The Tribe Covers a Multitude of Sins
I had a teacher in high school who had no poker face. Everyone knew the moment she tipped from Mildly Annoyed to Actually Enraged because she started calling students “my dear sweet.”
It was sort of a verbal tic. “My dear sweet” meant she was trying to be patient with you, and wanted you to know it. So it didn’t only show up when you spoke out of turn or wrote “penis” on your desk: you could also count on hearing it if you were slow on the uptake.
“No, that’s a participle, my dear sweet.”
“Answer the question right. This isn’t a joke, my dear sweet.”
And the consistent crowd-pleaser:
“Jesus made the water into grape juice, my dear sweet.” (I went to a pretty conservative school.)
We hated it fiercely. Students, as a rule, don’t really mind anger, disappointment, or frustration, but we couldn’t stand this. It seemed that it didn’t matter to her how she said it — her tone could be disrespectful, condescending, sneering — because she said the “right thing.” Dear sweet: that’s technically a term of endearment, right?
The Problem with Genre
It makes me deeply sad that there is a Christian genre. (I’m going somewhere with this, I promise.)
Genre is a heavy word; it implies a work will live up to certain expectations. Fantasy stories will have magic; Jane Austen stories will have witty romance; Christian stories will have no sex, little or no swearing or mention of alcohol, no endorsement of heresy, and — most crucial—a solid Jesus-per-minute ratio.
This doesn’t have to be literal mentions of the name of Christ. Usually, it’s just a plug for Christianity, a sort of advertisement:
What can accepting Jesus do for YOU?
- Your marriage will be SAVED!
- You will DEFEAT your atheist professor in philosophical combat!
- Your football team will WIN the championship!
Though there is hope for improvement, this problem is still running wild. We claim to be connected to a creative, powerful, loving God. But the mark of our art is not its beauty or its courage or its empathy. Our best-known movies tend to suck. They’re parasitic rather than creative, reductive rather than loving, trite rather than honest. Christian art is more concerned with proving its Christianness than it is with actually being good.
You can see where this is going:
It doesn’t matter how they say it — so long as they say the right thing.
It’s Not a Religion…
This is not actually a rant against Christian art.
I don’t like it, but hey, I’m a snob — I love not-liking things. But it’s not my place to say “I don’t like it, ergo it should not exist.”
It is my place to say that art is always symptomatic of its makers (and it has a lot to say about its consumers, too).
My generation, the Christian millennials, saw Rob Bell exiled for asking a question; saw pastors fired over every imaginable moral failure; watched a political movement latch onto Evolution Vs. Creationism in schools like a starving animal.
My generation learned from our Christian subculture that the state of our hearts mattered less than our spoken assent to appropriate theology. We learned that it was okay to question if and only if you kept your questions away from particular topics. We learned — implicitly, through countless examples— that our leaders will wear masks to protect their witness. That a Christian leader can say dehumanizing or inflammatory or genuinely stupid things and retain leadership, but if you dare to suggest that maybe God doesn’t sentence non-Christians to eternal conscious torture, WOE BETIDE.
We are more concerned that people prove their Christianness than anything else. Agreement to the right theology, outrage over the right political events, endorsement of the right people: these things function like marks of belonging, a symbol to other people that you are in the club.
Belonging to that club became the most important thing, because if you belong, you can do or say almost anything. And the ones who don’t belong receive summary exile.
…It’s a Tribe
There is tribalism in Christianity, and I hate it.
There is something deeply wrong with caring more about someone’s professed ideology than the pattern of their life. Churches will castigate honest, compassionate Christians for suggesting the world might not end if homosexuals got married, but we’ll defend an abuser so long as he keeps his theology straight; we’ll champion a bully because his obnoxious, insensitive invective aligns (however superficially) with what we believe.
What are we doing?
Surely there is more to our faith than painting our faces. Surely there is more to us than saying the right things.
And, if we’re honest with ourselves…what use is it to say those right things if they don’t reflect our hearts? if they are hateful? if they are so poorly said that the only people who listen to us agreed with us already?
The only reason to do this is to convince other Christians that we are in the club. Why are we so concerned with that?
The answer is obvious, of course. It’s the same reason I want to drop a casual swear word, or rail against folks who think that Christian=Republican. It would improve my social status among a group I find attractive (the liberal-leaning people-lovin’ why-can’t-we-all-just-get-along Christians). Doing these things would prove to them that I’m in the club, guys.
And it would also make this whole post utterly pointless.
Certainly it would make me feel very superior to accuse, insult, and otherwise poop upon the people who disagree with me. It would also alienate them; they could dismiss this whole idea as arrogance and anger. I would have exchanged one sort of tribe for another, but the methods would be no different.
I don’t want to do that.
What I want, really, is to be honest, and thoughtful, and compassionate. I want to yearn more for Christ than Christianity. As for the tribalism:
This tribalism, this determination to do or support things only because they keep us in the club, is stupid. It has cost us our unity, our reputation, our thinkers and questioners. It has burdened young Christian artists with the worry that their desire to craft things that are beautiful — just beautiful, not didactic or missional or evangelistic — is somehow wrong. It endorses hatred, praises ignorance, validates abuse, trumpets hypocrisy, and strangles integrity.
And I’m sick of it.
