[Vision2020] Christ Church ad

[Rob Keenan]

Egad. I opened up today's copy of The Daily Evergreen and found this ad
placed by Christ Church titled "It's Not About Slavery. It's About Silencing
Dissent."

Pardon me while I slip into my galoshes so I can wade through this [term
censored]. Among other things, in a section entitled "The Charade of
Diversity," Christ Church claims "the real issues" are these:

- why secularism can only fake tolerance, diversity, and inclusion,
- why secularism undermines rationality and knowledge,
- why secularism guts beauty, play, the arts, and laughter,
- why secularism inherently encourages racism and violence,
- why secularism has to hate the ancient Christian message.

So Christianity has a long, unbroken string of practicing tolerance,
diversity, and inclusion, eh? Tolerance like the Salem witch trials of 1692?
Or like the Crusades? Or the Inquisition? Or the Holocaust? Or "Christian
identity" groups? Or *gasp* enslaving African blacks in the ante-bellum
South?

And rationality and knowledge -- wow. It's certainly rational to accept two
contradictory creation stories as absolute fact rather than a moral allegory
about a good and benevolent creator figure. And contradicting scientific
evidence while clinging to words written some 4,000 years ago really speaks
to the practice of gaining new knowledge.

Yeah, the Church has a clear market on beauty, play, the arts and laughter,
too. Why, the whole ceremony of the Mass and the foundation of modern
Christian worship services is pretty theatrical -- never mind that the
ceremonies were culled from ancient pagan rites, cannibalism and all. And
laughter? Well, I laughed pretty hard when I read this ad. Score one for
you, Christ Church!

Let's ignore for a moment that the most vile and heinous acts and
organizations of racial bigotry were founded in Christian dogma (the
Crusades, the Ku Klux Klan, American slavery, the World Church of the
Creator, the Nazi party) and think on the REAL message: that those of us who
view racism and violence as a secular problem are obviously suspect. We
should definitely hearken back to the peaceful, violence-free days depicted
in the Bible, when adulterers were stoned to death by angry mobs and a young
man practicing civil disobedience was beaten and put to death in perhaps the
most brutal and painful way ever known to man. And remember: "Whosoever
looks at another woman with lust in his heart has already committed
adultery" -- so we'd better start picking out nice, baseball-sized rocks to
have at the ready. 

And secular programs simply do not exist that drive home the ancient
Christian message of loving one's neighbor as oneself or forgiving your
enemy or feeding the hungry, nursing the sick and clothing the naked. We
don't have public education, secular homeless shelters, public food banks,
clothing drives on government property or any of the other things Jesus
asked us to do. 

True, I have drifted rather heavily into sarcasm here. But I look to the
closing paragraph of the Christ Church ad: "Always be suspicious of
Darwinists bearing such dogmatic absolutes. It's oxymoronic. It's
hypocritical." Change "Darwinist" to "fundamentalist Christian" and we are
in full agreement. 

I may just be a poor Catholic boy from the city, but I know how to recognize
horse manure when I smell it.

ROB