Outside Inside Reality

Outside Reality TV, Into Reality
[Disclaimer: this blog has been particularly thorny to write, and there are many caveats that may not have been cleared. Please read accordingly, leave comment if needed!]

[Regarding Mr. Busey's team prayer in "Celebrity Fit Club 2" SEE PREVIOUS BLOG]

Unfortunately America is long past the point beyond which we can expect people to join with us under Jesus' name in prayer. I am not selling out to ecumenism here, just making a point.

Erosion
Somewhere between 1990 or all the way back to the late '60's, there has been an erosion of the Judeo-Christian social culture that America was founded upon. I am thankful for this heritage and want to preserve it, but I also realize that we cannot force unwilling people back into a mold that they do not want.

I will not go so far as to settle for this situation. I just don't think laws and arguments for their own sake will convince people. Actually it's probably better to pray for genuine heart change for the public rather than just a return to what they perceive as 1950's values. There is a significant percentage of the culture that resents that term and what it represents to them.

Our Perceived Response
The normal response of the religious community in my experience to this reality is to try to 1. convince the disenfranchised objectors that America's heritage should be preserved intact. This is a noble aim, but doesn't always work since the emotions tend to overrule logic. When this doesn't work, we often 2. don't know what to do, so we 3. reinforce the us vs. them mentality and 4. forget about God's perspective and get really afraid and upset.

I stated above that I believe in preserving America's heritage. I think where the faith community misses it is by pursuing a noble desire with tainted motivations. Please allow me to qualify this - I grew up in a faith environment with disciplined, virtuous people who studied the Bible. However when they started talking about the hot buttons (politics, abortion, left-wing social activism, evolution, prayer out of the public school, etc...) people really started getting upset, which can in fact be entirely appropriate. I think that a lot of the media coverage of "Religious Right" activities in the 80's captured this perception and broadcast it to the world, making Christians look angry and mean.

In my experience, I witnessed too much of this to completely discredit people's negative reaction. When AIDS came out, I didn't see many people praying about it; instead we stated it was God's judgment against homosexuals. I don't remember praying for president Clinton much, and when he lied under oath about his "indiscretions" many of us gleefully tuned in to the radio talk-show pundits, eagerly awaiting his impeachment. I could list a lot of other stuff but I am depressed already.

It was just for Clinton to be reprimanded for lying about his conduct. No one would deny that AIDS is a consequence of having sex with an infected person (although many believe that "protected sex" will always protect them), and it may be accurate though not easy to label it a "judgment". When we stop at "God's judgment" people don't hear the redemptive side, that God wants to reconcile us vertically & horizontally.

If I had AIDS, I might well realize and regret what I did and perhaps want to repent, but hearing that this is "God's judgment" against me, I might think God hates me and won't ever forgive me. The intended communication is "we are all responsible for our sins, but Jesus has paid this penalty on our behalf, if we will allow Him to change our thinking and behavior". If we say and do things outside of a truth-in-love motivation, the enemy can take advantage of it.

As I said in an earlier blog, the media thrives on broadcasting the worst of behavior, so it is tough to win a positive spin. They rarely catch us doing the right things, unless it is in the realm of social action. I'm glad more Christians are getting caught feeding the hungry and building homes and doing Tsunami relief. I hope we will try to turn other perceptions around one-on-one, outside of the media zone.

We have a lot of ground to cover. God is after individual people and has called us to be reconcilers. He guides us by his spirit as well. Below is an additional strategy that I have found to be effective.

Try This At Home
What I propose might work better is 1. ask the disenfranchised objector to tell you why they feel the way they do, and 2. try to find out what happened in their life (divorced parents, bullying, religious hypocrisy, moral failures, and broken trust are a few) to cause their disenfranchisement. Then you [gasp] 3. express sincere sadness over these events and in qualifying cases (such as any religious issue) 4. become an agent of reconciliation ("I understand how you feel about religious people being a bunch of hypocrites. I've gotten a lot of flak from them too, but Jesus isn't like that. I go to church myself, so it really hurts to know that we [the religious community] could have hurt you in that way.")

When people experience this kind of sincere empathy they are now more aware that you might actually care about them. You might now have a choice to do several things, among them 1. keep on talking about Jesus' love (or whatever else you sense God might want you to communicate, 2. go back to talking about America's moral heritage, or 3. something else.

Or perhaps the person was so mad that he or she spat in your face or assaulted you verbally or something in the previous paragraph. If this is what happened, you have been persecuted for righteousness. Congratulations. Rejoice, etc... but make sure to forgive the person and pray for them & that God sends somebody else to love on them.

You may have objected to this notion of assuming other people's mistakes as some sort of hypocrisy in itself, or that the other person should have to first repent before experiencing reconciliation with their church issues. You may be right and that may well have been how it worked for you. I would rather risk this than to watch an opportunity to offer God's love to somebody via an apology for something an affiliated person may have done to them. Heck, their perception may have been totally wrong as well, but I want to take the opportunity to bring Jesus into the situation.

What Changes Things

What Will Change People?

1. Prayers of brokenness

2. Love for lost souls

3. Fasting

Lifestyle Prayer

Thank God for bringing back the "house of David" - a restoration of king David's prayer temple which joined passionate music and fervent prayer and fasting. Best of all, people that share the vision of lifestyle prayer encounter a massive priority shift in their lives. They begin to think of themselves as followers of Christ and not primarily as American Christians. Their values are God's dream rather than the American Dream.

After Praying

After praying, they do things motivated through God's love, such as social and political action. Their actions do not resemble those portrayed in the news programs of the '80's, because their faith is not in candidates or political parties. They are supportive of a candidate or party to the extent that the candidate or party supports God's laws for the earth. Does this mean we "legislate morality"? Absolutely. I wish I realized sooner that every other belief system is trying to do this, although most other groups are not interrogated about it as much.

Those Trying to Legislate Morality Include

Groups who maintain...

Child Pornography is OK, "in the privacy of your own home"
Dad + Dad or Mom + Mom are equally beneficial for children & society as Dad + Mom.
Video Games with secret X-rated downloads shouldn't be "censored" from anyone
Underage girls should be allowed to travel to another state for medical procedures without parental knowledge or consent.

As well as...
Activist Federal Judges
Polititians
Gambling Moguls & Municipalities
People for the American Way
Move On.org
Corporations

Every other religious groups...
Every other religious sect...
Athiests...

And finally
Christians

The neat thing about America is that whoever wants it bad enough gets to make the laws. The neat thing about Jesus Christ is that he has the power to change people's hearts. The neat thing about God's kingdom is that there are tools that will change the world around us if we want it bad enough to use them.

What Won't Change America

1. Wishing for the good old days
2. Waiting for the rapture
3. Disgust, judgment, or fear-motivated petitions to God
4. Human plans, political or otherwise
5. Making sweeping judgments and lists of hostile groups such as the one I made under the previous heading. Doing this tends to cause others not to trust you (could you blame them?).

Case #1: Celebrity Fit Club

Celebrity Fit Club 2

People who are called to love Jesus and love others can receive a lot of wisdom through the good and not-so-good examples of other people. Reality TV contains an abundance of examples of the latter type. This show's plot is to take pampered celebrities and subject them to basic training-type tactics to help them lose weight while amusing America and creating financial dividends for the parent conglomerates.

The Cast

For our purposes, the main cast is team#1 (I forgot their name). This team consists of captain Gary Busey (Action Movie star who is a minister), Willie Aames (Eight is Enough, more recently "BibleMan" Superhero), Victoria Jackson (SNL, now a Christian Comedian), and Wendy Kaufmann, the "Snapple Lady" who I am sure is of a Jewish background.

The Exploits

To their credit, these characters often are supportive, encouraging, polite, and genuine. However, the nature of reality TV is to celebrate the worst of human behavior so that the viewer should watch cautiously, assuming that their on screen personae are a collage of the worst behavior exhibited, under artificial conditions contrived by the producers.

Dirty Deed #1

Willie Aames has missed his target weight goal for another week and the drill sergeant pays him a surprise house call. Willie is having a bad morning and doesn't want to deal with this for whatever reason. So the episode contains a lot of rude behavior from Willie such as door slamming, yelling, and garden-hosing of the drill sergeant, culminating in a yelling match in the "boardroom" scene. To his credit, it's obvious that Willie knows he is "in the flesh" as he admits, but I cringed for him the whole time.

Deed #2

Gary Busey is the team captain and kicks butt in a boxing match, scoring points for his team. He is whupped at the end of the match so he calls for a team prayer session. With so many other professing Christians on the team this seems like a great move, but the Snapple Lady takes offense to the end of the prayer which of course invokes Jesus' name.

Gary is wiped out from the boxing and snaps back about "team unity" and that sort of thing, and it gets very uncomfortable especially when he declares "the AntiChrist is among us". Willie and Victoria in the meantime try to smooth things over but it is awkward.

Suggested Tips for Getting Along in the Real World

1. Don't expect people to want to pray, especially outside of a vague ecumenical context, unless they are visibly open to it.

2. When people cry foul in response to a religious element, don't rail back without thinking. Listen to them and be willing to suck it up.

3. On your own time, ask God for discernment and what to do next.

4. It is probably better to be meek than to be inflexible in the heat of the moment.

5. -Flip/Flop Statement: Having said this, Gary's boldness and proactive orientation is a huge asset to him. I believe that the aftermath of this experience will be positive, especially if he has learned from it. In any case, we do need bold people that occasionally offend others since the rest of us may be so timid and afraid to speak out that God can't do much through us. The biblical record is full of such outspoken and tactless characters whom God used in huge ways. (Peter, Paul, Elijah etc...)

What I'm Not Saying

THE REALITY

I'm not overlooking the reality of others not accepting or tolerating our faith. Jesus said that there would be persecution and trials. However I notice that some people appear to be so focused on persecution that they have overemphasized it, and may in fact be bringing more of it on themselves. We often get what we expect.

If we expect people to be fair and honest, generally we will see more of those positive aspects in people. If we expect other people (traditional stereotypes being the dreaded college professors, evolutionary scientists, liberals, feminists, goth teens, devil-worshipping rock stars, etc...) to be hostile, we will definitely get flak from them. I think often this is partially or totally due to the way we have set our minds to expect them to act.

Personally speaking, when I do encounter "persecution" from people, I would like to have the satisfaction of knowing that I'm getting it in spite of the love and transparency with which I engaged them. Otherwise I don't have a clear conscience about it, since I can be pretty snide, abrasive, and opinionated without God's help. Or so I have been informed by others.

THE LIST

Here is a list of surefire ways to get heat from others, but I'm not sure that it counts as "persecution for righteousness":

1. Be obnoxious after people know about your beliefs
2. Stay in the church ghetto
3. Refuse to develop your social skills any further so that you might not be able to relate to real people and be comfortable in such situations.
4. Fixate yourself on martyrdom complex and unduly ponder eschatological themes (i.e. "Left Behind", end times speculations) so that you become slightly paranoid and jumpy.

And my current favorites

5. Spout off in your favorite indignant old-time country preacher voice just about anything
6. Be sure to use "Christian-ese" language and terminology normal people don't understand
7. Be partisan and out-debate the other guy. Win at all costs!

CAN'T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG?

I'm speaking from experience. Coming from a traditional church background, I had to practice the art of going into non-church recreational environments and hanging out, taking a genuine interest in people, and blending in. Whether it was an office party, or watching friends performing in a bar, I spent a couple years on this! I forced myself to go multiple times into an uncomfortable environment because I wanted to be like Jesus, who described himself as the "friend of sinners".

Would it be unbiblical to just learn to be more polite or aware of other people's differences when we talk with them. Is our spiritual mission to convince people that you're right? Or is it to reconcile them to God? We don't need to water anything down, or sell ourselves out, just make sure people are seeing more Jesus than ourselves. This blog will contain some good and bad examples of this concept as seen on TV and elsewhere in the culture.

Is this Blog for You?

This blog is for 2 groups of people:

1. Christians who want to make friends instead of enemies

I believe that 90% of the conflict is not necessarily what we say, but how we say it. What happened to speaking the truth with love? Plenty of people are speaking truth without love, and love without truth. Why not do both? Many people try to prove things to people they barely know, not realizing those people won't have much reason to listen. When we listen to people first, they might actually feel cared for enough to choose to listen back eventually. I am currently more interested in becoming an ambassador of reconciliation than a member of the debate club.

2. People who hate Christians

Those who have been irked, offended, or wounded by someone claiming an affiliation with Jesus Christ. Join the club! I just might have been the one who ticked you off, but I'm trying to change! I hope that this impersonal blog still might inspire you to give Jesus a listen and overlook the mistakes his followers make.