May CrayOn.
From mes- "wrongly" + creant, present participle of creire "believe," …
Thus: A mécréant is one of those who Believes Wrongly, believes other than the westernized judeo-Xtian position.
"Which also hath a noun sense of "’nfidel, pagan, heretic’."
Related: Miscreance; miscreancy.
"Sense of "villain, vile wretch, scoundrel" is first recorded 1590 in Spenser."
Naturally the defensive cultural reflex will always be to villainize those who believe wrongly, as Spencer Solomon has shown us prettily.
This will include savages, as well as the more domestic forms of heretic.
Of course I dropped believing in their God sensu stricto a very long time ago.
But these other forms of disbelief, ‘wrong’ belief, are newer to me, and rather more painful.
Before I slept, my brother called and I had enough left in me to pick up.
There are compelling reasons drawing him west, and that made/makes me happy.
In the first three paragraphs I gave him, about the how things were going, I felt articulate.
After that, I noticed something else creeping into my voice, a quaver that spoke back to me of my own uncertainties and unsteadiness.
As if I didn’t have a coherent narrative to offer him about what I am or do.
But was broken, in the Carrier sense, instead.
This kind of subtextual information embedded in the words and sentences, offering a meaning apart from them, is one advantage, or disadvantage, that the spoken word offers over the written.
In the beginning, poetry was a spoken art, and maybe this is part of why.
I only spoke prose to him as far as I know, but I could be wrong.
On a related note, the reason mécréant is the preferred form here, over the English version, is that somehow ‘miscreant’ picks up tones of cretinism.
Which is unpleasant, but more importantly distracting from the point of the poetic implement the word is intended to be.
If you believe in that sort of thing.