The T-Shirt Deception

I have friends who are cynics, and I love them for it. You might ask, 'Why would anyone want to have cynical friends?' I would answer that it's because they help you sort through the fake crap in your life.

Now I should be clear when I say that these friends of mine aren't all-around cynical, nor are they typically negative or doubting people. They just happen to know that I am a Christian, and it makes them uneasy and defensive. It makes them resort to reluctantly categorizing me as the t-shirt slogan, watered-down, religious version of something never meant to be so misunderstood, so misrepresented, so hated.

All at once I'm imagining some of you ready to pounce on me- 'Doesn't Jesus say that the world may hate us because it also hated Him?' Oh, but there is so much more to understand about why Jesus says this, why He says people would hate us, and the fact that He uses a very important word to start it off by saying "If".

We as Christians are very capable of making this mistake over and over again, where we hear this verse from John 15:18 and think that this gives us the right to be absolute nightmares to everyone around us; that somehow we are permitted to walk around, noses pointed up, thumbing through a Bible we constantly pick and choose from, separating ourselves from a world Christ explicitly calls us to love in spite of the hatred He warns us about.

There's a genuine dislike that my cynical friends, like so much of the rest of the world, have for Christians, but it's not for the righteous and unrelenting love we're showing the rest of the world. It's for something not so wonderful, something I like to call "The T-Shirt Deception".

There is this subculture of Christians, young and old, that have sort of marketed and sloganized Jesus (yes, I'm pretty ok with that fact that "sloganized" is not exactly a real word...ha ha!) in a way that has made Him distant, un-relatable, and exclusive. He's the "Jesus is my homeboy", "God hates fags", "God bless America", and "What Would Jesus Do" poster face of a group of people completely ruining Christianity for those who need it most. We marginalize, we segregate, we isolate, we judge, and we just plain old hate. It gets so bad that people in a pluralistic society like ours see nothing good about "T-Shirt Jesus", with all of His one-liner slogans and empty promises (man, he kinda sounds like a politician...ha!).

Meanwhile, those who are truly seeking to follow Jesus by living as He lived are being placed on an imaginary island to be completely forgotten. These people, these Christians, represent the real Jesus- the one who loved everybody, who saw through our faults and failures, who broke through the barriers we humans like to put up, who shows us mercy, who seeks justice for all, and who straight up died a brutal death for the very reason that He is madly in love with us and wants to make our empty lives whole again.

Some of you who read my blog have maybe gotten to a point where you say, 'Dang, Brad. You have a lot of harsh things to say to Christians and a whole lot less to say to non-Christians. Is there anything good about Christianity that you have to say?' My answer is yes, but it's not Christianity that does it for me. It's Jesus Christ Himself. We've become so obsessed with belonging to our exclusive group we affectionately named Christianity, and yet we've sort of forgotten about the group's founder (To flip-flop a famous saying, "there's too many indians and no chief").

We're so caught up in "being" Christianity that we're not doing enough "doing". We wear cool Christian t-shirts with catchy churchy phrases on them, we cling to our Bible on the train or bus into work every morning, we sing in the choir at church, we wage war in God's name, and we vote Republican. These are the things that make us Christian nowadays, and it's kind of sad. Is it any wonder why we have cynical friends?

Christ calls us to be love, to love others (even our enemies), to show mercy, to seek justice, and to build up the kingdom of God. Let's start doing those things, myself included, and watch the cynics vanish before our very eyes!