u/LineOfInquiry

I’m an atheist, but I was raised Catholic. I grew up in an area where Catholics were common, and those that weren’t catholic were usually atheist/agnostic, Jewish, or Muslim. So, I kinda thought that Catholicism was like the default Christianity or whatever, and I think a lot of people who don’t have exposure to deeply religious Protestant circles have a similar way of thinking (I mean that’s how movies often portray it, it’s always a catholic priest getting rid of evil spirits they don’t call a Methodist lol).

But that isn’t true. To a lot of Protestant Christians, especially evangelicals, Catholics aren’t Christians at all. They seem them as something completely other. And even if they acknowledge Catholics as Christians, they still usually see the Pope as evil or corrupt (and not for the reasons we do), or potentially the anti-Christ. So Trump disagreeing with or even insulting the Pope is not sacrilege to them, if anything it’s a perfectly “Christian” thing to do. This attitude has even rubbed off on some Catholic converts or Catholics from mostly evangelical areas, who basically believe everything the evangelicals do but are catholic because their family is or because of aesthetics: they don’t care about the pope or the actual teachings of the Catholic Church (for good or ill). Trying to play some “gotcha” card on these people regarding religion just simply isn’t going to work.

If you want to actually change these peoples minds, you have to actually engage with their bad ideas and not point to some Christian authority figure as who they “should” agree with to shut them up: it’s like telling a Sunni muslim to shut up because the ayatollah of Iran disagreed with them.

Something I’m worried about is that so many people on the left are like evangelical Christians: spending all their time infighting against other ~Christians~ people on the left to determine the “right” denomination while waiting for the ~second coming~ election. And I’m worried that Natalie is playing into that somewhat.

I don’t agree with everything any left wing commentator or politician says, but I can put that aside to support them when there’s a greater evil that needs to be confronted. But it seems like so many liberals just want to spend their time tearing down any popular figures slightly to the left of them. Mamdani, AOC, Hasan, Bernie, whoever I don’t agree with these people 100% but they are actively working to make the country better and make a difference and I think we should support that: just like I support Contra. Part of the reason Kamala lost in 2024 is that she refused to cooperate with the left wing base of the party and even give them lip service. Biden wasn’t a social Democrat, but he did lean into social democratic language and as president had a legitimate desire to help unions grow and give them greater protections and agreed to put a public option on his platform (even if he was never gonna pass it). Harris didn’t and it cost her a lot of “apolitical” but left leaning votes that Obama and Biden were able to pick up in the past.

A lot of the top posts on this subreddit are talking about Contra being criticized by random people on the left or random people on Twitter: and that’s fine to talk about sometimes but it seems to be the main focus here. Additionally, a lot of her latest videos have had the subtext of being about (mostly unfair) criticism of her even if it isn’t directly addressed. Thats fine and all, but we’re facing a fascist government that’s creating lists of trans people, throwing immigrants in camps, and killing random people on the street all while blowing up the world economy for empty imperial ambitions. We have more important things to attend to, and I wish sometime that contra would focus more on that and just ignore the random twitter users with no actual power. We have to learn to work together if we want to win and this stupid drama nonsense no one cares about is just hurting that cause.