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Charlatans, hypocrites and Christians (Part 1)

Yesterday, Alwin, Shu and myself went walkabouts around the south side of the harbour near The Rocks, swinging around Circular Quay to the Sydney Opera House. During most of that time, Alwin and I had our tele’s slapped on and we walked around with our non-subtle lenses. As mentioned in a previous post, my tele lens is big enough to instill fear into the average compact point-and-shoot camera owners and it generally makes you stick out like a sore thumb when you start aiming the beast around.

One thing I noticed was that people have this tendency to think that people with big cameras must be pros and this was illustrated yesterday when Alwin recounted an incident where a sculptor saw his camera and thought he was a professional artist and gave him a business card and chatted about art, etc. People also come up to you and ask you to take photos for them.

By now, you might be wondering what this has anything to do with the title of this post. Well, the spiel above reminded me of an interesting conversation I had last Sunday when I was doing a bit of soloing with my newly acquired behemoth around Milsons Point.

Last Sunday, I walked around the north side of the harbour just down the road from CCC under the Harbour Bridge looking for some shots of harbour activity. It was a bright and sunny day and the water was choppy enough for boats to generate quite a bit of spray. After I snapped up a few shots, some guy walks up and comments about my lens. We talked briefly about photography, about the weather, he asked whether I was a tourist and I said I’ve lived in Sydney for most of my life and I mentioned that I attend a church just up the road from here. At this point, he asked (my paraphrasing since I can’t remember what he said verbatim):

Oh, you’re one of those Christians huh? So are you like most of the other “Christians” I know who go to church and act all good on Sundays, but during the week they’re just like any other person on the street – getting drunk after work, cheats on their partner, and just being a general hypocrite?

I took that opportunity to elaborate on life as a Christian, and how people often get “Christians” and “goody-goody” tied up together to mean the same thing when it really is missing the whole point that Christianity is about a relationship with a loving God; not intrinsically tied to acts of good works and doing good deeds even though it is associated with it, etc (I could write volumes about this here, but it’s outside the scope of this post). After a fruitful conversation about the Bible, Jesus, etc, we went our separate ways (and I subsequently got approached by two more people talking about my lens – one was a professional photographer; one was an overseas student from Czechoslovakia. Unfortunately I had to run off to lunch at the Fish Markets so the chats didn’t last very long).

I must admit that every time I get asked a question like that, I get stuck in a rather non-trivial situation. Do I agree with them and say “well, I guess I can’t honestly say to you that I’ve never strayed from what I’m meant to be doing as a Christian”? Or, do I deny the reality that I have lived a far-from-perfect life as a Christian? Since this is something that I feel quite strongly about, I’m going to present my thoughts on this matter here. If you’re after some light bedside reading, you’d probably want to stop reading here.

Now, some “Christians” are simply charlatans or frauds. They can call themselves “Christians” all they want – it’s not going to change the fact that deep down they simply arn’t Christian. Being a regular church-goer doesn’t make you a Christian. Wanting to do good to others and helping the world out doesn’t make you a Christian. You’ve read the Bible from cover to cover and can rattle off impressive amounts of passages and Christian theology off the top of your head, but that still doesn’t make you a Christian. Claiming to be a Christian based on a flawed perception/understanding of what Christianity is about will not make you a Christian. It’s kinda like a female trying to pass herself off as a male. She can dress as a guy, talk like a guy, and act like a guy. She can do all these external things that may make her very male-like, but ultimately she’s still missing something that fails to qualify her as a guy. Any male that spends enough time with this “guy” will sooner or later notice one or more inconsistencies that betray her true nature (ok, perhaps the analogy is a bit extreme, but you get the idea).

As such, anything that these people do (whether in the name of Christianity or not) does not reflect what Christians really believe. An example of this can be found in this article that created some interesting debates. In particular, the following statement:

“God gave us these (pointing to her half-exposed breasts) you might as well get them out there, they’re all different and it’s exciting to see them so why not,” Ms Maree said.

“I’m a Christian. I believe in God, I go to church, but I also believe you should be able to do what you feel when you feel and not actually feel any oppression - and I love the attention!”

Hopefully, Ms Maree’s statements will not be interpretted in such a way as to say that the Christian community condones such behaviour. It does, however, clearly show that she’s missed the whole point of Christianity. Whilst everything is permissible, not everything is beneficial (1 Cor 6:12); and I struggle to see how her actions would be beneficial. As Christians, we acknowledge that sex is fantastic provided that it is in the right context (i.e. marriage). Provoking sexual desire outside of marriage is a big no-no for a Christian.

With the media loving to put the spotlight on Christians as they get into all sorts of different controversial situations, it provides the world with a grossly inaccurate image of what Christianity is about. Thanks to all these charlatans out there, the general public usually has virtually no idea of what it’s really like to live as a Christian. They seem to take what the media says about Christians as fact and thus pretty much every time that I’ve talked about Christianity to random people, they all seem to think that it’s about being good and doing good to others; hence we’re a bunch of hypocrites because quite often we don’t, etc. Then, they’re kinda perplexed when I tell them that it’s really more like a father-and-son relationship and even though we’re naughty most of the time, daddy loves us no less.

In the next post of this two-part series, I’ll discuss hypocrisy and Christianity. In the meantime, why not drop a few comments to let us know about any thoughts you may have on this. I encourage Christians that read this blog entry to comment about personal experiences in this area. I also encourage my non-Christian friends to throw in your views on this matter.