Baptist are kind of the worst Christian group in my experience. I grew up Baptist. It’s all hate. It’s all denying other people things.
Saying anything they dont like is against Jesus.
Music. Clothes. Wrong haircut.
All banned.
Oh and it’s super racist. The white side is anyway.
Yeah, like, in raw harm done the catholic church is hard to beat and can only fairly be compared to other extremely large and powerful religious denominations. There’s so much to criticize about it as a force of colonialism and cultural destruction especially in the Americas. And the anti queer and anti woman issues are very real.
But also there’s a core of value there. The magesterium is an educated force of inertia, and sometimes that’s bad, but other times it’s telling peasants not to burn witches because witchcraft doesn’t exist or telling rulers to stop fighting or stop killing their subjects. The church is misogynistic, but it has room for women who don’t want to marry and has a place for a small amount of feminine power. The church has been a force of European imperialism, but all Catholics are supposed to be equal and loving to each other so I was raised to think of myself as part of a global and interracial brotherhood. And that’s without touching on the catholic workers or the corporal works of mercy. Ritual, community, and an interrogated theology with an expectation of education in it also were immensely valuable in my opinion. It was also a link to my heritage and a reason to not let my family fully assimilate.
By contrast my cousins on both sides were protestants and on one side I suspect they were baptist adjacent (but like, my uncle drank) they were just weird about it. One cousin of a cousin asked my parents if he could court my sister when they were like 10, his brother was quiverfull, and their sister was interracially adopted and wound up pretty fucked up by growing up in that environment. And the other side definitely were baptists and the girls weren’t allowed to wear pants, they tried to force my cousin once removed to stay with her husband who beat her and her mom, and their preacher used my great grandma’s funeral as an opportunity to tell us Catholics we were going to hell as the real focus of the funeral (great grandma never willingly joined their religion).
So yeah I’ve got some opinions on baptists. My experiences with protestants in general is that even though there are good protestant sects, when I left catholicism the episcopals probably are where I should have wound up instead of as an atheist for a few years until I became pagan, it’s the way many protestant sects acted, especially towards Catholics that put me off of them as a whole.
Baptist are kind of the worst Christian group in my experience. I grew up Baptist. It’s all hate. It’s all denying other people things. Saying anything they dont like is against Jesus.
Music. Clothes. Wrong haircut.
All banned.
Oh and it’s super racist. The white side is anyway.
Yeah, like, in raw harm done the catholic church is hard to beat and can only fairly be compared to other extremely large and powerful religious denominations. There’s so much to criticize about it as a force of colonialism and cultural destruction especially in the Americas. And the anti queer and anti woman issues are very real.
But also there’s a core of value there. The magesterium is an educated force of inertia, and sometimes that’s bad, but other times it’s telling peasants not to burn witches because witchcraft doesn’t exist or telling rulers to stop fighting or stop killing their subjects. The church is misogynistic, but it has room for women who don’t want to marry and has a place for a small amount of feminine power. The church has been a force of European imperialism, but all Catholics are supposed to be equal and loving to each other so I was raised to think of myself as part of a global and interracial brotherhood. And that’s without touching on the catholic workers or the corporal works of mercy. Ritual, community, and an interrogated theology with an expectation of education in it also were immensely valuable in my opinion. It was also a link to my heritage and a reason to not let my family fully assimilate.
By contrast my cousins on both sides were protestants and on one side I suspect they were baptist adjacent (but like, my uncle drank) they were just weird about it. One cousin of a cousin asked my parents if he could court my sister when they were like 10, his brother was quiverfull, and their sister was interracially adopted and wound up pretty fucked up by growing up in that environment. And the other side definitely were baptists and the girls weren’t allowed to wear pants, they tried to force my cousin once removed to stay with her husband who beat her and her mom, and their preacher used my great grandma’s funeral as an opportunity to tell us Catholics we were going to hell as the real focus of the funeral (great grandma never willingly joined their religion).
So yeah I’ve got some opinions on baptists. My experiences with protestants in general is that even though there are good protestant sects, when I left catholicism the episcopals probably are where I should have wound up instead of as an atheist for a few years until I became pagan, it’s the way many protestant sects acted, especially towards Catholics that put me off of them as a whole.