Bottom Line: Christians are to blame for everything and should be given credit for nothing. It is time Christians personed up and admitted this. L.O.S.E. is planning a national day of shame for its Christian past so that we can better live quiet lives of non-partisan opposition to ourselves. We are defending Christianity by apologizing for all Christians.
Background: L.O.S.E. is our new organization (Lovingly Opposed to Sin and Evil) whose plan is to end evil in our lifetime . . . lovingly! Here is our first position paper. Here are Ten Commandments for political involvement (missing the numerologically questionable six).
Commentary:
The worst thing about non-academics is their desire to make simplistic judgments about blame.
Non-academics think that if a Christian does a good thing because of the teachings of Jesus, that Christianity should get credit for it. Think of the result!
Thousands of years of hospitals, the rising tide of civil and political rights, the development of modern science, the creation of the university system, most of the foundations of Western art and literature: all of this would have to be credited to Christianity.
Think of the chances for pride.
Secularism, on the other hand, has not done much.
Think of their chances for humility. Wouldn’t you rather be a secularist without the temptations of our vast cultural accomplishments?
There is good news. We can destroy this temptation to false happiness in “what God has done” by passing credit for it to secularists!
Academia of the last fifty years has shown us a more sophisticated way to think. We now know that Christianity has done no good, because many highly regarded humanities dissertations have shown our badness to us.
Christians who do good because of their faith would have done that good anyway. On the other hand, our horrors are our own.
Most Christians don’t realize it, but secularists do not agree with us.
L.O.S.E. was horrified to discover how little respect traditional Christians gain in the modern academy. Nobody knows the horror of this situation better than a Christian graduate student forced to endure bullying because of Church History. Many of us are still scarred by frequent Python Spanish Inquisition you-tubes appearing in our university mail boxes.
The good news is that when we admitted to our secular peers that Christians did not deserve respect in the secular academy, we gained respect from our friends.
We want to get this same sort of respect for the rest of us!
The goal of L.O.S.E. is to have ever more secularists describe our members as “good Evangelicals” or “reasonable, not like those agitators outside of the academy who don’t know how the university works” or “not like the rest of those people” or as “a credit to your religion.”
Christians who are academic have not given up on the Faith! No! We have simply given up on the rest of the Faithful, especially those who lived before our enlightened time.
The academic Christians of L.O.S.E. disassociate themselves from the Church, because we are re-imagining the Church as a place centered on being upset, concerned, and sorry for the things the Church did that upset, concern and worry our friends.
Isn’t repentance Christian?
When in doubt, we should take the blame. If it looks like someone else is to blame, then we should go ahead and take the blame, because it makes us (see the Church) look good.
Who can forget the self-satisfaction we gained at our first L.O.S.E. Conference, when Joe Carter took the blame for Watergate?
His statement, “I am Richard Nixon.” brought tears to our eyes.
What would happen if Hugh Hewitt were to admit that he and other right-wing Christians forced anti-anti-communists to hide their hatred of Stalinism for so long to counter the exaggerations of the right?
How much pain did the Church cause these well intentioned and good people who became confused when conservative Christians wanted to deny actors and directors the right to make films?
So many on the left saw the plain moral equivalence of private movie companies choosing not to hire someone with an ideology they found repugnant and the Gulag.
We must admit (and L.O.S.E. does admit) that many Christians did not see the moral equivalence. Too many became obsessed with the Gulags and did not worry (some not at all!) about screen writers who could find no place for their films or actors without a chance to star in a motion picture!
This is the sort of thing for which the Church must repent and, like it or not, we are boldly going to repent for everyone else.
We are opposed to all evil equally.
This will be controversial, but our prophetic boldness allows us to take this firm stand against other’s sins that they will not see.
We will apologize for you and so win your gratitude or your hostility, but certainly win a seat at the academic table for people of faith.
Secular people have rightly pointed out that the church is responsible for most of the evils of Western culture. Some might view this as depressing, but we view it as a great chance to repent.
Some have argued that the vast majority of people in Western civilization have been some form of Christian and so Christians are always going to heavily represented in any group. This includes evil doers.
So what?
We must accept the iron tight secular argument: when Christians are bad, it is because they have been reading the Bible, but when they are good, it is from reading secularists.
Jefferson owned slaves, but because he was a deist he did not really mean it. The Quakers hated slavery, but it must have come from reading Ben Franklin.
History is the long story of hidden secularists keeping the world from the rot of unsophisticated religious types.
The pagan and secular Romans were forced to persecute the Church when we refused their offer to join the rest of the culture and say, “Caesar is Lord.”
We repent of our failing to clarify our views to the Romans.
Stalin was put into a terrible bind by the stubborn opposition of many Christians to his plans for Soviet development.
We repent of our hostility of economic systems and social structures too few of us took the time to understand.
Albania? Our fault. Cambodia? You have it now.
China and Mao? Poor Mao was just reacting to all those missionaries opening hospitals and schools without the necessary secular suffering of his Great Leap Forward.
We are to blame for so much.
The long centuries of progress to produce our culture might be seen as depending on the hard work and sacrifice of Christian ancestors. Instead, we accept the fact, because our secular peers believe it, that all good things started after World War II.
There was very little difference between the Dark Ages (for which we repent) and 1910 (for which we repent). History is not the story of development, but of our messing up and failing to take the blame (for which we really repent).
Sadly, we are the children of the unrepentant. We repent of that. We are anti-intellectual. We are bad. We are sad, so bitterly miserably sad.
And we are sorry.
Next fall the Coalition of Christian Colleges and Academic Groups will hold the first ever Conference to Repent of Everything. It will be held at the national headquarters of L.O.S.E. at Saint Chad’s Progressive E.C. in Fontana-By-the-Sea, California.
Christian academics know the Gospel works, just not in anyone we know.
Too many Christians are partisan, don’t fit in well at better University mixers, and fail to listen to Prairie Home Companion with the appropriate smirk of delight.
Join with us May 1, 2008 at our Conference as we pray:
Help us to realize that or forefathers and mothers blew it.
We know their sins and they are ever before us.
All the bad things of life are their fault.
We are sorry for what they did and we shall call their faults our own.
For surely it makes us feel grace-filled to repent for sins they committed.
They were narrow and we are broad.
Forgive them for not being broad enough.
They were nasty and we are cheerful.
Forgive them for not being cheerful enough.
They were partisan and we are inclusive.
Forgive them for not being inclusive enough.
They were patriots and we are just people, loving people.
Forgive their patriotism for America is almost totally evil.
Forgive us for being their children.
We stand on the backs of pygmies, but we are on tip-toe and we can see the future.
It has us in it, so we are thankful.
Help us not to become arrogant and forget our own sin of not asking forgiveness for their sins soon enough.
God-Self help us to be Our-Self so that we can be the Church emergent
for the first time ever.
Really.
Amen