After reading Michael Kruger's comments and the essay he comments on, I just want to add further comment on Kurt Eichenwald's description of Christians in this week's Newsweek:
He began his article describing Christians as follows:
"They wave their Bibles at passersby, screaming their condemnations of homosexuals. They fall on their knees, worshiping at the base of granite monuments to the Ten Commandments while demanding prayer in school. They appeal to God to save America from their political opponents, mostly Democrats. They gather in football stadiums by the thousands to pray for the country’s salvation."
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Comment:
Really? While there is no doubt I have many personal faults as do most of my fellow Christians. But I have been a Christian since December of 1985 (the most theologically conservative type of Christian) and I have not personally known any Christians during this time among my college friends, church-going friends or otherwise who even remotely fit this description. I have known a lot of Christians and have served here and overseas as well. But the above, as a sweeping description of Christians, is pure fantasy and not reality.
Indeed, the news media get does occasionally report a "big news story" of some remote church in the sticks with about 10 members who burn a Koran or who shout about how God hates homosexuals more than other sinners. And publications like the Huffington Post and Salon almost daily posts essays which are an obvious attempt to chip away at people's faith.
But this story is more revealing about Eichenwald and his fellow elite journalists than about Christians. It reveals how far removed they are from the average person and how great a wall they have set up between themselves and the rest of the world. At least in this article, Eichenwald has become the embodiment of all he professes to fear and loathe. He stereotypes his opponents and suffers from a paranoid, conspiratorial, dualistic, Manichean worldview, in which those who share his views represent the forces of goodness and light while those who don't share his views represent the forces of evil and darkness. He pays lip-service to love and reconciliation, but he's only loves those who agree with him and wrongly demonizes his opponents.
How did it come to this? ironically it seems to me those the people in the world that are spreading hate are actually those who love to make up false narratives about other people they don't understand. The far-removed journalists who seem eager to call Christians "homophobic" or "bigots" without even understanding that they have an entirely different view of the world than they, ideas which preclude those descriptions as being the norm. No doubt there are people who have called themselves Christians who have done this and have been haters, but this hardly constitutes a pattern, or anything close, especially among those who take their faith seriously.
This is not just about journalistic integrity (though it is that). It is more about the obvious contempt Eichenwald (and many of his fellow journalists) hold toward the Christians they have invented in their imagination.