Excerpts from an Email I sent to a Christian about My Christianity

This response? It's not 100% one thing or the other, and it's not all laudable. It just is. I was replying as part of a chat about "Is Christianity a vibrant, exciting, growing thing, or is it in ruin?" : 

I place a lot of emphasis on the idea that, even in the apostle Paul's day, things were already completely awry. The idea that we, therefore, will decide to selfishly hold onto our own connection to God, and everyone else can just go hang if they don't have the sense to come where we are, is appalling, I admit. 

     My parents worship at a place that provides no evangelical work whatsoever, including no Sunday school nor gospel meeting. It only serves them, giving them a place to worship until they die, and everyone else can just go to hell. I have never, however, taken part in handing out tracts, singing or preaching in the streets, in this or any other country. It never felt right to me. By which I mean, not just that I felt uncomfortable, but that it actually didn't feel like a good thing to be doing. It felt counterproductive. Felt like bad press, like it was hurting the image of Christianity, like getting the "foolishness" part right, but missing the "preaching" part in any way that made sense. It felt like busy work, like doing something so we could say we were doing it, not to any practical, effective purpose. 

     I've certainly never met an evangelist who was actually interested in being real, and getting real results. They're in it to win, to be evangelists, in my own experience of them. If anyone is touched by anything they do, they chalk it up as a victory they achieved and move on hungrily to more conquests, hoping to remake the whole world in their own image. A Christian who's not up to the same shenanigans as they are barely qualifies, as far as they're concerned. Are we a virus? Living only to reproduce? 

    Today I went into a Subway restaurant with pretty much no customers. The manager on duty was Asian, with poor English. The music he was playing was odd. It wasn't the usual pop or classic rock. It was cloyingly, smugly happy. It sounded like hyper people masturbating to the slow songs that happy characters sing at length in Disney movies. It sounded like Adult Contemporary music if it was more syrupy and unconvincing. I have heard some oddly depressingly perky and sentimental music listened to by asian people in my time, but this didn't sound Asian. 

     It wasn't until the guy's only co-worker politely asked about his weekend and he said "Well, of course we went to CHURCH, and then we..." that it clicked. He was playing a Christian radio station (CHRI) in his restaurant. My first thought was "I wonder if his superiors are OK with that" and when the DJ came on and listed off the songs, every one of which had the name "Jesus" in the title, and my second thought was "Holy Crap! Why do Christian DJs all sound really, really gay?!" I left, and he was trying to catch my eye, in case I wanted to talk about the music, and all I could think of was what a job I could do of making a spoof Contemporary Christian album, with songs designed to try to give people a wake up call as to what they are doing wrong when it comes to being convincingly human. 

...I saw a man on the street, with empty pockets and no dreams left 

I saw a child with no one near to wipe her nose 

 I saw so much that could have made me almost weep or care 

And then I realized, I'm heaven bound! 

(I'm heaven bound! Nothing can get me down! Heaven bound! Jesus loves me! Heaven bound! Nothing's worth worrying about! 'Cause I'm Heaven bound!)...

I believe that Christians are ghettoized like a cult or like the gay community, inviting others in, but not able to go out and look people in the eye as if they were from the same race, on the same earth, largely in the same situations. I see Christians everywhere coming off as a creepily, preternaturally earnest Infomercial For Jesus, a cheesy, forgettable and fading bumper sticker, offering up the best sincerity they can conjure, imitate or just plain counterfeit. 

     I'm just doing what I do. I talk about religion and Jesus and evolution and science and so on with anyone who's interested. Mostly that's nonChristians. Christians don't want to talk to me about that stuff. I am determined not to hurt what I see as the cause of Christianity by faking any of it, ever. Ned Flanders exists because everyone thinks they know what Christianity is all about. Do they? Largely, they might. 

    Here is some frankness I feel I can say, because you didn't write the "Operation World" book you sent. If this sounds ugly to you, to no purpose, I am sorry. To me, where I am, it sounded very oddly like something from Amway, the nazis or the Moonies (in spirit, mostly. ) It reads like a plan for invasion by underdogs. 

     Well, Western Christianity? We're not the underdogs anymore. We already invaded. We joined with spiritual vandals and Goths, Huns and Mongols, and, eventually, Nazis, all in the name of Christ, and we took over much of the world. Now it suffers under us and the power we still hold and it wants to be free of what we've become. It is getting free. It seems extremely late to plan a pre-emptive invasion at this point. I think that the message of salvation went largely into the world, pretty much all over, barring people living in corners. It went out, generally, and it got subverted, thoroughly, from within. It was already infiltrated in Paul's day, and that went on and on so that by the time it got out, it had a disease which it gave everyone it touched in the name of God. 

     I think we're not only poor, weak, wretched and blind, but also affiliated with stuff that's evil, in a very complicated and seemingly irrevocable way. I mean, yeah, even if we weren't, we'd have the child abuse scandals, the taking of money, the homosexual prostitutes and the drugs. But my end of things is that people who have been seriously hurt by people who'd come in the name of Christianity keep coming to me and telling me things, and I'm troubled by all of that. Very troubled. 

    I don't think (nor do I think it would matter if) that's just "a few cases." Even if it were only one, I'd not feel ok about sitting and singing with the ninety and nine. The church is one, and what some of us are one with is connected to all of us. What is, I think, evidence of our evil connections (besides the sort of men who rise to the top in our groups, and the scandals they implode with) is the fact that these typical evils (drugs and so on) are not the limit of the damage. There is also a whole undercurrent of what the author of "Freedom of the Mind," the quintessential anti-cult mind-control book calls "rape of the spirit." People who were not necessarily physically molested as children, not necessarily beaten physically, but profoundly crippled in their ability to respond to joy, to the other gender, to children, to people in general. Damage at the roots, seen in the leaves that try to grow every spring. 

    So, I don't really know what any of us are to do, but the obvious stuff, the "go to a church each Sunday" or "start your own church 'cause we don't have enough of those already" or the "make sure you're on a different continent whenever possible" strategies do not make sense to me. That's where I am.