United Church of Christ pastor Susan K. Smith is, for some inexplicable reason, a Washington Post “On Faith” column panelist (could it be as easy as just, you know, asking?). Today, she claims that “Christians are giving God a name”:
I hate it when I hear someone say, “I am a Christian.”
Immediately, I recoil, because most times when people say that phrase, it is said with a sense of arrogance and superiority. When I hear those four words, I think not of kindness and love, but of bullying, judgmentalism, exclusivity, unforgiveness, cruelty and hypocrisy.
And that’s just for starters.
So far, she just sounds like a standard Richard Dawkins-type bigot. I’m thinking, maybe she doesn’t know actual Christians, and so is getting her stereotypes from The New York Times and MSNBC.
I think Christians give God a bad name. We certainly give Jesus the Christ a bad name.
Apparently she needed to mention both because they aren’t the same.
Instead of people wanting to go to a church, more often than not they flee! They flee because instead of churches demonstrating the agape “I-love-you-no-matter-what” love, they find that Christians turn their noses up and their bodies away from anyone who is different.
We Christians rail about the horror of abortion but blame kids born out of wedlock for their plights and ignore their needs.
At this point I’m sure she doesn’t know any actual Christians, because I know lots of them and none of them “blame kids out of wedlock for their plights,” and an awful lot of them are involved in many ways that seek to aid children from situations like that.
As for Christians who won’t have anything to do with those who are different, I’ve seen a lot mre of that among liberal in the churches who wouldn’t walk across the street to spit on a known evangelical if she were on fire. While lots of white churches don’t have any real idea how to reach out across racial, ethnic, linguistic or cultural lines, that’s not at all the same thing as saying that they wouldn’t gladly welcome people of other backgrounds into their fellowships. Oh, and the last time I checked, the UCC was 97% white.
We say we “hate the sin but love the sinner” but treat homosexuals as though they are the bane of God’s existence. While we say proportionately little about the “abomination” of the other sins of the Bible, like adultery or promiscuity or gluttony.
Sad to say, there are evangelical Christians who talk about homosexuals (as opposed to homosexual behavior) as if they were somehow bigger sinners than anyone else. That’s wrong, and needs to be confronted whenever we hear it.
At the same time, not only is the charge that these unnamed others (she says “we,” but who is she kidding?) don’t talk about other forms of sin ridiculous, but I’ve got to point out that there’s no organized, relentless movement within the mainline churches demanding that the latter recognize gluttony or adultery as “natural” or “genetically determined” behaviors that should therefore be acceptable in the sight of God and His church. (At least not yet. At least not gluttony.)
We use God to justify the most horrendous acts, and have done so throughout history. What on earth made Christians feel like God wanted them to kill Muslims during the Crusades? How could Christians justify slavery or be silent during the Holocaust?
Yes, Christians have “used God to justify horrendous acts” for the last couple of millenia. The UCC is currently using God to justify unlimited abortion on demand. What exactly is the point? That Christians aren’t perfect? That they are hypocrites? That some of them don’t understand the faith, or don’t practice what they profess? Is this supposed to be news? (By the way, like so much of this column, instead of coming out and saying what she means, Smith uses vague innuendo to make her points. The reference to silence during the Holocaust has got to be referring to Pope Pius XII, and is nothing more than perpetuation of a debunked slander. If she means something other than the obvious, she should write like a person of conviction and say who it is that she’s talking about. She gets through this column and never mentions conservatives, evangelicals, fundamentalists, the Religious Right, or anyone else who isn’t down with the liberal project, yet it’s clear that’s who she means, with the use of “we” being so much misleading claptrap. So say so and be done with it.)
If I remember correctly, President Bush said or at least intimated that God told him to start the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. All those innocent Iraqi people have been killed, as well as American soldiers … in the name of God … for the quest of oil.
As far as I know, she doesn’t remember correctly. The only thing Bush ever said about God in relation to the wars Iraq and Afghanistan is that he prayed for guidance, and then made his decision. I’dd be willing to bet that even Susan Smith has spoken that way at times without meaning, “God whispered in my ear that I should do” thus and such. And to say that the Iraq war has been “in the name of God…for the quest of oil” is, like her oblique reference to Pope Pius, slanderous, even if it is an article of faith in the left-wing fever swamps.
If one is a Christian, one is supposed to imitate the Christ. It says that in the Bible. Jesus talked to everyone, dismissed nobody, and got angry when people took advantage of each other. Remember his fit in the Temple when he overthrew the moneychangers?
It does say in the Bible that Christians are supposed to imitate our Lord. It says lots of other things in Scripture, too. It says that Jesus called the Pharisees a “brood of vipers” and “children of hell” (Matthew 23). It says He told Peter “Get behind me, Satan!” when Peter suggested a change of mission. It says Jesus set before the rich young ruler a standard of conduct that caused him to leave saddened, but did nothing to relax His requirements of the man in order to get him to follow Him. It says that Christ told His followers to turn their backs on their families if it those families would get in the way of following Him. It says He referred to marriage as being only between a man and a woman, and that divorce was sin in the sight of the One who had brought married people together. It says Jesus Christ commanded us to make disciples of all nations, and never suggested that the worship of any god or anything but the God of Israel was acceptable or anything but idolatrous.
At least that’s what it says in the Bible that the church has used for lo these many centuries. The one Susan Smith uses may be different.
Posted by David Fischler 
