So yesterday I took a slight detour in cyberspace and ended up wandering around for hours in a neighborhood I had never previously visited; it was something of a culture shock, but enlightening in its own feral way. I don't tend to spend much time meandering along the various boulevards of the 'interweb,' rather I tend to visit a very few specific sites, conduct my business there, and move on. But I had a little time and a google search led me to an article which led me to a website that inevitably sucked me in. It was a 'gasp' website for parents, particularly moms, though I had heard of it previously I had never ventured thither. What intrigued me was not the articles and their content, but rather the people behind the articles: those who wrote and read them. It was something like the time I went to a 'big' movie theater for the first time in ages and found myself rather astonished at the clothes people chose to wear for a night out and their behavior thereupon. I sometimes forget the ways of the world at large!
While some of the information was helpful, even encouraging, and often amusing, it was more the language and the writers' way of viewing the world that caught my attention. I often forget that to some people, certain four letter scatological adjectives are as necessary to their grammar as breathing is to life. I would also never have kids after reading about them on that site, but that is another article entirely (and yes, I am a parent). But the one thing that really caught my eye was an anonymous post in their 'confessional' message board where you can post your worst mommy moments, etc. It was a brief statement going something like this, 'I finally made a friend with a fellow parent at my kid's school but…' The author went on to state, 'I am an agnostic, bisexual, and a liberal,' (I wanted to interject, 'who isn't?'), but she ended with the words, 'and terrified.' That gave me pause. And the reason for her disquiet? The friend in question is a Christian. That was pretty much all there was to the post, but I found it both tragic and intriguing. Why was this person terrified? It was certainly an interesting look at how the 'world' sees the church.
Now if the person in question was a zombie or a werewolf or a vampire, that would be cool (to most moderns). Or if they were Buddhist, New Age, or a fellow agnostic, that too would be hip. Their race, gender, sexuality, doesn't matter, except the more 'diverse' the better. If they were a sociopath or a serial killer, that might raise a few eyebrows, but I had never thought of myself as terrifying! What's weird about this whole perception is that apparently every other group/religion/race/occupation/gender/sexuality/organization on the face of the planet is composed of flesh and blood people, but the church is something utterly different and you can't be friends with its adherents without taking your life (or at least your social standing) in your hands. But then if your only exposure to so-called Christians is through the media, this view is unsurprising as it is the last 'group' you can safely depict as evil, annoying, stupid, etc. in our obsessively politically correct culture. But the church is just like any other group of people: there are smart people, not so smart people, nice people, mean people, saints and jerks, introverts and extroverts, etc., to say we are all weirdos just because we are Christians is stereotyping, or is it?
This is far from the first time in history the church has been seen as weird or even dangerous. The Romans accused early Christians of being atheists and cannibals. Peter calls us sojourners and exiles. Jesus Himself said we'd be hated because He was. I guess the church is weird and was always meant to be, for it has something the world both desperately wants yet utterly despises. Which got me thinking about another matter that has always puzzled me. Why is Christianity so despised in modern culture when everything else is either tolerated or ignored. If you want the church to die a quiet death, why keep drawing attention to it? This is like telling a toddler to leave something alone, hoping it will place his thoughts on anything but the forbidden object, but it achieves exactly the opposite: he can think of nothing else. Why not just ignore the church and hope it goes away, vanishes into obscurity like the Cult of Zeus and the worship of Molech?
But there is always some new book claiming to debunk scripture or a TV program aimed at explaining 'what really happened.' If anyone who can even remotely be associated with the church does something mean or stupid, the media can't quit talking about it. Every Easter and Christmas, another issue of a certain magazine proclaims the 'truth' about Jesus. I really love the 'controversy' over 'God's wife,' inspired by some little scrap of parchment, considered by most to be a forgery, but it crops up every now and again on a slow news day. The entire collection of the Dead Sea Scrolls never got that much attention. Why so much effort to discredit what should be an obscure religious sect? You never see this sort of stuff aimed at Hinduism, New Age, Wicca, Islam, etc. If the world is trying so hard to make the church look weird and stupid, perhaps there is truly something there to be afraid of.
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