Why Bother Being Christian?

I'm in my recover-from-Sunday mode, reading through the stack of papers in order to catch up after a long day of church community related events and encounters. While eating burritos with my daughters an article caught my eye in the Oakland Tribune of today (4/30) - "Spanking Children is God's will, says El Sobrante church." You can read the article online here. The pastor of this church - as well as members of this faith community - affirm, advise and strongly encourage spanking, preferable with a rod or flexible stick. The pastor is quoted as saying, "Corporal punishment is not something you do to the child, it's something you do for the child." According to them, "your goal as a parent is to correct the child or get him back on the right path." Now maybe your mental red flags are being raised, and your saying to yourself "maybe that Monte is merely just another one of those liberal, flag-burning, gay-loving, anti-american progressive pigs that doesn't think we should spank our children - or even worse that our big brother government should make spanking actually illegal punishable by the electric chair, or at least some sort of fine." But my personal political, philisophical and cultures values are not really the issue here (at least in my limited, judgemental and openely biased opinion).

What really struck and horrified me in this article is that this church has published and continues to distribute an pamphlet entitled "Spank Your Child or Spoil Your Child." According to this pamphlet, (you can read some of it online here) parents who do not practice corporal punishment are depriving their children of the only method God says produces wisdom, and risk directly opposing God's will.

WHAT? I hear the church saying (albeit via the media service through which I was informed our the ministry and outreach actions of a nearby church community) that God teaches us best through pain, suffering, and physical punishment. I looked up at my daughters munching down on burritos, rice and beans, and thought to myself, "so - I must be a devil-loving pagan parent since I seek to teach my children about the love of God by telling them the stories of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, encouraging them to love others as we believe God loved us, to recognize every person as our neighbor, and to experience church activities and worship as celebrations of God's love and the community of faith. I'm doing all that when I should simply be beating the crap out of my daughters if they sass, fail to eat their vegetables, or don't want to go to bed. Do they believe that Jesus told his disciples to "let the little children come unto me for the kingdom of God is for such of them" because children are much easier to correct theologically through the use of a rod or some other sort of flexible stick?

I'm horrified because this is the sort of image that is repeatedly, consistently and widely dissimenated in our culture and world as one of the snapshots that form the mosaic portrait of what a North-American Christian in 2007 looks like. I'm scandalized that folks who might (now I haven't talked with them about this so I might be incorrect and definitely am judgmental) view the Shoah, the emergence of AIDS as a global medical epidemic, or recent genocides in Rwanda and Sudan as merely punishments or "object lessons" through which God was and is seeking to teach us how to be wise, and to live in God's will - are lifted up as the definitive representation of what I believe, have based my life upon and use as the lens through which I interact with everyone and everything in the universe. Why is it that such stories and actions make the limelight the same week that the Economist reports on the nerely universally accepted vision of Capital Punishment as a Capital Mistake, and Tom Friedman of the NY Times writes an editorial on our failing school system in which we're boring not only our children to death but beating our intellectual future into paralysis. (Read it here "China needs an Einstein - so do we" or catch multimedia clips here). How come no one reported on the marvelous things that Jim Wallis or Jack Rogers did this past week?

Now I know that the media seeks to sell papers more than to tell the truth. I know that they do that by publishing sensationalist and over-the-top stories as opposed to the reputed-to-be-too-boring stuff of every day life when normal people seek to make a difference in their daily actions, decisions and purchases. But really! It's not just the media that portray or seek to further such portraits of Christians. Churches and christians themselves are also doing it. Between the paternal persecution of Dobson and his dominons, and the polarizing comments made by run-of-the-mill disciples against any follower of the way who is not a member of the NRA, Republican Party, staunchly homophobic, against the ACLU, the UN, and the separation of church and state, there is little room for anyone else who seeks to articulate the driving purpose behind their life of Christian faith in any other way. Now I might sound like I'm calling for some sort of gulag for people that believe differently than me. They have the right to their fundamentalist interpretation of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, and such a right is not only guaranteed by our Country but also essential to the diverse specturm of Christian thought. What bothers me is that so often and increasingly - not just in the media but in the minds of thoughtful, open, and intellectually curious non-Christian people I know and love - Christians are percieved as a blind band of believers in Karl Rove as the Messiah, who possess a world-view based on fear of the other, mistrust of diversity and an existential angst cuased by all things related to evolutionary biology and the modernist-scientific-perspective of knowledge. At what point did being a Christian necessitate a polarizing choice between "either/or" when the Apostle Paul portrayed fiath in Christ as a dialectical choice between "both/and" in his foundational letter to the church in Rome? It doesn't take the atheistic testimony of Sam Harris to make folks ask the question, "Why bother being Christian?" It seems that we members or the Christian Community are already giving more than enough proselytizing testimony to initiate such wondering.