While writing about internet sovereignty — about carving out space that’s truly your own online — I started thinking about how the same principle applies to faith and identity. The way we talk about belief can flatten it into something it isn’t, especially when language like “cultural Christianity” gets tossed around like it’s universal. But just like the internet, Christianity has never been one-size-fits-all. It’s local, lived, and shaped by the people who practice it.
Every now and then, I see someone online talk about “cultural Christianity” — usually as shorthand for everything from bad theology to bad politics to bad memes. And, okay, I get what they mean. They’re usually talking about Americanized evangelicalism — the consumer-Christian aesthetic of megachurches, Christian nationalism, and theology-by-algorithm. But every time I see that phrase used like it’s universal, I can’t help but think: you mean one culture’s Christianity, not all of them.
Because there’s no such thing as one “cultural Christianity.”
There are Christian cultures.
🪶 Christianity has accents
Indigenous nations across Turtle Island have been incorporating Catholicism and Christianity into their lives since at least the 1600s — but in ways that are as complex and syncretic as the people themselves. These aren’t carbon copies of European faith. They’re living, local expressions of belief that blend liturgy and language, saints and ceremonies, candles and cedar.
The same goes for Irish, Scottish, and Breton folk-Christianity, where saints share space with fairies, wells, and the turning of the seasons. You’ll find echoes of older ways woven right into church calendars and family rites — not as rebellion, but as continuity.
Faith adapts. It listens. It learns the local tongue.
🕊️ Not everyone’s experience of Christianity is safe
When people use “cultural Christianity” as a synonym for power, they’re forgetting that in many places, being Christian means existing without power. There are Christians in many other countries whose churches are burned. Christians in parts of China who are surveilled, detained, or disappeared. Faith, for them, isn’t a cultural blanket — it’s a daily act of resistance.
- China’s government exerts sweeping control over all religious life: both Muslim minorities and Christian groups have been targeted under policies of registration, ‘Sinicization,’ forced assimilation, censorship, detention, and demolition of religious sites. The suppression is ideological, structural, and deeply entrenched — not isolated or incidental.
- It’s not just China, of course. Every empire seems to find its own way to turn faith into a control mechanism — whether through surveillance, suppression, or suspicion. And while I’m not Muslim, or American for that matter, it’s impossible not to notice how the same patterns of power and fear repeat, just with different names and symbols.
That matters, because when we use blanket terms like “cultural Christianity,” we risk erasing the stories of people for whom Christianity isn’t comfortable, performative, or dominant. It’s lived. It’s costly. And it’s real.
⚖️ Say what you mean
If what you really mean to criticize is American evangelical culture — the megachurch industrial complex, the politicization of faith, the empire-building dressed up as piety — then say that. It’s a valid critique, and one that needs to be had. But calling that “cultural Christianity” muddies the water and paints with too broad a brush. It flattens a kaleidoscope of human experience into a single shape that doesn’t fit anyone.
Language matters. The words we choose frame the world we think we’re describing.
✨ Faith is local
Faith, like culture, is lived locally. It has dialects, accents, recipes, and melodies. It’s the candles your grandmother lit. The songs sung in a tongue you can’t translate but still understand. The way people bow their heads, or lift their eyes. The incense that clings to the hem of a sleeve. The hands that make the sign of the cross without thinking.
When we talk about Christianity, we’re talking about all of that — not just one culture’s performance of it.
So maybe there’s no such thing as “cultural Christianity.” Maybe there’s just Christianity, lived through culture.
And maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to be.
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