People often ask me what news I read. (Okay, they don’t ask me I just tell them.) My usual response is that I stick to precious few subjects. I read mostly business and science news updates. From time to time, I will glance at “The Economist” and “Christianity Today.” However, my places where I get news are very limited. The reason is that I really hate having to do background checks on my news. I reading a story and then having to probe into online articles, books, and audio samples to find out if it is true or not. Usually this is just simple bias. (One way to get factual news is to see if the people touting it would normally tout that news.) There are all sorts of ways to lie with statistics and quotes being taken out of context and information just plain not being shared.
However, something happened recently that moved from mere curiosity, to annoyance, to actual outrage. Every so often a satirical news article is taken out of context and thought to be real. This is usually something that occurs when proponents of a particular viewpoint become desperate for someone to back up that narrative. (For instance, a few years ago the president of Iran touted that he was more popular with Americans than President Obama. His source? The well-known satirical site: the Onion.) Fact checking is fantastic and we need honest brokers. Sadly, we Christians have gotten targeted though.
You may think I am talking about the fact that we feel threatened that Christmas is being removed from this time of year; and that I am quite outraged by the “persecution” of not being able to say “Merry Christmas.” No, what I am angry about is that so many people know so little about Christianity, that they believed this story. This goes for Christians and non-Christians alike. I have met so many people inside and outside the church whose view of Christians is that we are all hate-mongering boycotters of anything that doesn’t come with Kurt Cameron’s stamp of approval. My question is simple, do you even know the Christians in your neighborhood or, heaven forbid, at your church?
When this story broke, do you know that the major conservative Evangelical publications not only denied this but went a step further to talk about charity during the Christmas season? (Be honest with yourself, when was the last time you took charity seriously any time of the year, let alone Christmastime?) Did you read the articles from Christianity Today, Think Christian, or even Charisma; or did you just pile on like the rest of society? Did you bother to see the articles posted in Conservative or Liberal journals alike that said this was nothing more than a ploy by an opportunistic charlatan deliberately mis-reading a satirical article in Breitbert? My guess is no.
I have come to expect this kind of behavior from the majority of Americans who do not care whether they are inside or outside the doors of the church. I have come to expect this behavior from people who only get their news in thirty-second snippets. However, I am deeply hurt that similar responses have come from clergy as well. I am angry that so many of my friends who are pastors shared memes made by secularists chastising Christians rather than pointing out that this was a big lie. I am outraged that they didn’t operate with Christlike wisdom or pastoral care to a world in need of the Gospel; but rather decided to declare themselves “not those kinds of Christians.” The problem is that “those kinds of Christians” didn’t exist except for the small fanbase this charlatan has accumulated. Rather than being pastoral though, many of my clergy and lay friends decided to accept the myth that this really was a movement among Christians. They chose to speak alongside the lie because it was easier than fighting for the truth. I will not post anything about how Christians should advocate for the homeless or care for the poor or feed the hungry, because that has already been posted in a much older text by a much wiser being. I will not post that Christians should not worry about the new design of a coffee-chain’s cups because that was never brought up by any true Christian except in jest or pharisaical judgement of a straw man.
Today I am ashamed to be a Christian, not because so many of us believe there is a war on Christmas being perpetrated by the red hue of a coffee cup and so few spoke against it. I am ashamed to be a Christian because so many non-Christians lined up to mock the body of Christ as hypocrites and so many Christians joined in the taunts or remained silent. Merry Christmas everybody, from one scoundrel who doesn’t deserve to be called a child of God to another, Merry Christmas
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