Religious soap opera: Pride and Stereotypes

Christianity is under attack by atheists and blundering, bigoted nominal Christians alike. The one loves the stereotypical Christian, the other loves to oblige. Meanwhile, the true message of Christ's love gets unheard, even though we hear and see Christian metaphors in much secular music and cinematography. 

Trees by the stream
Some years ago, just after I had re-dedicated my life to following Christ, my wife and I were due to perform at a secular music festival in the countryside. On the way there, we visited two Christian friends who tried to discourage us because they had heard “bad things” about the festival, that it was somehow a melting pot of all sorts of evil. My response was, “Then all the more reason for us, as Christians, to be there.” Not to proselytise with words, Bibles and pamphlets, not to condemn and judge, but just to be who we are: fellow human beings and musicians out to enjoy a weekend of sunshine and good music. Moreover, we were renewed people, fountains of living water, strangely different, trees beside the stream of eternal life, trees in whose shade we have visited and shared life with friends – Christian and non-Christian alike. We didn’t need words to tell this to the world.

Killed on the zebra crossing
Today, more than ever in my lifetime, I am witnessing an onslaught on Christianity by people claiming to be atheist and claiming to know what Christianity is all about through what they read in the media or experience themselves at the hands of people who claim to be Christian who are not “strangely different” but are strenuously conforming to the stereotype of “typical” Christians. These atheists’ judgment of the entire faith is neatly summed up by the passage from Douglas Adams’ Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: “Oolon Colluphid’s trilogy of philosophical blockbusters Where God went wrong, Some more of God’s Greatest Mistakes and Who is this God Person anyway?”  “Oolon Colluphid” is obviously an intellectual who has become popular through making controversial statements and, without allowing himself to be in awe of the wonder and mystery of the Universe (where God did it just right), he has swept the Creator out of the equation. Like Man in another part of The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, he has proven logically that God does not exist and is going on to prove that black is white, getting himself killed on the next zebra crossing!

Metaphorically, we are doing just that: we are getting ourselves killed morally, philosophically and aesthetically because we have allowed our logic to deprive us of the wonder and beauty of the universe by reducing it to wheels, cogs and nuts and bolts – and worse; dollars and cents. If we don’t stand in awe of something greater than us, we are in danger of neglecting and trampling or exploiting those who are weaker than we are, because we become arrogant masters of an engineer’s universe which has no understanding of the respect for life. It is also a financier’s universe where everything that is not bringing in cash or adding monetary value to the pot is disregarded as worthless. C.S Lewis in Mere Christianity puts it this way: "As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you." It is pride, the idea that we are answerable to no higher power, that is the cause of many of the world’s problems today – from the abuse and exploitation of our environment to the scourge of rape which sees men answerable only to their all-consuming will to power over “weaker” women.

Useless stereotypes
Religious pride looks like the opposite, posing as the remedy for the humanist, atheist ideologies around today. Humanism is demanding equal rights for same-sex marriage, “fundamental” Christians seek to abolish homosexuality altogether, basing their view on a few passages in the Bible that call it an “abomination.” It is a literalist view of all that the Bible says and is also missing the point. Religious pride relies on human interpretations of the Bible, instead of allowing God’s supernatural spirit to open our eyes and ears to all the ways (not just the Bible) in which He is communicating with us – through things that people tell us, something we read by chance in a magazine, lyrics of a (yes, secular) song or a concept in a good film. Submitting to this spirit requires a laying down of Self and a taking up of trust in God’s will for us, trusting that he is indeed interested in us in a very real way and is actively communicating with us. Unfortunately the pride-filled, fearful view confuses “awe and wonder” with a wrathful, judgmental god, blinding us to the wonders that He has in stall for us, that instead of this hell-fire and damnation we have a common-sense faith presented to us by the real Christ, a faith which boils down to the simple, yet most mysterious (and misunderstood) concept of love – the nemesis of fear and pride. Love and faith go hand in hand: we have to believe in love for it to work. Ask anyone suffering from depression how difficult it is to love yourself when you do not believe yourself worthy of love. It is the lack of this love which is driving self-proclaimed, pride-filled Christians to condemn people for things about which Jesus Christ himself was inexplicably silent (what did he say about homosexuality?), and in so doing they are fuelling the stereotype of the Christian that we see today.

The world loves stereotypes. This is the picture that it has of the average Christian:
• An unsmiling, humourless robot with a Bible under the arm.
• Someone for whom nothing outside of the words and literal ideas in the Bible exists – in fact, science and scientific hypotheses are to be mistrusted and vilified as “the work of Satan” (whose image closely matches that of Darwin with horns on his head).
• Someone who says “Praise the Lord” lots and who is always saying things about “The Lord” in such a way that you can actually see the capital letters every time they say “The Lord.”
• Someone who will slavishly support the USA’s killing and torturing innocent civilians because the USA has a “Christian” government (and therefore can do no wrong).
• A self-appointed moral guardian who believes that stamping out homosexuality is right at the top of God’s “To-Do” list.
• Someone who wears a WWJD (“What Would Jesus Do”) bracelet and a “Jesus” T-shirt, advertising a moralising, judgmental and no-fun-at-all buzzkill whacko who lived 2000 years ago who still thinks he can spoil our fun today by telling us with “overly attached girlfriend” eyes and froth around the mouth that we will go to a place called Hell (apparently involving eternal fire and stuff) if we have fun, read Darwin and the Mad magazine or listen to Judas Priest/Nirvana/Avenged Sevenfold (pick your generation) backwards, forwards or sideways. I remember when I was at school some well-meaning, sincere people handing out little cartoon booklets published by well-meaning, sincere but totally off-whack Chick publications sketching out scenarios where the wayward lad or lass ends up in Hell as a result of slavishly following a friend who drinks and takes drugs and who reveals himself as a devil when they die.

Watch just about any TV programme like the teen soapie “Awkward” or any number of popular movies and you will see Christian robots set up and shot down, dispatched with disdain. Yes, the world loves this stereotype and the media will play up to this in any way they can, with fearful Christians always ready to oblige. What a wonderful way to keep the followers of Christ at arm’s length and disengaged from the pressing issues of philosophy, ideologies, morality and ethics that abound in the world today: keep them shouting irrelevancies from ancient, seemingly anachronistic scriptures and no-one will listen to them.

Perhaps it is time for the followers of Christ to enter into a meaningful conversation with the world; perhaps the arts - music, literature and cinematography - can be the meeting place for this dialogue to take place. See the next installment of this post for more on this.