I was on the werewolf side of TikTok, minding my own business, when the algorithm decided I needed to see a woman crying because a barista wrote "Happy Holidays" on her cup. Not laughing about it. Crying.
Genuinely, performatively distraught, the way you'd film yourself if something had actually gone wrong.
I don't have a stake in this one. I'm not Christian – I'm a Hellenic-Celtic pagan, devoted to Selene, which puts me about as far outside this particular argument as a person can get while still technically believing in something.
That distance is exactly why the pattern jumped out at me the way it did. I wasn't watching as someone defending my own faith or attacking someone else's. I was watching as an outsider who'd stumbled onto a script, and once you clock a script, you can't stop seeing the seams in it.
The Script, As Far As I Can Tell
It goes roughly like this. Someone films themselves reacting to something mundane – a store clerk who didn't say "blessed," a school that didn't do a nativity play, a coworker who asked them not to leave tracts on the breakroom table – and frames it in the exact vocabulary you'd expect from someone describing an actual crackdown.
Persecuted. Silenced. Erased. Under attack. The music is often the kind you'd use for a video about war refugees. The captions lean on the same handful of words every time, which is usually the tell that you're watching a genre rather than a genuine reaction.
None of the videos I found were about anything that had cost the person their safety, their liberty, or their life. They were about mild social friction, the kind everyone of every belief system runs into constantly, reframed as oppression because oppression gets watched, and mild friction doesn't.
The Version of This I'd Have to Film
The way I actually tested whether this reaction was fair was to imagine the version of it I'd have to star in.
Picture me setting out moon water and a poem for Selene – no dedicated altar, nothing elaborate, just the quiet offering I actually make – and someone walks past and says something dismissive about it.
In this version of the script, I don't just roll my eyes and get on with my evening, which is what would genuinely happen. I film myself sobbing over the moon water, poem in hand for maximum visual effect, captioning it something like "they mocked my goddess and I have never felt so unsafe in my own home."
I'd be laughed off the app within the hour, and rightly so. Nobody watching that would read it as a real crisis. They'd read it, correctly, as a person performing distress because distress performs well.
Now swap in a Celtic example, because the instinct doesn't stop at Selene. Say I'm cutting a yew branch for a Samhain rite – yew's the tree that sits in churchyards and graveyards across these islands precisely because it was sacred to the people here long before the churches were, bound up with death and rebirth in a way that outlasted the religion that tried to absorb it.
It's not a random choice for me either: Ewan is a direct anglicisation of Eòghann, which likely comes from an older Gaelic root meaning "born of the yew," so the tree's already sitting in my own name before I've cut a single branch of it. Tha e neònach a bhith nad neach-labhairt dùthchasach Beurla is Gàidhlig – it's a strange thing, being a native English speaker reaching for Gaelic as an adult, learning to say the older shape of a name I've had my whole life.
Someone calls it morbid, or creepy, or asks why I'm messing about with "dead people's trees." Same script again: camera up, voice cracking, "I'm being persecuted for practising my faith." It would be exactly as absurd as the moon water version, for exactly the same reason.
Someone finding my beliefs strange, or saying so out loud, isn't an attack on me. It's just Tuesday, and I've got the actual anecdotes to prove it rather than a hypothetical.
I've been mistaken for a Satanist because someone saw my pentacle and clocked it as a Sigil of Baphomet instead, which is a genuinely different design when you actually look at it – mine sits point-up, plain star in a circle, the standard form most pagans wear; the Sigil of Baphomet is inverted, two points up, with a goat's head filling the star and Hebrew lettering ringed round the outside. Not remotely subtle once you know what you're looking for, and yet someone still managed to see a goat where there wasn't one.
And my own nan once looked at the same pentagram and somehow read it as a Star of David, which I still can't fully account for given that one shape has five points and the other has six. Neither of those moments made me reach for a camera. They made me shrug, maybe explain myself if I felt like it, and get on with my day.
I wear my pentacle most days, the same ordinary way a Christian wears a cross – not as a statement, just as the thing I put on. There's a sterling silver bracelet that goes on my left wrist alongside it, and it stays there too, more or less permanently – the only time it comes off is to polish it, not because I've decided to make a point of taking it off.
It's stayed on that long for a few reasons that have nothing to do with performance and everything to do with why anyone actually keeps wearing something: my dad gave it to me for my eighteenth birthday, which is the actual reason. That it happens to be silver, Selene's metal, is a coincidence I only noticed afterwards rather than anything I planned.
The left wrist itself isn't a coincidence at all, if I'm honest – I've got right-sided hemiplegia as part of my cerebral palsy, so the left wrist was just the practical, obvious place for it to go. Even that has its own small resonance, though: in a lot of energy-work traditions the left side is considered the receiving hand, the one associated with intuition and absorbing rather than projecting, which is a nice enough coincidence to land on for something I only wear because of a body that works the way it works.
I'm not being flippant about my own practice by imagining it this way – if anything, running the comparison is what confirmed how much I actually do care about it, because I could immediately feel how wrong it would be to cheapen it like that.
And that's really where the discomfort settles for me, underneath the persecution framing entirely: an act of devotion is a rite. It doesn't need an audience to be real.
When I set moon water out for Selene, or cut yew for the dead at Samhain, the entire point is that it happens whether anyone's watching or not – that's what makes it worship rather than a performance of worship. The second you need a camera rolling, a crack in your voice, and a caption doing the emotional work for you, you haven't deepened the rite. You've replaced it with something else wearing its clothes.
That's not persecution corrupting their faith. That's them corrupting it themselves, trading the actual practice for a performance of grievance and calling the performance devotion because it uses the same vocabulary.
That's precisely the point. If I wouldn't reach for "persecution" over someone sneering at a poem and a bowl of moon water, or at a yew branch cut for the dead, then reaching for it over a coffee cup that says "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" doesn't get to be treated as more serious just because more people share the belief behind it.
Being a majority faith doesn't earn you a lower bar for the word. If anything it should earn you a higher one, because you've got so much less riding on any single interaction than someone whose entire practice could still get them disowned, sacked, or worse, depending on where they happen to live.
The Word Has a History, and It's Older Than TikTok
This isn't actually a new phenomenon that TikTok invented – it's an old one that TikTok gave a much bigger microphone.
There's a term for it that predates the app by a couple of decades: the Christian persecution complex, describing the belief that Christians and Christian values are under active attack by Western governments and institutions, despite occupying a majority or dominant position in most of the societies making that claim.
It's not a fringe observation, either – it's had academic attention for years, tracing its modern acceleration back to the aftermath of 9/11, when a lot of political anxiety needed somewhere to go and religious identity was a convenient container for it.
What TikTok's added isn't the belief. It's the delivery mechanism – a format built entirely around emotional intensity in under sixty seconds, which rewards the most dramatic possible framing of literally anything, and a persecution narrative is about as dramatic as framing gets without actually requiring evidence.
The Part That Actually Makes Me Angry
Here's the bit I can't get past, and it's not really about the theology at all.
While a small, loud slice of American and British Christians are filming themselves crying over cup design, roughly 388 million Christians are living under genuine, well-documented high levels of persecution and discrimination worldwide – closer to one in seven believers globally.
People are being displaced from their homes, forced into hiding, or killed, specifically because of what they believe, right now, while this is being posted.
That's persecution. What's happening to the woman with the coffee cup is not that, and putting them in the same category isn't just inaccurate, it's actively insulting to the people living through the real version.
Every ounce of outrage spent on a store greeting is outrage that isn't going toward the Christians who could actually use the attention. I've seen progressive Christian creators on the platform making exactly this point – that inflating a Starbucks cup into a civil rights violation doesn't just look silly from the outside, it quietly erases people who are being tortured, imprisoned, or killed for the same faith being "defended" from a to-go cup.
Pagans Have Actual History Here, and We Don't Do This
I want to be precise about something before I go further, because it would be easy to read this whole post as me claiming persecution is a purely Christian delusion, and that's not what I think. Modern paganism has real history with this, on both ends of the timescale, and I'd rather name it properly than let the comparison sound one-sided.
Go back far enough and it's not subtle at all. The Christianisation of the Germanic peoples wasn't a gentle cultural drift – it involved forced conversions, the destruction of sacred sites, and outright violence against people who wouldn't give up the old ways.
The witch trials a few centuries later killed tens of thousands of people across Europe, a meaningful number of them for practices that looked a lot like what modern pagans do openly today. That's not a metaphor I'm reaching for. That's the actual, documented lineage a lot of modern paganism sits downstream of.
It hasn't stopped being current, either. There's a term for anti-pagan prejudice specifically – Wiccaphobia, or paganphobia – because it comes up often enough to need one. A 2021 Scottish Pagan Federation survey found over 41% of respondents had faced direct discrimination for their faith, mostly in social or professional settings.
A field study in New England sent out fictitious job applications with a pagan affiliation listed and found meaningfully fewer callbacks than identical applications with no religion named at all, in the same range as the penalty Catholic applicants faced.
There have been UK employment tribunals over pagan staff being disciplined or sacked for their beliefs, and at least one recent US lawsuit alleging a pagan employee was mocked and unfairly punished by management once her faith became known.
So no, I'm not saying persecution is something only other people invent. I'm saying the actual pagan version of this history doesn't produce the TikTok genre I opened this post with. Nobody I know in this community is filming themselves sobbing because a neighbour raised an eyebrow at their altar. We just quietly deal with the tribunal, or the lost callback, or the muttered comment, and get on with the rite anyway, because the rite was never about being watched in the first place.
Why It Doesn't Read as Genuine to Me
I want to be careful here, because I think there's a difference between "this person is lying" and "this person has been handed a framework that makes ordinary friction feel like an attack," and it's usually the second one.
If you're taught, consistently, from the pulpit or the algorithm or both, that any pushback against your beliefs is evidence of a wider war on them, you stop being able to tell the difference between "someone disagreed with me" and "someone is trying to hurt me." That's not a moral failing exactly. It's closer to a diet of bad information doing what bad information always does, which is make the person eating it worse at reading the room.
But I don't think that fully explains the theatre of it, either – the crying on camera, the ominous music, the captions clearly written for maximum shareability rather than maximum accuracy.
Somewhere in there, the genuine confusion shades into performance, because performance is what the platform pays out in attention. I don't think every person doing this is being cynical. I think the incentive structure underneath the whole app makes cynicism and sincerity produce identical-looking videos, and from the outside there's no way to tell which one you're watching.
I should say, in the interest of not being a hypocrite about any of this: I've cried over Christmas before. Genuinely, over it being Christmas and not Yule, which on paper sounds exactly like the thing I've spent this whole post taking apart.
The difference is what was actually happening to me at the time. That particular meltdown came while I was in the grip of psychosis and massive intracranial pressure, caused by a VP shunt that was slowly failing on me – the same shunt that landed me in surgery a few months later, which I've written about separately. The timing's a bit off for a tidy story, since the surgery itself was in April rather than December, but the pressure had been building long before it finally forced the issue, and Christmas just happened to be where it cracked.
By the time April actually arrived, that same psychosis had spiralled into something closer to proper insanity – screaming fits at my mum over nothing in particular, the kind of thing I wasn't in control of and wouldn't have chosen if I had been. It's basically vanished since the surgery, which tells you plainly enough what was actually causing it: not a personality trait, not a belief system, just my brain being squeezed inside my own skull.
That's not me reaching for drama over a word. That's a difference in kind, not degree, and it's exactly the distinction I'd want the coffee-cup crowd to actually sit with rather than wave away.
Where That Leaves Me, Watching From Outside It Entirely
I don't believe what these people believe, and it's genuinely not my argument to referee from the inside.
But I know what it looks like when a minority faith gets treated as a punchline or a threat rather than a person's actual life, because Hellenic-Celtic paganism gets exactly that treatment more often than I'd like, usually from people who've never met a pagan and are working entirely off aesthetic.
It's not the only characteristic of mine that gets that treatment, either. Take everything about me except my gender and my race, and pretty much all of it draws the same unjustified hostility from somewhere: gay, asexual, pagan, disabled. Four different categories, four completely different sets of people deciding I'm suspicious or wrong or in need of correcting, for reasons that have nothing to do with anything I've actually done to anyone.
I don't say that looking for sympathy. I say it because it's exactly why I can tell the difference between the real version of that hostility and a performance of it – I've had enough practice sitting with the real thing to recognise when someone's just borrowing the shape of it for a camera.
So I'm not dismissing the underlying anxiety out of some reflex to defend secularism, or because I think Christians are incapable of experiencing real prejudice anywhere. I'm dismissing this specific performance because it isn't that.
It's a majority faith, in the societies where this trend is loudest, borrowing the language of people who are actually being hunted for what they believe, and spending it on a paper cup.
If the crying-on-camera energy went into the World Watch List instead of the Starbucks menu, this would be a completely different post. It would probably be one I'd have more sympathy for.
Until then, I think the most honest thing anyone outside this argument can say is the thing I actually think: this isn't persecution. It's cosplay, wearing someone else's suffering as the costume, and the someone else never agreed to lend it out.