Saturday, March 22, 2008

Keep the Christ in Christmas...   [Mark Steyn]

...but take Him out of Easter:

The pastors at this church in Raleigh, North Carolina, were perplexed when they saw the Holy Week Sunday school lessons for preschoolers from "First Look," the publisher of the one to five year-old Sunday school class materials. There wasn't a mention of the resurrection of Jesus. Naturally, the pastors inquired about the oversight. It turns out it was no oversight...

"Easter is a special time in churches," the letter from the publisher says. "It's a time of celebration and thankfulness. But because of the graphic nature of the Easter story and the crucifixion specifically, we need to be careful as we choose what we tell preschoolers about Easter."

So now the story ends with the Last Supper - and presumably afterwards Jesus and His friends watch Elmo and then go to bed. That the foundational event of your faith is now excessively "disturbing" is almost too parodic a reductio of the Wimp Christianity of the mainline churches.

[UPDATE: A reader writes:

In your zeal to assert your manly status over and against the wimpy mainline church, you failed to see that the organization behind the curriculum is not emerging from the mainline church culture. It would better be described as emerging from the middle of American, moderate, evangelicalism. It's the Saddleback, Willow Creek crowd. You missed your mark by about three permutations of American church culture. The only parodic a reductio I can discern from your post is you - as the typical neo-conservative manly man with a subconscious lust for the romance of violence and death. You're perspective is so enamored with the violence of Jesus' death that you can't comprehend that someone would take into account a child's developmental capacity in teaching about Jesus. There appears to be no room for nuance or thoughtful engagement, just caricatures, and not even very accurate or powerful one's. Just old stale, beat up the wimpy mainline, type memes that had some teeth to them 20 years ago, but today irrelevant.

As a Christian I am baffled by what I find on your site. It is so far from the gospel I know in the Bible, so shallow in its engagement with the teachings of Jesus, so unaware of the lived reality of real churches in America, that it makes me grieve. 

That's a fair point - the first bit about middle America, that is, not the ensuing neocon manly-man stuff punctuated by randomly placed apostrophes. I'd originally written "a parodic reductio of Wimp Christianity", and then I thought, "Oo er, what if they think I'm saying all Christianity's wimpy?" and I'll spend Easter Day fending off a gazillion e-mails. So I went back and edited it. Shouldn't have done so. But I notice, since the systemic and intentional misrepresentation of my writing by the plaintiffs in the human rights cases in Canada, I'm getting more cautious about handing hostages to fortune. The ol' chilling effect setting in. Wimpo, butch thyself.] 

03/22 02:08 PMShare