The Joke That Is God On the Cross

Dear Evangelicals:

Every atheist, skeptic, agnostic, and practitioner of other faiths -- all those who've proven immune to your evangelizing, in other words -- would say the same thing as John Stott says in that quote.

You're out there "living your best life now" while people are suffering, bleeding, and dying right in front of you. Yes, the war within is every bit as bloody as the wars over there in the global south.

If non-Christians are immune to your pitch, it's because you're immune to their pain. You're going to kick and scream and struggle against the goads. The fact remains that saying the words without getting down in the mud with the suffering is exactly who you are, and it is literally killing your evangelism.

Judging by those of your fellow evangelicals who've changed their hearts about what you consider non-negotiable, "Bible-based" teachings, it's going to take trial by fire to teach you what Jesus wept over: You. Lack. Empathy.

You are cold-hearted and hard-hearted. You'd rather fight to the death to uphold the law than die to your churchy friends because you've extended grace to women, people of color, the poor, lgbtq folks, the disabled, the orphaned, the friendless, the jobless, the homeless -- you know, all the unlovely types who must surely be sinning, else they'd have the perfect life that you have. Right?

I've said this a million different times in a million different ways, but you can't learn empathy by reading a blog. You have to go through something -- something that will cut you off at the knees and humble you before those you fear and hate most.

I've compared you to alcoholics and addicts on a dry drunk, and, like them, you'll have to hit bottom in order to get well. You'll have to be hit hard by circumstances that completely overpower you, and strip you of every preconceived notion you have.

And preconceived notions are all you have.

Everyone you've ever known will have to turn their backs on you. You'll have to be stripped of everything and everyone you've manipulated to serve your twisted, hateful, entirely un-loving and un-Christian agenda.

So, you're living off the kindness of strangers in some bedroom community shoe-horned against the backside of a hill, where you can't even smell the ocean. You're stuck in a rented room; eating your landlady's crappy, vegan cooking; miles away from all your fabulous, Jesus-y friends -- just as an example. But, you're so full of yourself that you can't possibly imagine anything worse.

Let me give you an example of something worse: jobless, homeless, hungry, and friendless, with no one to take you in and feed you because they know you treated your last benefactor like garbage.

Yes, no matter how bad things are, they could always, always, always be worse.

I pray it happens soon.