here's my heart, come and find it

coffeeandink made an amazing post the other day that I want to shamelessly rehash. The post is titled Religion!=Christianity, which is a reasonable summation of half of her points, but it leaves out her fucking spot-on discussion of the ramifications of the very real hierarchy of religion in ~the West~. (I hate that word too, I'm sorry, but I can't think of another word that's not tautological.)

This is kyriarchy, right here. Christianity is supreme because of colonialism; Jews are given a pass because we're perceived as wealthy and white. (In my own case, because I am. But that's another privilege on top of the ones I already get from being Jewish instead of any other minority religion.) Needless to say, Ashkenazi Jews are more likely to be wealthy and white and so have more acceptability in mainstream culture, and of that subset German Jews -- half my family heritage and the ones I know the family stories of -- were the most acceptable for ages because of a relentless campaign of assimilation on our parts, though within America the point is muddied and I'm sure there are complications elsewhere and elsewhen that I don't know about. A lot of the reason polytheistic religions are treated as just silly, I would guess, is because they were the target of missionary movements, because they were the colonized and not the colonizer. A lot of the reason Islam is racialized in countries that don't have the deep-seated Crusader fear of the Turk, I would guess, is that we have issues with admitting that there's another major world religion that isn't colonized; if they're not the misguided heathen, they must be the implacable Other.

Someone in a post about good_ficday suggested -- for real -- that Western countries are not Christian. I am not going to speak to the experience of those in other countries, but ha ha, I kind of went off the handle thinking about this one. The reason that my religion is even a little bit respected is because this is a Christian country, and it's in the best interest of the Christian majority to tolerate Judaism, for now, because it fits very neatly into the majority categories.

I don't need to get into how deep-seated my paranoia of toleration in the grand tradition of Western Europe is? Like, I think the reasons are pretty obvious? A week ago we had our Holocaust unit in my history major seminar and the Jewish professor decided that we should also watch a documentary that was coming to campus at around the same time. It was about Jews living in Germany, specifically survivors who'd returned after the camps. It was kind of harrowing and I cried a lot, but that's actually not my point, because, you know, the Holocaust, it's bad I guess, old news. What was new news for me was the speaker who I immediately found untrustworthy -- I felt so vindicated when he started to talk and I disagreed with him -- and then I realized why I found him untrustworthy. It's because he "looked Jewish." He had curly hair and features that centered around his nose and small eyes, i. e., he looked like ME AND ALL MY RELATIVES.

And I genuinely want to hear it if people from Western Europe or Australia feel that way about being a practicing Christian in a predominantly atheist country, that they're so devalued that even to themselves they are a bogeyman. But I can fucking tell you right now that that is not how it works in the United States of America in my experience or the experience of anyone I know, particularly for those who belong to the acceptable Protestant sects. And I will flip my lid if one more person tries to tell me that it is.