I wasn’t going to do this
Pop culture has been off my writing screen for some time now and I wasn’t going to add it back in. It has a tendency to obliterate healthy habits of thought and speech. I don’t like unhealthy thought and speech habits. Ergo, no pop culture posts.
But then, Rosanne…
#1 There are not strong enough words to define her tweet, I’ll use deplorable and leave it at that. Okay, I’ll add, utterly…
#2 I wouldn’t even know about this tweet if it weren’t for the MEDIA!! Believe it or not, I don’t follow twitter, can’t stand it and wish that it wasn’t part of our social culture. It’s a cheap and easy way to sling verbal excrement. And that includes our national leaders.
#3 Kathy Griffin is still making money off her anti-Presidential rants, she has a loyal following. Her photo of a decapitated presidential head, in any other season would have been cause for a national security crisis. Yes she received death threats, her mother also received them, but she’s still making money from it.
#4 Joy Baher accused a sitting Vice President of mental illness over his religious beliefs and though she apologized she still has her job.
Is there no equal repercussion for attacks on Christian faith?
As Bruce said this morning,
“In a civil society, all we want is for a just application of standards”
There are times that I wish Facebook had never been invented. I often think if it wasn’t a way to be in touch with some very dear people I’d delete it for good. I end up getting involved in debates I’d never have, never care about and never see if it wasn’t for Facebook. At times I actually have blood pressure because of it.
Does anyone remember the 80’s? When Madonna made her debut with nasty music, obscene sexual displays onstage and her anti-Catholic, horrible, awful degradation of the Cross? The Christian community was appalled. We ranted, we wrote, we lamented, we moaned, we tried to boycott her (until A League of Their Own) and we lost.
Today, I hear her music in my water classes with women in their 80’s and none of us raises an eyebrow. In fact, we often sing along. We shrugged our shoulders when she played the Super Bowl. She is an American Icon.
And now we rant, write, lament, moan and boycott things profoundly more degrading and still, we loose. If history doesn’t teach us anything please let it teach us this,
Pop culture is not eternal and isn’t worth the fight. In fact, fighting it degrades the name of Christianity. Refusing to participate is our greatest weapon.
For any Rosanne defenders, you’re on the wrong side of this. And for any who thought she was a political conservative, you were wrong. Her continued support of our current President, who is also not a conservative, places her in league with fools. Her appeal lay in the idea that much of her daily TV struggle was familiar to many in our country who live this way in real life. One of her funniest bits was the one of she and Dan doling out meds they could afford with what little insurance or lack of it they had.
I know people who live like this!
I lived this way one time myself. Carolyn had a run of ear infections and we were uninsured. I remember filling only half an Rx because we didn’t have enough to cover the whole thing. It’s an insecure way to live yet many in our country do. Even with the ACA it’s too expensive for some.
But any who thought that Rosanne represented the majority of the country, despite her ratings, were also wrong. Much of this country is living a life that reflects a far more traditional standard. ABC News, the very network that also canned Rosanne, conducted a survey asking “What, if anything, is your religion?”
83% of Americans identified themselves as Christian
While I know that definitions of Christianity are broad and many professing Christians don’t live according to the traditional dictates of Scripture, Christianity’s primary lifestyle resource, that’s still an enormous statistic.
Yet Joy Baher still has her job
I’ve accepted that it’s too much to ask our current media outlets to apply their standards equally. And while I hate, and I do mean hate, that Christianity is an acceptable religion to malign, I’ve also accepted that it most likely will not change in my lifetime. I acknowledge that Christianity has asked for some of it’s fire. When you see televangelists asking for millions of dollars to buy jets because they can’t pray in metal tubes carrying the public which are full of demons…
They asked for it
But they are not a reflection of most Christians in America. And many hardworking, faithful, obedient Christians are feeling the sting of the Twitterverse’s, and especially the general media’s vile contempt. It’s ugly, it shouldn’t happen and it’s not right. No one should be labeled mentally ill for claiming to listen to their God or because they hear His voice. And of course that doesn’t include mass shooters!
It’s just common sense people
Because I align myself with Christians who try to live their faith according to our primary lifestyle resource (i.e…the Bible) I’ll leave these thoughts to ponder:
Matthew 12:36 “But I tell you that everyone will have to give an account on the day of judgement for every empty word they have spoken”
James 3: 5-5 “Likewise, the tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts. Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark. The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole body, sets the whole course of one’s life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell.”
If that doesn’t define the Twitterverse, I don’t know what does
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