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\nChristians Are Leaving Homophobia Behind – Will Journalists Keep Up?<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
The article makes (and occasionally fumbles) some important points.<\/p>\n
Christianity is not a monolith. Ironically, it's being monolithic is a position that both the Religious Right likes to promote (with themselves in the starring role), and the media seems happy to go along with (because the Religious Right is more vocal, because they make for good headlines, because they have big money behind them, because treating them as the primary or sole voice of Christianity is just easier to do, etc.).<\/p>\n
But there's a wide array of Christian voices — and even the spectrum of "liberal" vs "conservative" is insufficient to encompass them. And even that's just in the US — once you start looking at Christianity around the world, you get even more themes and variations, including how various branches of Christianity align themselves with political groupings quite different than here.<\/p>\n
But the media seems willing to simply take the loudest, angriest voices to be the only voices that count, the representative voices of a huge religious tradition. Ironically, this media myopia is true even for those outlets that would quickly distinguish between moderate and conservative and radical Muslims. When you pick Tony Perkins and Pat Robertson and Mike Huckabee as the "go-to" folk to represent "Christians" in the media, it's like going to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Osama bin Ladin, and Abu al-Zarqawi as your faces of "Islam.")<\/p>\n
Thus, for the question of why, with a majority (54%) of (American) Christians now saying "homosexuality should be accepted by society," the media have not stopped portraying the continued legal struggle for equal rights for gays as being "Gays vs. Christians," the answer is that the proposition is supported by only 30% of Evangelical Protestants, who have managed to glom onto the title of True Christians® in the media.<\/p>\n
Now, arguing over who is or isn't a True Christian® is a mook's game; even agreeing on what Christianity really is all about is impossible. However, it's a mook's game that's been played since Jesus' day, with no sign of abating, except that (for the moment) it's not played around here with the auto-da-fé<\/i> and the Inquisition. But though many Christians (bearing in mind Christ's dictate for all His people to be as one) try to avoid that sort of sectarian bickering, Christians who are not in accord with the American Religious Right have a responsibility to speak out where they see the Christian principles they believe in being misused or ignored by their co-religionists. Not in anger (well, not primarily in anger), nor to try to claim the mantle of True Christian® for themselves, but to teach, to offer up alternatives to the narrow "party line" — to make it clear that, at the very least, Christians do not speak in one voice on this, or many other (arguably all other) social issues.<\/p>\n
I often hear fellow Christians wonder why Christianity has such an increasingly bad reputation, why people make such angry jokes about it, why all those mean atheists criticize it, why youth seem to be abandoning it. "I'm a loving person. I just want to get along. I certainly don't agree with people like Bryan Fisher. Why do I get lumped in with him?" It's because those Christians are just quietly going about their lives, doing what they do, and not realizing that the Bryan Fishers of the world are the ones making all the noise, and getting all the attention, and thus promoting the idea that all Christians are just like him.<\/p>\n
Just as people (esp. on the political Right) say, "Hey, where are all those supposed moderate Muslim voices disagreeing with those extremists we hear in the news?" so moderate Christians need to speak up to be sure that we, and our opinions, aren't lost in the anger and self-righteous fundamentalism of our conservative (if not reactionary) brethren. We need to (to borrow a term) "teach the controversy." Otherwise, our silence is rightfully considered consent to whatever the vocal ones are saying.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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\nChristians Are Leaving Homophobia Behind – Will Journalists Keep Up?<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\nView on Google+<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
