Roll 'em

                I’ve noticed that Christianity, more than any other faith, seems to inspire a disproportionate amount of eyeball-rolling from critics of “religion.”  If confession is made to being a Buddhist, or a Jew, or a Mormon, or a Wiccan, or an Atheist, reactions tend to range from polite muteness to lukewarm “ah!’s” of false interest; but announce your Christianity, and there go the eyeballs, in full sweep around the sockets.

                Why is that?

                One reason, certainly, is our portrayal by a secular media salivating for any opportunity to feast on Christian hypocrisy and scandal; another is the fact that we keep feeding them.  That such disgraces are disproportionate to the reality does not generally occur to the flat-lining masses eating popcorn on the couch in front of their television sets.  

               Combine this with the mass ignorance of what Christianity is, the almost unanimous inability to distinguish the Biblical Christ from the hijacked version of the Western church, and it’s hard to keep a straight face.

                Eyeball-rolling is avoidance.  It is a facial gesture that exclaims, “Oh, how lame!,” that can barely stand the imbecility of the utterance, that cannot waste its breath on condescending to reply.

                That’s where it gets interesting.  It is easy to roll the eyes, or curl the lip, or to make fake retching sounds…whatever.  But when the eyes return to level, look into them and ask the person if they can tell you what it is they hate – what, exactly. 

                An honest person will rip into you about the hypocrisy and ignorance of Christians, how they’re always telling everybody else what to do, how they act worse than other people, that they’re all anti-progressive, against women’s rights, racist, and whatever else he’s learned on the couch with his popcorn.  Like any stereotyping, his own ignorance is founded on some truth.  He defines Christianity by the glaring exceptions, or by the one Christian he talked to, once,  or by the Crusades, for instance.  In his eyes, our failed perfection proves Christianity’s falseness.  

                A polite person will try to ward you off with something vague and hopefully acceptable:  he believes in God, “but,” he points out (since you haven’t thought of this), “God means different things to different people.” Or, he believes in loving everyone equally (like his mother, and the mass murderer).  He simply refuses to think too closely about anything.  In his eyes, nothing is false because nothing is true, or maybe everything is.  It doesn’t matter.  Now please go away.

                There are other classes of objectors, but those seem to be the most common.  Christians are responsible for much of this ignorance.  We engage in arguments about “Christianity,” trying, stupidly, to defend our “religion” against the ridiculing onslaught, when what we are really defending is our own injured egos.  If we are about “Christianity,” we are missing the point.

                Most religions are safely “organizations” in which nice, like-minded people get together to do like-minded things, such as eat and hold rummage sales.  Christianity is very adamantly about a very particular historical person, with a very particular mission:  to bleed to death for the sins of the people.

                I think most people join a religion or a religious group to fulfill some psychological need – for community,  for forgiveness and understanding, friendships, “spirituality” (whatever that is) – all of which masks a deeper, visceral need for justification, which they will never find outside of Christ. 

                This is the only argument.  You can NEVER hope to prove the rightness of a religion by the example of its people without sounding like an idiot and losing.  You can only point to the rightness of it by the righteousness derived from the blood of God himself.

                Buddha, Mohammed, Moses, Confucius, the Popes, and so on, all imparted their own brand of wisdom and law, made tremendous marks on the societies that grew around them, and made long-term contributions to humanity (for good or ill). Yes, God means different things to different people.  But nobody except Jesus died for you.  

                I wonder, during the brief pause in which I follow the eyeballs around, if maybe this is not what really irks them.  As an unbeliever, I did the same thing, although usually with a fouler gesture, and not confined to the face.  Is that what bothered me, maybe in a way too deep to grasp, or did I just miss the obvious because I was too focused on spewing what I imagined were clever offenses?  I don’t know. 

                I do know that the “religion” of Christianity has done much to destroy the message of Christ, perhaps more than any other single factor in history, and the responses to it seem to bear that out.  Going straight to the issue will still incur derision, maybe even more of it, but at least the focus will be where it belongs.  It is one thing to ridicule Christianity, which can save no one anyway; it is another entirely to ridicule Christ, who is the only one who can.

LPM