The late-night television show “Saturday Night Live” has been a perennial favorite of mine throughout the years.
But I have to confess that the classic ones are the funniest. Who can forget the “Church Lady” with her ultraconservative dress, horn-rimmed glasses, and such catchphrases as “Well isn’t that special?”
The reason that the character draws such intense laughter is because it accurately paints the picture of how most “normal people” view churchgoing Christians. If you ask the average person on the street why they wouldn’t bother darkening the doors of a local congregation, one of the inevitable “top ten” reasons would be the judgmental sermons and attitudes of the people there. While the Church Lady is hilarious as entertainment, experiencing it in real time is not nearly as funny.
Not much has changed since Jesus physically walked the Earth some 2,000 years ago. Every generation seems to have its share of critics. His greatest opponents were the Pharisees, an ultra-religious group of Jews that tried to enforce an enormous set of rules necessary to please Yahweh. Anyone who didn’t meet their strict standards were condemned as spiritual outcasts and branded with such pleasant labels as “tax gatherers” and “sinners.” Needless to say, this non-elite crowd didn’t get the best seats at the synagogue or invitations to the dinner parties of the religious crowd.
Jesus was radically different than any other religious leader of his day, not merely because of his claim to deity, but in how he treated people and how they responded to him. So many of the spiritually disenfranchised flocked to him that the religious establishment eventually identified Jesus as a major threat, and did everything in their power to discredit, criticize and get out of the way — which historically they eventually achieved.
Since Jesus himself was the “friend of sinners” and had such a magnetic attraction to spiritual outsiders, why have so many churches and Christians frankly excelled at driving them away? How has a religion, centered on the concepts of love, forgiveness and mercy, morphed into a group caricatured by the Church Lady?
The simple answer is a pervasive attitude of judgment.
Before getting too excited about this obvious fact that many of us have personally experienced (I myself was fired as a pastor for “letting the wrong kind of people in”), please understand that Christians are not alone on this one. You can hear similar venom from an entire chorus of different social groups with their own agendas whose words and attitudes are strikingly similar. The bottom line is that one of the unfortunate byproducts of being a human being is that we all have a tendency to pass judgment on one another, and take on the attitude that somehow “I am better than you are.”
If we are honest with ourselves, we can find some subtle examples of that in our lives every single day, and may be more subtle than you think. For instance, my wife was asked to assist in teaching a class on customer service skills, which is a topic she is passionate about and enjoys. Without even thinking about it, she jumped right in and inadvertently took on the lead role in the class session without being asked. While the other instructors were not offended, she confessed to me later that it bothered her that she had unconsciously taken on an attitude of “Oh, I can do this lots better” — which is another form of the same concept we are talking about.
The attitude may not blatantly claim “I am better,” but can still possess the subtle arrogance of “I know/can do better,” “I know best” and similar thought processes.
Fortunately, there is a way that we can move past judgment and gain a different perspective on the entire issue. Keep in mind that this involves “peeling back the layers” of the core issues, doing some honest self-appraisals, and actually making changes in our collective thinking as a society, and our attitudes as individuals. Since this represents a journey, please understand that wherever you may find yourself on the spectrum now, you can move past where you are and ultimately toward a better mindset that Jesus himself had and practiced while on planet Earth.
Now isn’t THAT special?
Federal Way resident Joe Rinehart: joseph.rinehart@nexusis.com
