Archive of Media
I am really steamed this morning. The word keeps coming out about additional retail outlets that have identified “Christmas” as the “C” word that must be banned from their establishments. The word is out that Wal-Mart, of all stores, has joined these ignoble ranks. Of course, Hanukkah is fine, and they certainly would not want to exclude Kwanzaa. Not to celebrate those by name would be prejudicial and politically incorrect. But Christmas is another story. Merry Christmas is out; happy holidays is in.
Why is Christmas different? I believe there are three reasons. First, the primary motivation is the hostility toward Jesus foretold in Scripture. The Bible teaches that Jesus would be the stumbling stone and rock of offense. The word Christmas is offensive because it includes Christ. Jesus warned his disciples that the world hated him and would hate them. Therefore, we should not be surprised that Christ is blackballed, even at Wal-Mart.
A second reason for this gag order stems from the first. Any swipe at Christianity, any effort to strip it from American culture, finds support from academia and the news and entertainment media. Therefore, these stores can expect criticism for including Christ and applause for excluding Him.
Third, Christians tend to be compliant. Jews or blacks will scrap over such discrimination. Christians tend to confuse being loving with being passive. Grace has been elevated to an absolute that leaves no place for militants. The Jesus who attacked those polluting the temple and who verbally assaulted those who distorted truth has been eradicated from contemporary evangelical teaching. Therefore, retailers have come to believe that they can get away with banning Christ.
However, I believe Wal-Mart has miscalculated. It is utterly amazing that Wal-Mart would take such a position. Founded by Sam Walton in the Northwest Hills of Arkansas, there can be little question that Christians make up the backbone of Wal-Mart’s clientele. A major aspect of their philosophy is to locate stores in small and medium-sized towns and to avoid the big city. My daughter, who lives in Philadelphia, would have to pack a lunch to make a trip to a Wal-Mart.
The shoppers in the small and medium-sized towns are predominantly salt of the earth people, a substantial segment of them being good old boys who in their hunting shirts shop at Wal-Mart with their families on Friday nights as the major family outing of the week. These people believe in country music, America, family and Jesus. “Jesus, Take The Wheel,” by Carrie Underwood is now number nine on the country music charts. It seems that these folks might be a little upset when they find out that Jesus is not welcome at Wal-Mart this Christmas.
What is more, Wal-Mart executives seem to have missed the news that evangelicals have gotten a little tired of the abuse and are starting to rise up. Organizations such as American Family Association are leading the charge with effective boycotts, and they are capable of bringing even Wal-Mart to its knees.
Some other news apparently also missed by Wal-Mart executives is that Macy’s, who banned Jesus last year, have invited Him back for this Christmas. If Macy’s, residing in the midst of pagan, Jewish, and black populations discovered that life without Jesus doesn’t pay, it seems that Wal-Mart will learn the same lesson the hard way.
Apparently those Bentonville executives are counting on the fact that Christians love Wal-Mart more than Jesus. We will see. For many, forgoing the Friday night outing at Wal-Mart would be a sacrifice. The question is whether this is a price Christians are willing to pay. I wish Wal-Mart a very, very miserable holiday season and a New Year that starts with a resolution to welcome Jesus back.
People can be categorized as sponges or filters. This is even true of believers.
Like a sponge soaking up water off a messy counter, some people soak up, unprocessed, whenever data is presented to them, especially if said by someone they perceive to be an expert. For them, authors and teachers are experts, so they soak up whatever they read or they are taught.
Other people, a much smaller segment it seems, function more like a filter on a faucet, processing the water, removing harmful substances, and only allowing that which is pure to pass through. They analyze what they read and hear to determine its validity.
While I was attending New York University, a faculty member from a Bible college was with me in one of the courses. It amazed me that even in the midst of such a secular environment, with an orientation antithetical to a biblical worldview, this person tended to accept what he was taught at face value. It seemed that his assumption was that the teacher was the expert, and therefore must be right.
We can either be sponges or filters. As we read, listen, watch, or otherwise take in information, we can either be passive or active in the process. We can either accept what we hear at face value or critique it to determine whether it is compatible with teaching of Scripture and an empirical and rational evaluation of the world around us.
Functioning like a sponge requires no work. Filtering can be laborious. In addition, being a sponge is not threatening. People like us when we accept what they are telling us and when we go along with the cultural mainstream. However, filtering often exposes error, which leads the filtering individual to respond in unpopular ways, to stand out from the crowd, to swim upstream rather than float downstream. Perhaps that is why there are more sponges than filters.
Some sponges make an attempt to protect themselves from the intake of pollution by identifying safe sources. They only soak up the water on certain countertops. For example, if they hear it on Christian radio or if they read it in a Christian book, they drink it in. Conversely, if it comes from a secular source they reject it. Such an approach is problematic because in this polluted world it is not safe to drink from any human fountain without filtering first. Also, some secular sources have good things to say. Therefore, assuming that they are wrong out of hand deprives us of some good insights and places us in an indefensible position.
In our previous posts we have been discussing types of communication that tend to bypass our filtering process. Pictures and other types of non-rational communication tend to infiltrate our worldview without conscious critique. The media, news and entertainment, wield these weapons with great effectiveness, shaping our worldview without our awareness. These propaganda experts are so good at what they do that often they manage to bypass the processing facility of even the filtering types among us. The sponges don’t stand a chance.
To make matters worse, our educational system encourages people to be sponges and deprives students of filtering capabilities. Being a sponge takes no training, but filtering requires the development of analytical skills. Worse yet, contemporary education actually creates a bias against filtering, encouraging students to process the data of life emotionally rather than by empirical and rational (not to mention biblical) analysis. Therefore, we have become a culture, and an evangelical subculture, that has absorbed all sorts of polluted ideas.
Therefore, it is essential, especially for evangelicals, to ramp up the filtering process, carefully screening all input from all sources. We also need to again filter the ideas that have flowed into our worldview to determine if they are genuinely biblical. Doing so effectively would expose a significant number of current evangelical concepts to be unbiblical, and in turn would begin an evangelical reformation. Are you a sponge or a filter?