Christian Memes and Double Rainbows

Last week a friend sent me a text asking something to the extent of, “Can there ever be ‘Christian’ memes?” The question struck me as odd so I didn’t reply, but it has provided me with much to think about since then. Christian memes? Can such a thing be generated? What would that look like?

If you read a lot of my posts you may gather that I am a big fan of viral marketing and sleeper hit advertising campaigns. More than anything I guess I enjoy the revelation of people’s interests and thought patterns manifest in their reactions to successful attempts to part them with their money. Product (Red). Mountain Dew partnering with extreme sports. Red Bull Flugtag. Dominoes Pizza soliciting fan pictures of pizza to use in their promotional literature. Free shoes from Chrome Industries. Ideas that, once acted upon, generate intense interest and participation from people around the world.

Memes, at least in the colloquial, are kind of like this, but restricted to inside the realm of the Internet. When we here “meme” we think of things like the Numa Numa dance, archaic raps, poorly translated Japanese video games, songs that question the underlying mechanics of magnets, and philosophical velociraptors (philosoraptors). These memes spread like wildfire and, like any good ad campaign, generate a tremendous amount of user-generated content as denizens of the Interwebs try to jump on board and garner impressive amounts of view-counts, whether it be on a video, picture, or webpage, of their own material. Memes bring out the id superstar in us who wants to rule our sphere of influence. We like to show how creative we can be.

So what would a “Christian” memes look like? Photoshopped pictures of King David being a badass? Auto-tuned dcTalk songs? “Hip” Christian slogan ideas Bible verses in lolspeak? I can only think of retarded ideas. Christian memes based on these ideas would turn out like the rest of the so-called “Christian culture”, most of which is just regular culture watered-down and sterilized. So much of “Christian” culture seems to be about generating religious-themed merchandise that people can “feel good” about buying and, once they do, revel in proclaiming their “lifestyle” to the world. It’s a picture of Jesus screen-printed onto the twisted t-shirt of ethical consumerism. A little more to the point, what would be the goal of generating said “Christian” meme? To spread the Gospel? To publicize a church? To convey the importance of incorporating a rational way of addressing pain and suffering into your worldview? These things are much to important to be trivialized by a mere meme.

And therein lies my main objection to Christianizing the meme. Internet memes are only done for moar lulz; never for anything really important. They are here today gone tomorrow - the very digital embodiment of that which does not matter. Something that should truly slide. If anything, why don’t we Christians focus our energies in pointing out God in what society already finds meme-worthy, such as how cool (and, also, sweet) it is that God wants to display two rainbows at once. Sure the song has a bleeped curse word in it, but should that keep us from appreciating how bright and vivid that rainbow is? Show your friends and be like, “Hey, my God does that.” It’s certainly better than any t-shirt idea I have.

_DZ

Growing Up With My Face On a Prayer Card: A TCK Experience

The other day my friend Daniel (it’s uncanny how many people I know with my some variant of my name) and I were talking about missionary kids and how we (he is one too) grew up with this pervasive feeling of ‘being known’. The feeling is, in part, a side effect of growing up in another culture where your entire neighborhood knows who that “little white kid” is, but I think has a lot more to do with all of the attention you get from people you don’t know.

As a missionary kid you get used to your family being treated like some sort of Christian rock star. Not rock star in the “Audio Adrenaline” sense, but rather in the “Superchristian” church hierarchy sense. Your face is depicted in its various iterations of maturity on numerous prayer cards which are distributed to anyone and everyone, churches rearrange their schedules to listen to Dad preach, and you receive birthday cards postmarked to an address you lived at four houses ago from Sunday School groups at churches you never remember attending. These cards were filled with birthday greetings scrawled in various shades of crayon and were brimming with eager questions about what missionary life was like.

Living in Japan, a highly developed first-world nation, did not exempt me from the ‘typical’ missionary questions. What is Japan like? Do you have TV? Do you speak Chinese? Have you ever eaten raw fish? Do you like Japan or America better? With all these kids clamoring to gain knowledge that you intrinsically possess, you start to feel a certain sense of power. I am super-special. People know who I am.

As I grew older I started to resent some of the attention - after all, it’s not like I chose to go and live in another country. Everyone I met had these ideas of missionaries that involved danger and sacrifice and hardship. I didn’t feel like my life reflected that at all. I had clean water, Western living standards, delicious food, a very good English education, and a faster Internet connection than most people living Stateside had. But none of that mattered. People in American churches still treated me differently.

As I experienced more of the world I started to realize just how different that “differently” was. I never thought it weird that a picture of my family was on a church bulletin board or a family’s refrigerator, or that Dad would send out prayer letters telling people in America how our family was doing, that we would sometimes open a letter and find an unsolicited check from a generous individual, or that people would come up to me and say “Hey, I’ve been praying for you since you were a baby.” But that stuff doesn’t happen to everybody; it’s a unique experience - one that I now treasure - but it also contributes to the aforementioned paranoia of feeling ‘known’.

It doesn’t matter where I go, there's a pervasive feeling that people know who I am, who my parents are, and where I are from. Maybe they even know my education history, friends I’ve had, or where I currently live. And all that means that I mentally prepare myself for awkward interactions with people I don’t know but who know me. People around the world have been vicariously following my life, and yet when we meet I have no idea who they are. It makes one-off interactions such as ordering pizza, making a reservation, talking to customer service, or asking for help locating an item in a grocery store irrationally daunting. It contributes to the insights behind this article I wrote about why I don’t like talking on the phone. I remember a time in high school when I had to find a somewhere to volunteer for class credit. Calling up a volunteer coordinator at a local rescue mission, something most people wouldn’t blink at, was one of the most harrowing experiences of my life. And why? Because I was used to people whom I had never met knowing a lot about me.

People in Japan knew me as the blonde, white kid, and people in America knew me as the missionary kid from Japan. Not only did people know me, but they had been following my life for a long time. They had, through pictures and family updates, watched me grow up. Who’s to say that they weren’t going to continue that? I assumed they did, and that I was going to have to watch my back. It took me a few years to come to terms with this and try to compensate for my skewed perception of the world. Over time I realized that not every new person I meet knows everything about me, and that most people I meet just see me as a tall, skinny white boy. Cool. I can deal with that.

_DZ

Sons of God in the Face of National Crisis

“The indifference to the plight of others and the supreme elevation of the self is what the corporate state seeks to instill in us. It uses fear, as well as hedonism, to thwart human compassion,” writes Chris Hedges in his feature article published in the latest issue of Adbusters magazine. He writes about his perception of the U.S. as a corporately-controlled state, a world power in which we and our politics are slaves to corporate interest. Quoting philosopher Sheldon Wolin: “The United States has become the showcase of how democracy can be managed without appearing to be suppressed.” A sorry showcase, indeed. Hedges laments our situation as one in which we have little to no power, where the status quo is already set and maintained by those with money. We can only stand by and watch as they fail, flailing to grasp onto the shards of their former glory. We could fight, but what’s the use when they control the banks, the media, the very government itself? It is a complete failure of our political and economic systems, brought about by mismanagement and power lust.

We are a generation with no direction. Raised by TV, educated with corporate money, placed as a cog in an economic drivetrain, and spoon-fed the ideals of middle-class consumerism, we are the children of “truth through advertising.” Our national leader is a political brand. Our ethics are wrapped up in how we consume. We are sheep circling a drain.

Solutions are few and far between. Though he denies any fraternity with those purporting violent, anarchic insurrection and chaos, Hedges also refutes the idea that pacifism can overcome such odds. In a long and self-contradictory paragraph he asserts that, “When you ingest the poison of violence, even in a just cause, it corrupts, deforms and perverts you. Violence is a drug, indeed it is the most potent narcotic known to humankind. Those most addicted to violence are those who have access to weapons and a penchant for force...[violence] must be avoided, although not at the expense of our own survival.” A corrupt, deformed, and perverted survival, but a survival nonetheless.

What else is at stake but our survival? Our supremely great American politics? Our grand economic machine that churns ever forward? These are but dust and will pass, just like every system before us; those of Alexander, Julius Caesar, Stalin, Hirohito, and the Native American. If our survival is not at stake, then there is no point in the article, yet Hedges asserts that violence in only necessary in this facet of our current situation. The danger we face is not the collapse and rebirth of our system, but the violence enacted upon us by those who wish to maintain status. Hedges, however, wishes to save us from the system without resorting to violence.

His “solutions” are the standard liberal fare; sustainable living, forging local networks, global compassion, environmental preservation, conservation of resources. In a country that’s too big to fail, the answers he sets forth are ones that withhold the fuel for big government and fragment the monopolies of the elite. He spells it out for us:

“Hope endures in these often imperceptible acts of defiance. This defiance, this capacity to say no, is what the psychopathic forces in control of our power systems seek to eradicate. As long as we are willing to defy these forces we have a chance, if not for ourselves, then at least for those who follow. As long as we defy these forces we remain alive. And for now this is the only victory possible.”

Not only is his solution meaningless (we remain alive through imperceptible acts of defiance?) but it is equally hopeless. This is the only victory possible. This is his view of the future. We meaninglessly defy, just to make ourselves feel better, until the whole system collapses, possibly resulting in violent anarchy. And after all of this, we “should seek to keep alive the intellectual and artistic traditions that make a civil society, humanism and the common good possible.” That makes for great rhetoric, but fails to see the decrepitude of the human condition.

Lest I sound even more hopeless than Hedges, allow me to offer an alternative to his solutions. I have no faith in politics to save this nation. I have no faith in economics to save this nation. I don’t believe that being more environmentally conscious will solve anything. And I don’t have any faith in violence. My faith is in the words of Jesus Christ.

Pacifism, one should note, does NOT mean passivity towards an aggressor. Pacifism in the face of violence is an act of defiance; an act of courage when confronted with anger and hate. Pacifism, to me, means having faith, having hope, that through your pacifism your enemy will turn into a friend. Sometimes this will involve pain or even death. But this is what the Jesus of the Bible commands of us. “Love your enemies, and do good to those who persecute you.” (Mt 5:44) This is a statement intended to be woven into your soul. “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God.” (Mt. 5:9)

Reading the words of Jesus and applying them is important, lest we simply hide behind the banner of “Christianity” - an all-too easy grievance to commit in Christian America. Hedges rightly condemns it as much:

“The corporate forces, which will seek to make an alliance with the radical Christian right and other extremists, will use fear, chaos, the rage at the ruling elites and the specter of left-wing dissent and terrorism to impose draconian controls to ruthlessly extinguish opposition movements. And while they do it, they will be waving the American flag, chanting patriotic slogans, promising law and order and clutching the Christian cross.”

These people will see Christianity as useful; useful in furthering their own purposes. This misuse of Christianity is a sorry state of affairs and makes my heart frown, because Jesus did not call us to earthly power. “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth” (Mt 5:5) The illicit union between power-hungry Christians and politics is staggeringly unfortunate. Christ wasn’t political, so why should we be? We should be loving peacemakers.

What, then, could my - could our - response be? Again, Jesus again lays it our for us: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. And love your neighbor as yourself.” (Mt. 22:37-38) Our attempts to create a perfect system in which no party is marginalized or oppressed, in which everybody has enough, and in which our highest ideals our realized is unattainable. Should we resist consumerism and care for the environment? Sure. But not through grand schemes and political plots. It should be through perceptible acts of love, through perceptible nonviolent resistance, and through other beneficent actions firmly grounded in the hope that Christ gives us: that if we love Him, serve Him, and love others, we will become sons of God.

_DZ

Thanksgiving Thanks

Things I am thankful for this year.

-Parents who call me.
-Books for learning from
-Money for food
-My job, in this economy
-Working bicycles
-People to bicycle with
-Enough insulin
-A warm apartment
-Ample clothing
-Good health
-My church
-Music

All these things may seem may seem rather ordinary and boring, and I might agree, if you were only looking at them separately. But for all of these things to converge on one person? God is clearly blessing me.

Happy Thanksgiving!


_DZ

Moving Towards Abstraction

The world around us is fascinated by that which is not there. By this I mean that which is not tangible; a sliver of representation of something meant to be found in real space. That which is an abstraction. As culture morphs and flows it seems to progressively strip down concepts, ideas, and images until they are shells of what they once were.

Take modern art for instance, as this article does. It follows paintings of trees as they move from depictions of real trees to lines meant to represent the tree in abstract. Your mind has to fill in the blanks. Or take this gorgeous image, for example.


It is a person, but only when you don’t look directly at it. In being incomplete, it is wide open to interpretation. Each individual viewer is encouraged to supply their own completing fetal image.

Stuart Ewen’s fantastic book All Consuming Images highlights this trend of abstraction as well, citing several examples.

-The fashion world used to advertise with paper dolls dressed up is rich, detailed depictions of clothing. Gradually the designs moved onto magazine covers, and sketches of clothes became more and more about the lines and less and less about the textures and colors. Nowadays two lines can represent a woman’s body and the clothes covering (however much of) it.

-Old cathedrals used to be stately, solid, stone buildings. They were imposing structures, meant to convey the power of the church. Then the Gothic style took over, and rather then using stone to impress, architects turned to light. How light filled the place - how God filled the place - became significant.

-Important buildings used to be built with a huge floor plan, but now they are built narrow and tall. These buildings, skyscrapers, make the pedestrian look up at the tops of them, where the buildings often end in a vanishing point. Abstraction.

-Money, an abstraction of value in itself, used to be coinage and then paper currency. But we deemed cash too weighty and created credit cards, an abstraction of an abstraction. Green-colored cards, like laminated dollar bills, are the entry level cards. The higher up we go in terms of card class - Silver, Gold Platinum - the more valuable our abstraction is. When we hit the top, the Black credit card, we reach nothingness. Void. It is the point where money must not matter. And now we have PayPal and online cash transfers, and if they take over we might never have to see visual representations of money again.

Having electronic money is easier, they say. In fact, the less humans have to handle things, the more efficient the world is. Everything is becoming more and more digital, and hence, they tell us, more efficient. You used to have to go to a theater to see a film. Then you could rent it on video. Then DVD came along. Now you can download Blu-Ray movies from iTunes. Amazon’s Kindle device lets you download and read books in digital, clicking buttons to turn pages. How efficient is that? You never even have (or get) to touch what you buy.

Folk and rock music are often recorded in a way to recreate experiences. Classical music has definite themes and is meant to evoke certain images. It has emotion. Techno, on the other hand, combines sounds and rhythms that don’t happen in nature - they are synthesized, making the listener create a virtual soundscape. One person can listen to a track and say they hear a freight train going through a tunnel of suspended water; to another person, like Simon Reynolds(link), that track could depict “an ice cream truck doing rounds on one of Saturn’s moons”. It is abstract music for infinite, subjective, interpretations.

The Internet is full of these abstractions. They are what “social news” sites like Digg and reddit are based around. When everything on the Internet is screaming in demand for your time, you have to choose what you will spend it on based on interesting abstractions. What ends up being popular are things that can be effectively condensed into a (preferably witty) fifteen-word summary sentence. The problem here is that not every great, worthy idea can be

• A) be condensed in this way or
• B) be given the treatment by someone who knows how to do it effectively.

Equally problematic is when someone who knows how to condense effectively is working on nothing but inane “news” items and, more often then not, they conjure up misleading sentences that do nothing but grab attention, resulting in us reading disappointing-yet-effectively-packaged non-news items and passing up the important ones. I have to face this dilemma on my blog all the time - how to construct interesting yet not blatantly misleading post titles.

Before friendship moved online, it used to mean bowling or playing board games on Friday nights. Then it meant playing video games together. Now it means having a digital Facebook connection. Facebook is an abstraction of a social circle.

We have tweets - abstractions of consciousness. Impulsive ideas that we feel need to be broadcast so others can try and decipher our thoughts.

What, you may ask, then, are the implications of this? So what? Isn’t more efficient better? Isn’t making things open to interpretation a more tolerant way of expression? A way of accommodating other peoples’ views and ideas? Perhaps. But we have to ask, “in what direction does that lead us?” If efficiency and single-minded goals are our objective, then we are on the right track. But should everything be streamlined to maximum efficiency?

We are now in an era where seemingly anything and everything can be considered “art.” If you don’t understand it, well, then that art isn’t for you I guess. When ideas are depicted in the abstract, they are often intentionally ambiguous. They are everything to every one. As our ideas of value become less and less concrete, value becomes harder and harder to define. If relativity was the essential theme of postmodernism, then abstraction is the theme of post-postmodernism.

As more and more things in our lives - friendships, art, music, money - move into the abstract, it is easier for even more things, perhaps things never meant to be represented in the abstract, to move there. The abstract is meant to represent something, but if we are conditioned to only think in abstract terms then one person’s abstract is another’s reality. This is only true, however, in a limited sphere, and the thoughts in this abstract sphere are guided by the person or institution from whose hands the abstraction manifests. The creator controls the thoughts.

This shift towards relativity of value, control through ambiguity, and the results of combining them with concrete things illegitimately dragged into the abstract realm is my primary concern. There are some things that, frankly, I don’t think belong in the abstract. I think that the less friendships are ‘open to interpretation,’ the healthier they will be. I have learned that earmarking, highlighting, and writing in the margins of books I own is a valuable memory device. I notice that when I use cash, I am more hesitant to spend.

How many things must their be in our daily lives that we need to pull out of abstraction? Our views of love? God? Life?

_DZ

The Worldy Self-Direction Ethos Does Not Work in Your Favor

The other day a regular customer was in my store preparing some nachos. We have a nacho bar where one can decorate nachos with chili and cheese and stuff, and this guy was whipping up a tray of nachos.

“So,” he turned to me and asked, “are these nachos any good?”

“That depends,” I gamely replied, “You get out of them what you put in!”

“That bad, huh?” he chuckled.

“Not really. But if they are, it’s not our fault.”

We both laughed. I said it in jest, but there was some truth to it. It’s actually a rather scary ethos, all things considered.

You get out of life what you put into it. Life is all about you. And now we have a Web, Web 2.0, that mirrors that ethos. What is important is what you contribute to the “conversation”. User-generated content is what counts. In some cases, like Wikipedia, it is good. In others, (90% of YouTube is a good example), it is not. It is junk.

But I digress. The point is that we’re still believing that we are in control of what happens to us. We get out of bed thinking, “Today is a blank slate, and I can sculpt my day to be the perfect day for me! Everything will go well because I say it will.”

This rubs me wrong in two ways. First, I don't like the self-centered vibe it emits, because ‘constructing the perfect day’ usually involves complacent activities like sitting in front of the TV eating ice cream and pizza, or impulse-shopping at the Mall of America. (Current MOA ad slogans include “The road to economic recovery will be long. You’ll need shoes,” “You could probably do without it, but why take that chance?,” and “Is that a new purse, of did you just get more interesting?”)

The main reason that the self-direction ethos bugs me, though, is that it A) doesn’t include space for “random” (read: predestined) events, and B) it places all of the responsibility, and, hence, the potential guilt, of a failed day squarely on you. Just like if that guy had ended up with a crappy tray of nachos, the self-direction ethos dictates that if you have a crappy day, it is completely your fault. After a while, these days start to add up. Week after week, month after month, year after year. If you’re having crappy days, you’re obviously not doing enough to prevent them. The astute reader will make the connection that depression will soon entail, followed by utter hopelessness. The universe, without God, does not work in your favor. However...

-Ephesians 2:10

"For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do."

-Romans 8:28

"And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose."

-Philippians 2:13

"...for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose."

Cheers.

_DZ

A Stolen Bicycle and The Supremacy of God

*Sigh
So someone stole my fixed-gear black track bike, my $400 Bianchi Pista, off my porch last night. I had the bike for a little over a year, and for most of that time it was my only bike. I rode it everywhere. I got comments from everyone who saw it, and I was pretty proud of it. My porch is enclosed and there’s no way to see it from the street, so I can only assume that the person who took it knew that the bike was there. Maybe it was even someone I know. This sense of premeditated violation is I guess what bugs me the most. It wasn’t some impulsive action brought on by seeing a nice bike on the street - that’s still not very nice but is a little easier to deal with. This was planned out. I’ve never had anything remotely valuable stolen form me (the last thing I can remember was my Razor scooter in tenth grade), so this is kind of a first for me. I hope my bike is OK, and that the new owner is treating it well.


I should have every right to be mad about it, right? After all, it was a relatively expensive purchase and I loved the bike. And someone DID violate my personal space, as they had to open a door to get on my porch. Someone took something that wasn’t theirs, and I should be mad about it. I lost a monetary investment and a mode of transportation. I also lost my opportunity to ride on the velodrome in Blaine in the conceivable future.


On the other hand, though, I had a nice bike that I didn’t deserve that I bought with money from a job that I didn’t deserve. It was a nicer bike than I needed to have. Taking it to race on the track is a luxury in which few people in the world can afford to indulge. Riding brakeless around the city was a youthful passion rather disregarding of the perilous position into which I was placing myself. Spending $400 on a bike probably wasn’t the best use of the resources that God has given me. God gave, I enjoyed, and God took away. I guess I don’t see how any righteous indignation on my part is in order.

More importantly, perhaps, the bike was a source of pride for me. I was proud that I could afford it. I was proud with how well I could ride it. I was proud with how clean I kept it. Like I said, it elicited many compliments from those around me, which made me feel good. With every, “Hey, nice bike!” I heard I secretly added, “Wow, you are pretty cool to have such a good taste in bikes!”


And see, that is completely untrue. I didn’t even know what a fixed-gear bike was when I bought my Pista. I just knew that if I spent $400, I could get a good bike. It wasn’t a conscious decision to end up with the bike I did. But I wasn’t going to let that stop me from soaking up praise.

But perhaps God wanted me to have the bike? What if God was blessing me with it? Maybe He was, but I certainly wasn’t humble about it. As author and pastor John Piper puts it, our purpose in life is to magnify the glory and supremacy of Jesus Christ to the world - to be lights that show how infinitely worthy Christ is. If Christ blesses me, it is to show that He is an infinitely glorious God worthy of all my praise and so much more. Is owning nice things like a Bianchi bike bad? No. But when was the last time God was glorified because I rode a Bianchi? I’m ashamed to say, probably never.



So like I said before, God gave, I enjoyed, and God took away. I have nothing to be angry over. God did it for a reason, and I believe that that reason is in my best interest, even if I don’t understand it right now. That’s part of what makes God so great, though - that He is able to work for my good in ways that don’t make sense or are even painful for me.

But perhaps part of God’s plan is me getting my bike back, in which case, if you know anything about it, please let me know. I would really like it back.

_DZ

Thoughts on Christianity, Nationalism, War, and Loving Your Neighbor

I’m in the middle of reading two books - Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis and The Myth Of A Christian Religion by Greg Boyd. Both books are well-written and thought-provoking, and differ on a point on which I want to fully flesh out my ideas. Boyd is adamantly against nationalism and, particularly, the militant religious nationalism behind such movements as the manifest destiny and other displacing movements waged behind the mantra of “God gave us this nation” or “We are a holy, chosen people group.” Boyd feels that in this sense religion is a tool used to bolster man’s pride; an illegitimate way of validating one’s (most of the time) not-so-holy desires. I think that Boyd is correct here. In this way I think, also, that Boyd is very supportive of the separation of church and state, because the church should not use the state as a crutch to perpetuate its causes.

Boyd is also clear that he believes that allegiance should be pledged to God and God alone, not to some man-made nation or nation-state governed by men. It seems here that Boyd would not be supportive of Christian men and women in the military. Protecting our freedoms is all well and good, but protecting them at the cost of killing our enemies when Christ calls us to love our enemies seems to him to be disobeying God. Here Lewis disagrees. To quote from his book in chapter 17 on forgiveness (p.106-107)

“Does loving your enemy mean not punishing him? No, for loving myself does not mean that I ought not to subject myself to punishment - even to death. If you had committed a murder, the right Christian thing to do would be to give yourself up to the police and be hanged. It is, therefore, in my opinion, perfectly right for a Christian judge to sentence a man to death or a Christian soldier to kill an enemy. I always have thought so, ever since I became a Christian, and long before the war, and I still think so now that we are at peace. It is no good quoting 'Thou shaft not kill.' There are two Greek words: the ordinary word to kill and the word to murder. And when Christ quotes that commandment He uses the murder one in all three accounts, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. And I am told there is the same distinction in Hebrew. All killing is not murder any more than all sexual intercourse is adultery. When soldiers came to St John the Baptist asking what to do, he never remotely suggested that they ought to leave the army: nor did Christ when He met a Roman sergeant-major- what they called a centurion. The idea of the knight - the Christian in arms for the defense of a good cause is one of the great Christian ideas. War is a dreadful thing, and I can respect an honest pacifist, though I think he is entirely mistaken. (Bolding is mine, italics are his.)

I have no issue with Christian judges, though I think life in prison a better alternative to a death penalty. But should they feel the need for a death sentence, I think, and this might be a stretch, that they are simply obeying the law and, in a way, “giving to Caesar what is Caesar’s .” You might disagree with me on this. I understand. As far as Christians being in the military, I think that there is a place for army chaplains and every other Christian should refrain (in America, at least) as a conscientious objector. All killing may not be murder, but I believe that all killing is probably not in your enemies’ best interest and in saying so I disagree with Lewis quite strongly.

But going back now to the separation of church and state, I believe that allegiance to a nation especially if it is a Christian nation, is misguided. Christ didn’t come to earth to make a super awesome political nation state - he came to love people and save them by dying for them. Making a Christian nation just creates an “us and them” mentality that can only get in the way of loving our neighbor. Therefore I am not supportive of Christians in the military, nor am I supportive (at all) of flagpoles on church properties. I don’t see how a church aligning itself with a symbol that, at best, will only foster warm fuzzy feelings of patriotism and, at worst, will turn away people who have had bad experiences with Americans can further the spreading of Christ’s love. Because, really, spreading Christ’s love and proclaiming God’s glory and worth is what Christianity is all about.


_DZ