This article about Operation Christmas Child was on the front page of CNN.com this morning. It’s really a marvelous charity effort, and one in which our church enthusiastically participates every year.
That it is a Christian effort is not mentioned until the fifteenth paragraph. Actually, as I read, I was beginning to think the article wasn’t going to mention that little tidbit at all. That would have been disappointing, but not surprising.
An old sociology professor of mine once declared, as commentary on the style-over-substance moralistic direction of the country, that we were living through “the neo-Victorian era.” That was 1991. Sometimes I think about looking him up to get his current thoughts, as I’m certain the cancer of political correctness has metastasized far beyond even his most pessimistic outlook.
Few institutions have suffered more at the hands of political correctness than Christianity. There’s an oh-so-PC interest in saying “see, just like any other major religion!” about Islam when atrocities are committed in its name, for example. So too many people are all too eager to present groups like the Westboro Baptist Church as genuine Christians who just happen to be a bit radical, as opposed to hateful, deranged kooks. The preacher who threatened to burn the Koran? Same thing. Oh, that’s just the kind of thing even more of them would do if they thought they could get away with it.
And hey, if things like that aren’t enough, and you need real violence committed in the name of Jesus, just head back to the Crusades.
No, no. This is not a religion that is a tremendous force for good in the world today. Why, they’re out to get us all. You have to watch these Christians every minute.
You know, it was partially over this that I fired a friend a couple of years ago. Her failure to recognize the ubiquity of her prejudice against Christianity, made all the more offensive by her endless professions of philosophical objectivity, was a major factor in my decision to terminate our relationship. That’s about the only context in which it really makes me angry anymore—when it comes from someone I’ve mistakenly trusted to know better.
Anger is frequently unproductive, of course. I certainly can’t walk around angry at the phenomenon in general, because it’s just another manifestation of the rampant, hopeless mediocrity of the “mainstream” media and the drones they create and maintain. Sometimes another reaction I have is to post examples of what Christians do for society, but that’s no good. We don’t do those things so we can talk about them, and it’d be too easy to sound like that in such a post.
I can, though, reasonably ask that you be careful about what you decide is true of “Christians.” How much sense does it make to fall over ourselves rhetorically isolating Muslim terrorists as a fringe element, not representative of the faith at large, and then say something about the supposedly monolithic “Christian right” (for example) in the next breath?
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If someone is going to paint all Christians with the Westboro BC brush, then they also have to paint all Muslims with the Bin Laden brush. Pick a religion and there will always be someone or some group who tries to use it to their advantage. Faith is a powerful thing.
Whether or not someone personally believes Jesus Christ was the Son of God come to earth and died on the cross for their sins is really only important at their own personal end game. But I do not think anyone can say the teachings of Jesus Christ do not give us a pretty good model to live by and how to treat each other. No, Christians are not perfect either and we rarely live up to the full requirements. But I would much rather try to “love my neighbor” and “turn the other cheek” than “kill the infidels.”
BB_FAN, I understand. My complaint is more in how these misfits are treated in the media. WBC is frequently referred to just as that, as if it’s just another Baptist church. Might see “sect” in there, and once in a while you’ll see “radical” or “hate,” and the reporting starts to get the whiff of honesty about it.
Contrast that with the endless, page-filling bloviations of “religion of peace” and these are very misguided individuals and the average adherent of Islam would never ever ever kill innocents in the name of Allah and… whenever there is any mention of Islamist terror.
To be VERY charitable, the WBC goons are at least as out of step with Christianity as are Islamist terrorists with Islam. It’d be refreshing to see some reporting once in a while that reflected such.
One has to presuppose moral equivalence between the two (Islam and Christianity) first. And that, my friend, is not possible for many reasons.
Ergo, I have no problem picking up the broad brush in reference to same. Doing the same to a Christian? Well, there’s the old adage about going to church doesn’t make you one any more than standing in a garage makes you a car. You have a _choice_ to live as a Christian or not.