[rant; religion] {faith is both a prison and an open hand}

[kaberett]

Content notes: evangelism, mention of non-current suicidality.

Proposition: I should be able to walk into my workplace without being fucking evangelised at. I expect it from the Jehovah's Witnesses (misc) and the Mormons (home of Creepy Sexy Jesus across the way from work); I don't bloody want it inside my department building.

It's the Christian Union's ~themed week~, you see, and it's entirely possible that I'd object less if it weren't such trite, shame-based theology. "I'm not that bad, so why do I need Jesus?" Oh, fuck off.

And fuck off even more for your reaction to "I'm queer, trans, and ex-Catholic; you don't want me" being "actually, yes we do". At which point (late, stressed, underslept) I snapped back that they didn't want me in any meaningful way that wouldn't render me suicidal, all while continuing to walk away, and I kind of hope it ruined her day, to be honest, because she fucking oughtn't get away with making my work space hostile to me and thinking that doing so is ~purely and wholly loving~, because it goddamn isn't.

(See, this is why I fall down on the Captain Awkward maxim that it's a potential red flag if people aren't kind and decent to everyone around them, because fuck that.)

Comments

[legionseagle]

Owing to a piece of CU idiocy in my college, the college's most notable Zionist, who had been the victim of such severe anti-Semitic bullying in his previous college he'd been allowed to change to ours, ended up convinced that my then boyfriend (an atheist of the scientific rationalist breed) had been putting up pro PLO propaganda.

My general sense that the CU were trouble never recovered from this, and nothing I have ever heard since (which is a lot) has caused me to change my mind (I shared a house a couple of years later, at law school, with someone who'd been at a different college and a very devout Catholic, active in the St Vincent de Paul Society and so forth, and he said that the CU's efforts to convert the Catholics to Christianity were quite unrelenting.)

I think the people recommending ways of dealing with them need to bear in mind that the Affiliated CUs have been buried in the fabric of British universities for almost a century, that one of their key techniques has always been to represent themselves as an ecumenical body (which is as far from the truth as one can get) so that anyone who comes up to University having been a churchgoer with their family and innocently asks "Where's the nearest church?" is immediately seized upon by the CU as their lawful prey and kept isolated by all means necessary from non-CU Christians who are, for these purposes, the Enemy (not all churches are equal and the existence of some churches -- gay-friendly ones, for example -- will be actively suppressed by college CU representatives: see what I mean here from the link supplied by our host. I think it's no coincidence that the link to "list of churches in the area" is dead and the only live link is "find a church by asking the CU reps at freshers fair".)

Particularly in the current climate, with all sorts of panic about Islamic extremists on campus, it's fatally easy for any move against the CU to be interpreted by the CU-propaganda machine as "Ordinary Christians are being persecuted while IS warmongers rage unchecked across our campuses!" And the right-wing press (and, as I indicated above, at least one Archbishop of Canterbury, who ought to have known better) fall for it hook line and sinker.

[silveradept]

It's convenient for them to fall for it, since those things advance their agenda as well. It's a stupid alliance, but one they prefer to actually having to confront reality.

[legionseagle]

Certainly agree about the right-wing press; Rowan Williams should have known better, though.