiming that “FEW Christians are believers” and fighting about the propriety of feeling nervous when Jesus supposedly says that few who call him “Lord, Lord” will get into Heaven.

Somehow, a few commenters eventually land on arguing about whether or not stillborn babies and severely autistic children can go to Heaven.

There’s no use at all to telling them that anything about Christianity that’s important enough to require its own flavor really should be something that they can objectively argue is superior. They’ve already shot their critical-thinking ability to death—at least regarding the topic of Christianity, if not everywhere else. There’s nothing objectively true about a single Christian claim. They lack an entire tether to reality. That’s why the doctrinal yardstick exists in the first place. Indeed, they’ll never wonder why one Christian’s core make-or-break “gospel issue” is another’s easily-hand-waved-away preference, nor why both of those Christians will always think that Jesus himself thinks the same way.

I’d say “Don’t ever change, r/TrueChristians,” except I already know they won’t. So there’s no need to say it.

The self-fulfilling worldview that implodes on impact with competing worldviews

One thing you’ll notice very quickly, if you check out the OP, is that almost everyone there is some flavor of Christian. I spotted only one person who flagged their account as “Agnostic.” For that matter, after a quick once-over I spotted only few commenters who might have been mainline, and only two who were some kind of Catholic. Most people were some flavor of evangelical. (Many were unflagged, but their comments definitely made them sound like evangelicals as well.)

Every one of those flavors competes against the others in some way. And you can just watch all these little squabbles erupting in the OP’s comments. Not one of them seems to have declined the opportunity to showboat their superior Jesus-osity to the rest. When anyone even slightly pushes back against one of the showboaters, an argument instantly sparks to life. Of course, nobody leaves these little arguments chastened, or changes their own beliefs even a little. They all leave thinking it’s very sad that the Jesus didn’t strong-arm a change of that other person’s beliefs.

I’d wager that for every single Christian who hangs out at r/TrueChristian, there are a dozen others there whose beliefs would immediately lead them to label that Christian a false one. And that one Christian would consider all of those other flavored Christians to be false as well.

Can you even imagine the sheer cognitive dissonance that flows from participating in a subreddit with that sort of name, and yet constantly encountering Christians from all of those other competing flavors?

As I said, I seriously thought this subreddit was a joke. I thought its creator had intended to make some kind of ironic statement about how Christians destroy their own credibility as a group by fostering this kind of disunity with other Christians. Maybe that person was.

But if so, the TRUE CHRISTIANS™ of r/TrueChristian have inverted the joke by being its living embodiment. Too bad Jesus couldn’t see that coming!

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