Lord, Save us from Your Followers
I’m currently reading Dan Merchant’s book “Lord, Save us from Your Followers.” So far, I’ve really enjoyed the book. It’s been a bit of an eye-opener as he shares viewpoints from people of very diverse backgrounds.
Today, I read a passage that made me think about what a disservice we do to God and our Christian faith when we reduce this beautiful mystery down to catchy slogans and a few bullet points. Can we really take the complex issues of Scripture and faith and make 3-5 absolute statements of what they mean? For me, when I study Scriptures, I see glimpses of the truth which inspires me to seek more. And, I often end up with more questions than answers. With that in mind, I want to share a bit from this book.
“In this consumer culture we’ve been trained to accept ad slogans, labels, sound bites, and bumper-sticker slogans as adequate. These micro-blips of information reduce the complexity of an issue, strip essential meaning from it, and ultimately snuff out conversation…’It’s Adam and Even not Adam and Steve’ doesn’t address the financial or social issues attendant to the same-sex marriage issue or invite a dialogue on a complex issue, it just says, ‘Shut up already.’ This simplistic, one-way communication style we’ve developed seems to give us permission to be close-minded and dismissive. It does matter how you tell the story. To create a group called Value Voters infers that everybody else is without values. The Reverend Jerry Falwell once explained that the name Moral Majority didn’t mean to infer that everyone else was the Immoral Minority, but that’s what it sounded like, and, that is how people took it. So if the result of the communication yields an incorrect or inaccurate perception, we should consider a new way to explain the story. Now, of course, both us and them are guilty of this reductionism. But if we’re trying to live like Jesus - represent Him - then we have to elevate our game. You can scream: ‘Theocracy!’ or ‘The Religious Right is subverting the Consitution!’ or ‘I will fight the Hollywood agenda!’ or ‘We must win this battle to reclaim America!’ and the nature of this strident, confrontational language makes us all feel we’re in the right and our enemy will be defeated. And there it is: this one-way communication creates enemies rather than dealing with the issues or, more importantly, demonstrating Christ’s love.”
I include that in this entry to simply say, we need to think about what we say and how we say it. We can often do more damage than good with our words. Sometimes, we throw down some words with great authority, basically saying “That’s the bottom line”…and we keep those who might have alternative views on the outside. We need to embrace healthy dialogue. Hating someone into a relationship with God rarely works. Continually pointing out that you are right and everyone else is wrong rarely brings others along…it usually offends and makes them thing you are arrogant.
Our government could really learn from this. In our foreign policy, we use a lot of “we’re right and you’re wrong”. We even tell leaders of other nations that we won’t sit down and talk about peace until they agree to all of our terms. And, we ridicule people that talk about having open dialogue without pre-conditions. Does anyone truly wonder why the rest of the world looks at us as an arrogant bully? We have reduced complex issues into campaign slogans and the damage has been done.