Protestant Blog Ethic has a neat story (tip of the hat to Karl for finding it) about reporters who “go undercover” at Christian events to uncover what all we church folk are up to. I was just having this conversation with some of the kids at Wednesday Bible study the other day, about how other groups have had trouble knowing what to do with Christians, or how to understand them, since the Roman Empire.
“I can imagine some of the shocking revelations when a secular, cynical, liberal reporter spends a weekend at a Synod Youth Gathering sponsored by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America: (not linked in original)
“They spent an entire hour one afternoon talking about the evils of Bottled Water, and the damage it does to the environment!”
“A group of teenagers choreographed and performed a liturgical dance to one of the Psalms!”
“They passed around a bucket and collected an offering to help women entrepreneurs in developing nations get micro-loans for their small businesses!”
“By Sunday morning they had assembled 40 quilts to go to Hurricane relief in New Orleans!”
“There were no altar calls, no psychological manipulation, no exorcisms, and no speaking in tongues!”
“They prayed for peace in Iraq!”
After all this radical behavior gets exposed, I imagine many readers of mags like City Pages and Rolling Stone would say “Wow, that sounds a lot like the kind of behavior I agree with! I even respect people like this!””
The blog’s author is a terrific musician who lives in Chicago and has played for quite a few events I’ve attended. I really recommend his music along with his thoughts about faith!
I think there are a lot of people who conflate fundamentalist Christians, who are an extremely vocal minority, with Christianity as a whole. Admittedly, I was guilty of this in the past, but I was like eighteen or nineteen and eventually stopped being so much of a moron about it.
Many secular people — particularly hardline Atheists — don’t seem to realize that there are, in fact, Christians who aren’t the self-righteous nutters that think that 9/11 was caused by God removing some magical shield around America in response to feminism. Just because Jerry Falwell says it doesn’t mean every Christian believes it, in other words.
I think part of the problem is that because the lunatic fringe is such an obnoxious group, we tend to give them the most attention, and it all ends up minimizing the religious people who are sane, rational individuals. I’m certainly guilty of this myself, in spending so much time and effort making fun of Jack Chick’s crazy, hate-filled ramblings, and his assertions that finding out that Santa isn’t real makes children go on murderous rampages.