| 1:49a |
All my posts here have been snarky/crabby since I moved my journal. I wonder if this is working out, if I lost my rhythm when I moved.
But I have this pet peeve that I haven't talked about before.
I was brought up in a home that was incredibly outspoken about faith. Basically, you only have to know my parents less than an hour to realize that they're Christians and very devout ones at that. I mean, part of that is because it is, in fact, my dad's job to be a professional Christian. But my parents were the kind of people who used to pray in restaurants*. I never grew up thinking that religion was something to hide. It honestly never occurred to me that I was supposed to hide my faith. For most evangelicals, keeping mum about your faith is a shameful thing, even if you're not interested in converting others. It wouldn't occur to me to hide my interest in religion any more than it would for me to hide anything else I care deeply about. I don't pretend I'm not obssessed with Harry Potter.
Of course I've gotten grief. But I get grief about a lot of things, and I've been picked on for plenty of other reasons and pretending not to be a Christian would never have distracted people from the other reasons they had to make me miserable. But if I'm open about what I believe with people, and then they can't accept that, then I know where I stand with them. I don't set out to pick fights with people, but by speaking up when speaking up is needed, I know where I really stand with people. For example: I was in a chat room with some friends once and one person said something insulting about my faith.
"Actually, I'm a Christian."
Their response was basically "so what?"(followed by some yelling about the Crusades). So now I knew that they weren't really my friend, because they could care less about my feelings. This doesn't mean I reject all people who have different worldviews, it just means that I give everyone plenty of warning and anyone who shows that they can't conduct themselves like an adult with regard to my beliefs can take a walk.
I keep finding out that people I thought I knew, are actually Christian. And I want to go up to them and hand them a Very Special Trophy for doing so well at the central tenet of Christianity. Because as we all know, this is a Secret Religion. I keep running into people who really seem to think that anyone who actually goes around talking about their faith must obviously be a fundamentalist or at least a conservative.
Yes, "they will know we are Christians by our love" not by our ability to loudly sell the product. However, if nobody around you would have ever guessed that you're a Christian, that's not so great either. Maybe some other people have been talking about how they wished they knew more reasonable Christians, and you *heard them* and *said nothing*. That's whole worlds of unhelpful.
A lot of people believe that there is no need to announce our beliefs. Actually, I wish I could agree. I should not have to do this. Constantly. With every new person I meet when the subject of religion comes up. But I do. Because if I don’t, the second they find out I’m extremely religious (or in some cases, when they find out I care about religion, period) the first thing they do is judge me based on who they think I am. And there is no way they won't find out if we have any sort of meaningful conversation at all.
I've been trying to give people a safe place to discuss their non fundamentalist Christianity, and I've spent a lot of time and energy collecting resources and linking to them. When I do all that and people are still going "I'm afraid to talk about this because nobody I know understands" I can't help but think they just haven't been listening. And I get easily frustrated when I've been talking and talking and it turns out no one's heard a word I said. I'd thought the only way someone on any of my flists could fail to miss that I'm offering people the chance to talk about it is if they generally tune out everything I say on GP, *especially* when I'm talking about religion.
Because there's so much fear and mistrust when it comes to discussing religion among some of my accquaintences. And I ought to be used to people making assumptions about what I believe based on what I've admitted I was raised as (geez, it's like I need to have a t shirt printed that says I Am Not a Death Eater)so...I mean, people who aren't Christians or who had bad experiences with Christianity often start to tense up when I broach the subject. "Oh no, is she going to start trying to convert me?"
I do the same thing with my relatives. I just assume that they're going to disagree with me, so I won't talk about it with them- sometimes I even plug my ears when my dad goes off on one of his lectures. And I do it even when he's saying stuff I should agree with. Either a) because I worry that if he believes it, it might be a bad idea, or b) because I am a 26 year old high school drop out and journalism college flunker-out-er, and he is a middle aged graduate of bible college with two and a half decades experience preaching- and he's just now figuring out stuff that I already got to. I wonder if I do that to other people and if it annoys them as much as it annoys me.
**not that I pray in restaurants. I usually forget to say grace anyway but I see no need to make a show of it if I was going to. |