Sorry, Christians, but you are not the “light of the world”
“You’ve been thinking that people don’t like you.” says Bishop T.D. Jakes, “It’s not that they don’t like you. They don’t like the anointing that’s on you”.
The pastor proceeds “Your anointing makes them uncomfortable and the reason they can’t relax when you come into the room is because something in you is tormenting something in them and you say ‘I don’t understand how come I keep falling out with people that I’m trying to be nice to’. And you need to understand that is not your actions that they hate. It’s your anointing that they hate.”
I wasn’t searching for this. In fact, I was looking at completely unrelated stuff as the excerpt from Bishop Jakes sermon popped up. Still, I like how it summarizes a topic I would like to talk about here. Namely, the belief of Christians that they are the “anointed ones”, the “salt of the earth”, the “light of the world”.
Of course, they’ll try, like the pastor quoted above, to say that they are not the special ones because of who they are, but because of God’s presence in them, so that they can display their fake humility. Still, in practice, there is no doubt that they do feel as special individuals, as “God’s chosen ones” or, as he puts it, “the anointed ones”.
But they’ll find it strange that people do not treat them as such. That their spiritual superiority, their godly nature, is not acknowledged by anyone else besides themselves. So, they come up with the narrative that the reason is because all other people are “in darkness” and that the “light inside Christians” disturbs these “shadowy people”, which includes all non-Christians and, sometimes, even all non-Evangelicals Christians (like Catholics, Orthodox and more traditional Protestants).
Have they ever considered other better, more plausible, explanations? For example, that they are just acting annoying towards other people? Or that others can see through the façade of Christians trying to look nice to everybody, while seeing all non-Christians as inferior?
Or that, in life, not everyone will be kind to you, including Christians, and that a lot of non-Christians face the same issue and find themselves being treated poorly by others?
There is a person I know that would say that, whenever others acted towards her in a way she found inconvenient, it was because they were “being used by Satan to ruin her day and make her sad”. She was very convinced of that and this was not only her, but there is a good chunk of Evangelical Christians who think like this, because they firmly believe that being Christians makes them that special.
Another thing is that Christians see themselves as “separated” from everyone else and think about the “world” (including all non-Christians) as wicked and twisted. Now, think a little bit, if someone sees you as a corrupt creature and wants distance from you, what reasons would you have to feel anything but annoyance by this person or, at best, to mock or to ignore her? And wouldn’t it feel fake if the same person who sees you as an inferior creature starts acting nice towards you? Wouldn’t it feel really suspicious?
Christians will see others in such terms, as awful sinners deservers of Hell, but they think that, because they pretend to be nice to them, it will be all fine. It’s not a big surprise then that many people will treat them in a cold or even harsh manner.
Through the infamous rebuttal of Origen of Alexandria, titled “Against Celsus”, we do have fragments of Celsus lost book “The true Doctrine” which, despite being written almost 2 millennia ago, remains incredibly relevant to our modern days when it comes to Christian behavior.
Celsus elaborated on the same issues we see today, Christians holding strange and contradictory doctrines, keeping a literal reading of old legends and myths, acting as if they were better than anyone else, insulting and despising all other religions and, finally, thinking the backlash they face has something to do with how special they are and not with their annoying attitude of entitlement.
What is also worth mentioning is how they feel special chosen people by subscribing to the most common and widespread form of religion in the West. Believing and doing the same thing as thousands of other people, many times even dressing themselves and acting exactly like all other thousands of Evangelical Christians. As I understand, someone is considered special when he is unique and very distinct from the others, or when he has a very special skill that others cannot mimic.
These Evangelical Christians are difficult to tell apart. It feels as if, like in cartoons, they were all put into the same treadmill of a factory and went through a series of processes to look and sound exactlt the same, like mass produced products. Yet they firmly believe they are the special ones. They struggle in dealing with the most basic things of life, yet they affirm that the entire world depends on their blessing.
