Houston Hookers
I wonder if there are any three more divisive topics than sex, politics and religion?
In an effort to dial down my own rhetoric, I want to assure my conservative readers how important you are to me and to this blog. It is your ideas that challenges me and I think challenge some of the other frequent readers and the blog is better for it. There are more conservatives who read my blog then liberal; the liberals tend to comment more. That’s how we roll.
TS made a comment to me today (and I’m paraphrasing) that if you’re going to call someone a jerk, you’d better be able to back it up with evidence. Many, ok, most of my blogs are woefully lacking in evidence. This makes me vulnerable to criticism. I’m learning to take it.
In Houston for what amounted to a few hours, I nevertheless put close to 100 miles on my rental car. It’s easy to do. Houston is one of these cities whose sprawl reminds me more of Los Angeles then of other cities comparable in size. I stayed in a part of town near the Galleria which looks and feels like AnyMall, USA. That isn’t to say that it isn’t pretty or accessible, only that it’s antiseptic in its sameness. Without being there, we’ve all been there. Driving from this part of town to where my meeting was, I passed no fewer than 30 Mega Churches including Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church which from the outside looks like a convention center. I also passed as many or more adult bookstores, lingerie modeling boutiques and strip clubs. Houston reminded me of Florida in that way, the odd juxtaposition between hell and salvation on every corner.
In the Wesleyan tradition, John Wesley the founder of the Methodist movement believed that wherever two or more people were gathered in the name of Christ that was a Church. To him, a Church wasn’t s physical place, but the Spirit, God’s Spirit moving through people. I don’t know what “church” means to other persuasions of faith but my experience of the Evangelical movements is that Church is less about the intimacy of worship and more about building state-of-the art dwellings which function as community centers as much as they do places of worship. There is a Methodist Church in Kansas City with over 5000 members (remember that Metro KC only has a population under 1 Million) in a building that has a cappuccino bar, basketball courts, gift shop, class rooms, and massive infrastructure in technology to market to and reach their current and future congregants. As someone who has spent her professional life mired in technology, I embrace its application in contemporary worship. It doesn’t speak to me, but I acknowledge that my feelings are matter of preference and that part of the emergent movement is the utilization of modern warfare for membership recruitment. What’s wrong with having place of worship that models itself off of a community center? Only this: a community center is for the people of the community, just being a resident of a particular city or county gives you access. You don’t need to be a Christian to use them.
It may be as simple as this. I am fearful of Evangelical Christians because they seem forever bent on stripping away the private freedoms that I enjoy. They are deeply moneyed and as such are vulnerable to corruption. Jim Baker? Mr. Haggard? Jimmy Swaggert? As Biblical literalists they therefore miss the allegorical beauty of the text and of stories told and re-told as part of our faith based history. Did Eve really eat an apple from that tree? The Fundamentalist movement says she did. I believe that that story is a metaphor for understanding the “sin” of sexual intercourse and that childbirth needed to be both explained (and blamed). This story is just one of many in the bible that Fundamentalist Christians re-tell in order justify the treatment of women as less- than men.
There are some wonderful people of faith that I’ve crossed paths with in my life. They have been Catholic, Mormon, Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim, Presbyterian, Methodist, Episcopal, Baptist and they use their faith, for the most part, as a compass by which to live their life, to do charitable works and to help others know Christ. But it’s also been my experience that Fundamentalist Churches are about assimilation and exclusion. These churches seem to gather steam from disenfranchised white people, who feel threatened by becoming the minority in a culture that like it or don’t is becoming increasingly non-white.
Except for Leawood, Kansas where there is one black family in a terra-cotta colored home that I always drive slowly by in hopes of catching a glimpse.
To my faith-filled friends and JonW, I count you among them; in fact I envy you your faith. I wish that I’d been raised in a church. But in the early 70’s a child of divorced parents living with a single mom, were not welcome in worship. I can’t explain better than that and my mom and I never talked about it, but I know I felt the taint of not being worthy to attend church. I didn’t manifest that feeling on my own, I was made to feel that way by so called Christians who saw my mom and me and passed judgment. I went to a private high school that had a number of my classmates involved in Young Life and I remember, vividly when they had had their coming-of-age weekend and it was just one more clique I wasn’t invited into. I don’t much care about that except to say that if Young Life was about shaping young Christians, in a graduating class of 68, about have of whom were female and about half of those were involved in Young Life, that not one person reached out to me is an indication that I wasn’t their type.
I had a woman give me her testimony one morning at the bus stop right before Christmas. She is Baptist, a Deacon in her church and a positive delight. I’ve spent some time with her and her friends and they are a remarkable accomplished group of women. And while it is a friendship I’d like to cultivate, I hold back because I know that I’d have to change who I am in order to walk to her drum beat. I’d have to find something good to say about Sarah Palin (of whom she has honest admiration), I’d have to stifle most of my social, ideological and political views… and I can’t do that- they are too much a part of who I am.
This is the last in an onslaught of some of my more convoluted blogs. Like others, I wrote this on an airplane which is probably why is rambling and obtuse. Please know that I welcome dissenting opinions, I need them because left unchecked, I can get pretty weird.
Or hadn’t you noticed?
If you have to change who you are to be friends with someone, those people dont need to be your friends. People should accept one another for who we are. It takes a lifetime to get to know someone and even when you think you know someone, there will be a surprise. God made each of us a unique individual. If we were all the same and molded into the same type of person, the world would be very robotic.
Grapefruits no more.. Only tangerines… and no avocados either.
Everything we do is a choice. There are blessings to be found in each person we meet if we choose to embrace them. Meeting someone who has more faith than you can challenge you to new heights. OR you can choose to feel intimidated and justify pushing them away.
While I think JavaJennifer is one of the kindest and most caring people alive, I believe she puts up a wall to protect herself from being let down as she has been let down quite a bit. Don’t let her fool you, she is ALL good and uses her sarcasm and witt to challenge the rest of us to think outside the box. (Or outside the BUN as Taco Bell would say)
Excuse me, Metro KC has more than a million, in fact Metro KC has 1,985,429 people. We are not as small or backwater as you made us seem……. Your part about all the mega churches being so close to porn stores reminds me of an article I read. The article did some research and found the more Red and Conservative the state was, the more money there was spent on porn, be it online or at porn stores. Number one in the US was Utah.
Good post, Jen…I’ll come back later today or tomorrow and comment. But I wanted to say one quick thing: When I used to go to the NRB–National Religious Broadcasters–convention in the early and mid-80′s, it was held at the Sheraton Park in DC. The highest concentration of in room pay videos of a questionable nature was always in this four day period, year after year. So that certainly gave me a jaundiced eye towards many you’ve commented about in the past.
F. Scott Fitgerald once said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” Like you, I do not find the fundamentalist black and white / all or nothing point of view particularly helpful. However, there is truth in Eve eating the apple — both literally and allegorically. I wonder, why can’t the two ideas exist simultaneously? Maybe we’d all be a bit more intelligent if we could listen and learn from one another.