I don’t like Christians: Part I

 

 

One
sunny fall day of my sophomore year of college, I left my dorm on the
edge of campus to head to class, only to be blocked by a group of
protesters waving signs with messages like, “God hates fags,” and
barking at all females nearby, myself included, that we were going to
hell because we were wearing jeans. A van drove by the university center with an image of an aborted fetus plastered on the side. A pair of men
in beards and robes stood at the Sundial in the middle of New Campus
shouting hellfire and damnation through megaphones while trying to
pass out pamphlets to students who were trying to get to their next
class without being verbally assaulted.

 

Call
me crazy, but I’m fairly certain that no one suddenly found Jesus
that day.

 

Given
the above example, it’s not really that surprising that nonbelievers
sometimes perceive Christians as uber-conservative nutjobs trying to
convert everything that breathes within a twenty-foot radius. If
you’re looking for a reason that Christians are leaving bad tastes in
the mouths of Americans, you can thank the extremist groups for making news headlines and painting the rest of the believers in a similar light. There
is even a Wikipedia page about Christian terrorism. Between the
Crusades and the KKK, we have royally screwed up. What is wrong with
this picture? How the heck did things go so awry?

 

When I imagine Jesus’s reaction to all this, I see him
shaking his head with a kind of sad look in his eyes, wondering how his children have gotten so lost. This is not
what he preached. You tell me how screaming at college co-eds that
they’re going to hell is loving your neighbor. You tell me how
murdering abortion-clinic doctors is turning the other cheek. You
tell me how beating a gay man is treating others how you’d like to be
treated.

 

It
doesn’t matter where you fall on the political hot-button issues.
Jesus was not a politician.