MysteriousFaith

Bumper Sticker Spirituality - DRAFT of Chapter 3

A draft of the third chapter of my book “Bumper Sticker Spirituality” talking about whether or not Christians think about the implications to wearing WWJD, using bumper stickers to convey theology, and the idea that God may not vote Republican.

Bumper Sticker Spirituality: Chapter 3 - What Spirituality Is Not

“How many thousands, in this America, picture Christianity
as something old, sapless, joyless, mumbling in the chimney
corner and casting sour looks at the young people’s fun?
How many think of religion as the enemy of life and the flesh
and the pleasures of the flesh; a foe to all love and all
delight? How many unconsciously conceive of God as rather
like the famous lady who said, ‘Find out what the baby’s
doing and make him stop’?”- Joy Davidman, Smoke On the Mountain

Religion demands converts. Spirituality creates disciples. The difference between the two is not slight. A disciple has what he needs to define his faith and sustain his mind within him as opposed to a convert who requires ext; he is not self-contained, rather he is centered on a total reliance on God. A convert relies on externals to both sustain him, but many times unfortunately to do his thinking for him. The desire to fit within a particular group of people is an emotion we experience most profoundly and positively within our families. But for those who find their family experience short coming, the desire to embrace another group of people becomes increasingly strong. Too often, religion becomes a willing accomplice in providing a person searching for an identity with just that: an identity.

Just as religion is uncomfortable with tension, it is uncomfortable when a simple physical reminder can suffice to strengthen the stamina of those who would otherwise falter. The history of religious icons has much to say about this phenomena. Where religion fears man will forget God, it creates symbols. Symbols become substituted for meaning. Meaning requires thinking, action and activity. Symbols are safe; they can be hidden behind and yet they can also be fought over. They are simple enough to be broadly understood without complexity and yet they are powerful enough to bring men to bear arms against their brother.

The culture of faith in the twenty-first century has much riding on its symbols. Religion has created a whole new set of icons that can be used to identify and gentrify believers. These icons have become those things that most define Christianity: where we should be challenged to live by the life of Christ, we may now wear a T-Shirt with “WWJD” slathered over it prominently. Our icons have become our identity; our Creator has been commercialized.

The extent to which we externalize something is the extent to which we do not understand its real value. Internalizing something, that process by which our minds are remade, is much more difficult and arduous. It rarely gets hung up on externals - rather, the process of remaking our minds involves dealing with difficult and deeply seated sins that separate us from a relationship with God and with others. One of my friends made the comment that when he first became a Christian he thought the big sins were drinking, drugs and having sex - he soon found out that these externals were the easiest things to remedy. I don’t mean to trivialize the struggles we all face with externals, but I empathize with him: my biggest struggles with sin are not the externals, but rather internal issues like truly forgiving someone who has wronged me, turning the other cheek to someone I think is petty and close-minded, or not loving others enough to sacrifice something I already have or want so they can be taken care of. For me, the biggest internal sin is pride. I can’t seem to go much beyond fifteen minutes without forgetting that the universe does not revolve around me. I think the story of Lucifer rebelling in heaven has more in common with our every-day lives than any of us would ever care to admit. At times, I am so insightful and so interesting to be around I’m floored God ever let me grace this planet at all - frankly, I would have made a much better angel.

One of the problems with externals is that we all have a need for something to be a label when that something is not clearly understood. We rightly sense the value in the name of Jesus, but we don’t want to put the time, the effort, the energy into making His name more than an adornment. Making His name a model for our life is much more complex, it is much more profound, it requires humility, and - if we take the Bible at its face value - we have to admit that taking His name means getting dirty, not separating ourselves from our culture, and embracing those around us regardless of their spiritual, intellectual, or interpersonal maturity.

Assuming to Answer for God

Not too long ago, I saw on MSNBC a pastor getting interviewed about his newest ploy to fill pews: for their New Year Eve service they are going to give away a PT Cruiser and a Harley Davidson cycle. The MSNBC commentator, in an obvious tongue-in-cheek reference to the Christian metaphor WWJD (What Would Jesus Do) asked the pastor, “what would Jesus drive? A Harley? I kind of like that.”

WWJD? is a euphemism that is well known within the Christian world - it is at face value a really striking question. So much is at stake when we visibly place this message on our body or our car. We put WWJD on bumper stickers (after all, what good is a theology point that can’t be expressed on a bumper sticker?), on bracelets, on t-shirts, on Bible covers, on coffee mugs, cell phone covers and air fresheners.

WWJD has its roots in an important question and its desires are not bad. But what should have been a subtle point has become a pronounced theology. Let’s be honest, when environmentally conscious people want to poke fun at the Christian soccer-mom demographic, they turn to a marketing campaign that asks “What Would Jesus Drive?” Now, begging the reader’s patience, there is an inherent problem with this question: as we all know Jesus preferred boating to driving. Scripture is clear on this matter. When he needed to rest, he didn’t have the disciples take him on a long chariot ride in the scenic Nazarene country side - he had them take him on a boat ride. When he needed to get to the other side of the lake, he had a boat take him - he didn’t ride a chariot around to the other side.

If our theology is really Trinitarian, then we could easily change the ancronym WWJD to WWGD, substituting “Jesus” for “God.” Stop for a moment and let WWGD roll around in your head: What Would God Do? I would subject to you that only in a culture where we have so lost sight of what power and majesty God has we would be so cavalier as to commercialize a WWJD label as predominantly as we have. It is at best cavalier and at worst heretical. It is also, I would suggest to you, supremely self-righteous. What to you may be a question, a challenge you hope to live by, is to someone who does not share your viewpoint a dogma. For them, WWJD is a comment on the insight you have that they do not: the ability to supremely know right from wrong, meekness from envy, chastity from lust. We laugh at the Hasidic Jews who wear boxes on their foreheads because in Joshua it says to be sure that “his book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth; but thou shalt meditate therein day and night, that thou mayest observe to do according to all that is written therein: for then thou shalt make thy way prosperous, and then thou shalt have good success.” If we are going to laugh at the obvious legalism and senseless symbolism in the bound pieces of the law held to the foreheads of Jewish men, are we so far off in our own external symbolism?

Asking WWGD really ups the ante doesn’t it? It should also highlight the obvious fallacies that exist in the WWJD question. WWGD shows that externals can not substitute for real content. It also shows that we have trivialized our view of God. Perhaps most damaging, it shows that we commercialize and label what we should internalize and live by!

It was really comforting to me as a child to know that Jesus looked a lot like my Dad: there is only so much “truth” a six-year-old can retain in Sunday School Class. I don’t think I could have handled both the flannel graph Noah and the ark story line at the same time I was dealing with a Jesus that looked like Salmon Rushdie. The church I went to was quite comfortable projecting images of people drowning as they beat against the door of the ark (cannon fodder for an evening of bed wetting and night terrors for me). No doubt our teachers had to make a choice, either keep the drowning damnation flannel graph, or keep the Caucasian Jesus. They went for the obvious choice.
We should not feel completely bad about how we have honkified the image of Jesus - the impressionist painters of the 1500’s were guilty of the same thing. What our culture can take genuine credit for is the commercializing of Christ. Where our forbearers were content to codify the image of Christ to make Him look like them, we have packaged the image of Christ to fit our very commercial world-view.

Of all the things He is probably not happy about, the crass commercialization that surrounds His name, His image and His impact on His culture would be on the list. Where did we go so wrong to think that we could reach our culture by sending our kids out into their school systems with a WWJD bracelet, a cool t-shirt with a stylized crucifix, and a pack of folders sandwiched in a 3-ring binder slathered with stickers that say things like “Jesus saves … and so should you: sponsored by First Bank of Omaha”.

Our view of Jesus can be fairly easily surmised by how we treat Him in our culture. We clearly value Him, because you only commercialize that which you can market, and to market something, it has to resonate with the appropriate demographic. Jesus has become a marketing tool, a label, a way of saying “I’m a Christian, and you’re not.” It started out honestly enough - we encouraged new teenager converts to take their Bibles with them to every class, just to make the point that they were different now that they had Christ in their hearts. What started out as “a stand” has grown into a symbol, a label, a way of segregating “us” from “them.”

Was this how Christ was known to others? Was this how the disciples were known? Was it obvious to the Athenians that Paul was a Christian because he was lugging around II Chronicles (the KJV version of course) in two handy-dandy compact scrolls? I don’t think so.

It is interesting, perhaps even compelling, to go to a first century Christian source to see how they related the teachings of Jesus to their every day lives. Take The Epistle to Diognetus as one example. This Epistle was written, it is commonly believed, as a response to a non-believer’s question about what the essentials of Christian life involved. The fifth section says:
“Christians are not distinguished from the rest of mankind by either country, speech or customs; the fact is, they nowhere settle in cities of their own; they use no peculiar language; they cultivate to eccentric mode of life. Certainly, this creed of theirs is no discovery due to some fancy or speculation of inquisitive men; nor do they, as some do, champion a doctrine of human origin. Yet while they dwell in both Greek and non-Greek cities, as each one’s lot was cast, and conform to the customs of the country in dress, food and mode of life in general, the whole tenor of their way of living stamps it as worthy of admiration and admittedly extraordinary. They reside in their respective countries, but only as aliens. They take part in everything as citizens and put up with everything as foreigners.”

If I take that at face value, it strikes me what it does not say. More significantly, a historical perspective on when this was written is important. This was at a time when the church knew persecution, when it was forced to unite on the essentials and reinforce only that which mattered most. And in this time, they actually fit in, even participated with their culture! How stridently different than what today’s Western Christian culture accentuates. In our culture, we seek out not just adornments that label us as belonging to the Christian sub-culture, but we also employ a complex and pessimistic apocalyptic world-view in an effort to expedite the conflict between good and evil, less because we understand the ultimate redemption of man-kind and more because it will finally and ultimately prove us right. What would it mean to today’s Christian to recognize that Christ’s coming again has less to do with us being proved right, being vindicated in our faith and in our separation from our culture, but that His coming again has to do with the world being remade in the image with which He originally intended, in a world where all are equal and where beauty and love can be fully celebrated.

We all want a Jesus that we can understand. Our efforts to remake Him in an image we can connect to is understandable and not to be ostracized completely. Frankly, we all want a God we can understand - I know I do. I resonate deeply with the thoughts, questions, and doubts Philip Yancey so clearly articulates in his masterpiece Reaching for the Invisible God. My problem is not with those who want to connect to a Christ they can understand - He was, after all, willing to let Thomas put his fingers in His wounds to strengthen his faith - I have no doubt Jesus is willing to come to me to help me believe. What I do not believe in is a crass commercialization of Jesus that serves no other purpose than labeling my beliefs against someone else, rather than building those bridges I see Christ building so often in the Gospels.

The Secular View of Jesus

I have a dear friend who gave me my first insight into these WWJD bumper stickers, shirts and bracelets: he has elected not to put a WWJD bumper-sticker on his car out of a basic realization that his driving habits are perhaps against the subtle message his bumper-sticker is attempting to send out. What would Jesus do gets into a topic I am not sure we, as humans, can really comment very much on. Wasn’t he after all the Messiah? He was the God-Man. So let’s stop for just a moment - do we really hope to understand in each situation what Jesus would do? Quite frankly, I think the comment misses something on its conception and its execution. On its conception, we forget that Jesus had the right and frankly, the ultimate need, to always speak directly to the heart of someone and could do so with absolute freedom because he was God in the flesh and also because he knew exactly what was going on in their hearts. We don’t even know our own hearts, so how can we reasonably expect to know another’s so well that we can act on the basis of our insight into their very soul? Let’s be honest, this is not quite the admonishment we had once hoped for.

Who was Jesus really? What did he look like? How did he handle himself in normal situations? The Apostle John tells us that if all the stories about what Jesus did were written he supposed that “the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.” What we do know of Jesus is what is recorded by his disciples - men who, when they took pen in hand no doubt recalled those momentous times when his deity, his full God-hood, was obvious and at work. Are you like me; do you wonder about what kind of boy Jesus was? What kind of teenage, coming-of-age issues he dealt with? Do you wonder about how he handled day-to-day living? What his normative experience was like, not just those select moments in time that have been freeze framed by the Apostles to maintain the primary events in Jesus’ life?

The prophet Isaiah gave the ancient Jews a detailed look at who their Messiah would be. Somewhere, this got lost in the translation to the ancient Jews, but I would suggest, it has also been lost on 21st century Christians. Isaiah tells us the Messiah would have “no beauty,” that he would have “no majesty to attract us to him,” and as if those two things are not pointed enough, Isaiah goes on to say that Christ would have “nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.” Isaiah tells us that he would be “despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering.”

Have you ever wondered if you would have recognized him as Messiah? It is convenient now, even comfortable, to fall back to historical arguments for the historicity of the risen Christ. While necessary, it overlooks the struggle of faith that the disciples themselves felt. I chuckle at times thinking of how today’s apologists so handily wrap up all of the reasons why Christ is a real person, why his teaching is infallible and why he is the God-Man. I wonder if the disciples would have, pre-Resurrection, had much in common with these same apologists. For us faith is convenient - it can be packaged and distributed as needed. For others, faith comes hard, it is fought for, it costs something.

The Jews in the days of Jesus Christ were primarily looking for a political leader, a man that would rise up and break the chains of Roman oppression from their backs. What they got instead was a meek man who felt that the Mosaic law was being improperly lived out and that fulfillment of Scripture would mean his death at the hands of his own people. I am so thankful that I live in the day and age I now live in, if for no other reason that I can now rely on the passage of time to prove the veracity of his claims to be the Messiah. I can be humble enough to realize that I may very well have been one of the faceless crowd shouting “crucify him.” After all, not only are prophets not appreciated in their home towns, but liberals who dine with sinners are all moral relativists.

Bumper Sticker Theology

Where I live it is fairly common to see people driving around with various pithy doctrinal statements on their bumper stickers. You can pick yours from the long list of candidates: “Jesus Is My Co-Pilot” or the ubiquitous fish eating Darwin. Maybe this is just me, but aren’t these the rough equivalent of flipping someone the bird? My personal favorite is the one that goes something like “In Case of Rapture This Car Will Be On Auto-Pilot.” I wonder if we think about how that comes across to others: in the case of the Rapture my two-and-a-half tons of aluminum and sheet metal will be flying down the road at fifty-five miles an hour crashing into the nearest oncoming piece of traffic - maybe even that nice school bus load of innocent kids. But isn’t that the irony in the bumper sticker? Because if they were still around after the Rapture they wouldn’t be innocent now would they? They had their chance, you mister tailgater, you had your chance - you missed it, I didn’t, I’m right, and you’re damned. Enjoy eternity - I know I will.

I have to be honest, not all of my resistance is this grounded. A very real part of my resistance to bumper sticker theological statements is that I am not sure I can afford to do any more damage to my testimony by further impugning Christianity with how I drive. It isn’t enough that we have to wade through difficult issues like “why do bad things happen to good people” and “can man have free will if God knows the future”, but I have to introduce more skepticism to non-believers in that they have to rationalize why a Christian does burnouts at every one-and-a-half block stoplight.

God May Not Vote Straight Republican

During college I spent about three years very active in politics. I went from a campus chairman to a state chairman of a pretty significant political group in my home state. What a wild ride that was. Keep in mind at this point in my life I was pretty militantly Christian Conservative. I knew this meant we were against homeless, for the death penalty, trickle down economics was inspired and the next World Council of Churches might add it to the Canon of Scripture. One fundraising dinner had me watching a group of men, slightly inebriated (after all, listening to a 70-something US senator talk about farm subsidies is not how most of us want to spend a Friday evening) talking. In the group was an ambulance chaser, the owner of an ambulance service provider, and a nursing / hospice care facility. I wasn’t sure if they were chatting amicably or if they were developing strategy for some convoluted vertical integration scheme. All they were missing was a OB/GYN and a funeral director and they would have had quite the package deal.

What I took away from my experience in this conservative organization was that what we really stood for, what really mattered most, was hating Bill Clinton. I can not think of another way of saying it. It was striking how our discussions dripped with vitriol - we went from talking about winning the election (and with Senator Dole as our candidate, you can imagine how exciting that was), to talking about how President Clinton was the most vile man on the planet. I think it was really all a bit of political envy. The Democrats had Clinton - an affable, articulate, young and energetic candidate while we had Strom Thurmond - a pedantic segregationist on his 40th term in the US senate who reminded most people of Mr. Burns from The Simpsons.

To put it simply, we hated Bill Clinton. Did we hate what he stood for? I am not sure. For sure we hated him because he won - that much I am very clear on. We lost control of ourselves. I remember being in DC in a shop and seeing a postcard with President & Mrs. Clinton’s heads transposed on a couple dressed in leather and bondage. Is this what we had fallen to? Philip Yancey in his book What’s So Amazing About Grace talks about the aftermath of his interview with President Clinton. Yancey says that he never received as much hate mail as he did after he said he felt Christians should forgive President Clinton of what he had done wrong. As I write this chapter I am reading Michael Moore’s “Dude, Where’s My Country?” I found in the first chapter what I consider affirmation of my belief that our hatred of President Clinton has created a like emotion from those “on the other side.” Moore argues for connections between the Bush family and the Bin Laden family - but he writes something I find terribly insightful:

“But, to use the Clinton analogy again, imagine, in the hours after the Oklahoma City bombing, Bill Clinton suddenly started worrying about the “safety” of the McVeigh family up in Buffalo - and then arranged a free trip for them out of the country. What would you and the Republicans have said about that? Suddenly, a stain on a blue dress probably wouldn’t have been te top priority for such a witch hunt, would it?”

I won’t make the mistake of getting into a discussion about whether or not our motives were pure during the Clinton administration, and if they were not, what it might portend for our future (that is another book entirely), but I will say this: we were simply, profoundly and Biblically wrong in how we acted, talked about, treated and dis-respected President and Mrs. Clinton. Read now-Senator Clinton’s biography: bet you it will throw you for a loop to hear that she views her calling to public service as being deeply rooted in what she learned from her family and her church as they studied John Wesley. I would contend to you that we hated Bill Clinton in some part, at some level, because he stood for a set of principles and ideas that would force us to act on what we hold to be our reason for living.

We don’t live by the Gospel message because we don’t really believe it. We can not accept that lives can be changed if we only love others the way we love ourselves. We do not really and fully recognize that lives could be changed, the inner city re-born, if we acted out in ways that represented our understanding of the need to treat others the way we ourselves want to be treated. I find it more than a little ironic that the two men who most exemplified the supposed pacifist message of the Gospel were Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr. Ghandi, of course, was not a Christian and MLK Jr. is a hotly contested character within the Christian community.
Our view of politics in America is Pharisitical at best. Think about it: the Pharisees would not accept Jesus as the Messiah because they were so focused on changing their temporal world that they couldn’t accept a spiritual Messiah. They were convinced that redemption would mean a leader who could break the backs of the Roman occupation and restore the Davidic kingdom. It was, to be blunt, a political desire. When Jesus revealed Himself to be a leader of the spiritual world, not the political world, He was castigated and ultimately crucified.

We have more in common with the Pharisees that we would like to admit. As a wondering atheist in my early 20’s, I was convinced that one of the core weaknesses of Christianity was that its followers did not actually believe what they claimed. If they did, politics would be secondary to the supposed power they could wield - the power of the Kingdom of God. Let’s take any one of the hot button issues Christians get all worked up about - issues that are moral, not political (things like the Laffer curve and trickle down economics). Just kidding, how about abortion and homosexual rights.

In both of these situations, Christians would contend that the problem is that they violate moral laws, absolutes that God has laid down clearly across all generations. They represent truths that are cross-cultural, and as such, are non-negotiable. I can understand that argument. What I honestly don’t get is where in Scripture they find the connection between their moral views and political involvement?

It isn’t that political involvement is wrong; I am not naïve enough to believe this, but what I would suggest is that where you believe God says something is morally wrong, He probably also shows you how He reached those people guilty of those same sins. And, in fact, that is precisely what you see when Jesus ministered in this world. He was a friend of winebibbers, of harlots, of tax collectors, ate in homes of ill-refute. Come to think of it, Jesus was probably a stinking liberal!

They say that you’re not responsible for what happened to you as a child, but that you are responsible for what you do, as an adult, to correct those problems your child-hood left you with. I say that all to say this - I am coming to the shocking realization that not all of what I was taught as a youngster about God is proving to be accurate. My chief realization: God may not vote straight Republican. I know that He votes, because not voting is just plain un-American and un-democratic, and God is clearly for America, democracy and capitalism. Come to think of it, those folks in Acts sure did seem to be in favor of that whole “pool the wealth and divide it up equally” thinking. They just probably had not yet come to realize that capitalism is the sure fire way to ensure spiritual liberty in a country. Too bad they had not read “Atlas Shrugged” - they could have made a killing on the Phoenician purple die futures. Ayn Rand has been a real boon to the American Christian sub-culture, what with her books like “The Virtue of Selfishness” - what philosophy other than objectivism lies at the roots of conservative thought? When William F. Buckley Jr. referenced Ayn Rand as one of the primary founders of today’s conservative thought I honestly thought to myself, “OK, this is where I get off. Something has to give; either Christianity calls for selflessness and sacrifice, and I am willing to live by that standard, or I’m just using Christianity to fill up the hollowness I feel from being so alone in this universe.” Perhaps in this analysis we find some nugget of trust as to why more people do not profess to share our life of faith; in the intimacy between Christianity and Conservative thought lies an inherently incompatible calling. One to selflessness and sacrifice, and the other to self-preservation, even to the extent of John Galt creating a new society where he can leave behind all those not heady enough to see his way of doing things. I am certainly glad Christ was willing to come to me and you - that he did so in terms I can grasp, in a physical, tactile world. I needed him to do that, you needed him to do that, we all needed him to do that - because belief in God is hard enough, without having any belief that God has ever physically graced this world.

Now, I must impress upon you that such weighty issues were important where I grew up. We were they type of church-school that regularly played other Baptist church-schools in the two organized sports we could actually field a team for: one-man relay races and solo ping-pong. Not really: we could pick between soccer and basketball. You could pick either sport, but you had to play both. Such “choices” pervaded my school experience.

Before our games you would have thought we were in the bowels of the Roman Colliseum, getting ready to be fed to the lions. I was pretty sure that, regardless of what battle lines were going to be drawn on the field of play, the battle lines being drawn in heaven were us against the heathens. Keep in mind the heathens were a demographic that looked a lot like us: they were also heavily infiltrated by the denim-jumper mafia, appeared to have their fair share of people cross-referencing the coach’s play calling with the KJV Bible (keeping in mind that a zone offense may be extra-Biblical and as a result not something we could get behind), and marking down every time one of the players said something like darn or didn’t show the appropriate level of sportsmanship.
HolyWood

Now, I should be completely honest in this chapter: I am very sensitive to criticism of the entertainment establishment in America. My sensitivity probably lies in years of banishment from the normal cartoons, TV and movies most kids grew up with. Our family, well, our experience was a touch different. We didn’t have a TV for years. Every once and a while Dad would bring home one of Grandpa’s old black & white TVs. That was reason to rejoice. It didn’t matter what was on. Never in my life did I know about things like cubic zirconium, Jazzercise, or Mutual of Omaha. Dad would back-slide about once every 18 months and actually buy us a small TV. He was reluctant to put that much of an investment into a new TV because, roughly 30 days after purchasing the TV the preacher would preach about the evils of TV. We all knew what that meant: after going home the TV would be put down. It became something of a ceremony. Dad would vacillate between anger and frustration (probably frustrated at how this time vaguely reminded us all of a similar situation about 19 months ago). Dad would take the TV out to the back yard, explain to us that he was doing this to protect us from the evil of Hollywood, and, because the preacher had told him no good Christian should bother with owning a TV. He would then go into his bedroom, come back with a rifle and the hunt would begin. Come to think about it, hunting isn’t really the best metaphor … shooting fish in a barrel is. The TV probably just thought it was going for a ride, maybe was being taken on a walk, but here it now sat, under the tree, waiting to receive its final death sentence. Dad would cock the gun, whimper slightly, then shoot the TV. In the shattered visage of the TV tube lay by shattered hopes of seeing Scooby-Doo, the Hulk, or even a scandalous glimpse at the Dukes of Hazard.

Letting the story stop here would not be doing it justice however. The resulting day would be marked by our feeling a certain self-righteousness. After all, who else is as concerned about their eternal security as to terminate their appliances with such wanton abandon? But our self-righteousness, like all sugary experiences, would soon fade and the dawning realization that we no longer had access to the magical box would set in. It is here that my Dad had a distinctly unfair advantage because come mid-week, unbeknownst to the rest of the family, Dad would get his TV fix in. It wasn’t as bad as a drug addict finding the remnants of a heroin needle in the chaos of a drug den, but it was real close. See, Dad had figured out that he could kill two birds with one stone in his weekly soul-winning sessions. Dad would faithfully go out during the week with his soul-winning cohort and get his fill of TV. He was pretty good about picking houses where it was his partner’s turn to witness, and where they looked like they had cable. Dad would position himself out of the line of sight of the intended salvation target and longingly gaze at the television. They had been trained to get people to turn the TV off so that you can maintain a person’s attention, but that rule went out the window.

When I reflect upon my childhood I am struck by the lack of influence Hollywood had on my growing up. Reacting to this deprivation is probably why now I can recite at command various entire movie sections, Simpson’s episodes or insights into the Justice League and X-Men.

The Point Christians Miss The Rest of the World Gets

Balance is not a strong suit of the Christian sub-culture. We are not comfortable with “both/and” - we much prefer “either/or.” Not all of this is unique to the Church - much of it is common to the Western Culture. Academics have introduced this point in books such as “The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently … and Why.” It is forgotten all too often that Scripture is a work of Eastern, not Western thought. That probably is traumatic enough, but let’s take the next jump together: Jesus probably wasn’t a 6′1″ white guy with long, lightly curly hair always wearing an impeccably clean white tunic.

We shouldn’t feel bad - that misconception got started a long time ago in an age of artists most have forgotten. What is sad, is that now we have so distilled Christ down to a point where His image can be usurped for anyone’s social demographic. Are you Caucasian? Then buy yourself a Caucasian Jesus. African-American? Aisle two, the black Jesus paintings are all the rage this Christmas. We have so cheapened the image of Jesus that we have forgotten how He is viewed by the world around us. We can’t see beyond those set of ideas, images and identities we have tied into the visual image of Christ.
Is there a greater truth hidden in the realization that if we have so blatantly hijacked the actual image of Christ to fit our own way of looking at the world around us, we have probably also hijacked His message to fit our own way of thinking, of living, our own politics, social constructs, and world-view?

We won’t be ultimately judged, I believe, on an “either/or” scale - we will be found to be “both” sinners “and” redeemed creatures. I think reasonable people who do not share Christian religion understand this. The problem is that this understanding is incompatible with our view of faith. We are so adamant on “either/or” spirituality, that we can’t find our bearings when someone takes a “both/and” position.

We are willing, even require, that we be judged by both the good and the bad we have done in life. We are very desirous that we be weighed in the cosmic scales by both the good and the bad we have done; but for some reason that same perspective doesn’t apply to our culture. We can’t see the good and the bad - we see the bad and we fixate on it.

C.S. Lewis commented on the balance that an authentic Christian life should have when he said the following in Mere Christianity:

“Temperance is, unfortunately, one of those words that has changed its meaning. It now usually means teetotalism. But in the days when the second Cardinal virtue was christened ‘Temperance,’ it meant nothing of the sort. Temperance referred not specially to drink, but to all pleasures; and it meant not abstaining but going the right length and no further.”

Balance can not exist within fundamentalism; navigating the perilous days ahead of the world will require an extremely sound sense of balance. American Christians must begin to recognize that fundamentalism will lead them down a dangerous path that will end badly for them, their families, and their country.

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• September 24, 2004

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