Am I A Christian?

Several weeks ago I was talking with a woman about the paint job on the outside of her house.  I pointed out that there was only one coat on it and that several windows had not been caulked.  I thought it really should be done again.  She agreed and then proceeded to tell me all the things the general contractor had messed up.  The list wasn’t extensive, but I could agree that a plumbing leak and a bad paint job are pretty annoying.

            Then she said, “You’re a Christian, right?”

            For not the first time in my life I wished I could pause the conversation, open this woman’s head, pull out the file of the conversation, and see what she meant.  She said “You’re a Christian, right?” but behind that simple question was a myriad of assumptions.  I actually hesitated and reviewed what I had observed about her: Obama posters in the house, Jesus fish on the fridge.  Maybe a “Christian like me”?  I cautiously stuttered, “Yes?”  Like that, with the rising end like it was a question.  “Yes?”

            “Well,” she began.  Then something engaged in me and I knew what she was going to say.  She was feeling slightly guilty for complaining and bad-mouthing this contractor.  She was going to say, I know I should forgive him.  It’s silly of me to still be upset, but I am.  And I was going to say, Hey, it’s tough sometimes.

            Instead she said, “The worst thing was that he didn’t tell us he was a Mormon.”

            I said, “Well, he’s a jack-Mormon.”  A jack-Mormon, this contractor’s wife had once told me, was a non-practicing Mormon.  Not an apostate, per se, but not really in line with the whole thing.  She told me that when she and her husband were an active part of the little church I was planting.  That was, coincidentally, when he was building the house.

            “No,” the home owner insisted, “he and his wife told us they were born-again Christians.  That would have been a deal breaker for us, if we’d known.”

            “Really?” I laughed.  “Not getting the painter to do two coats would have been a deal breaker for me.”  We chuckled politely at one another as I made my way out the driveway.

            But I felt like that was the deal breaker for me.  That was the day I decided I didn’t want to be a part of this whole thing, if that’s what this whole thing is about.  And it seems like that’s what we’re talking about.  It looks to me like the entire Christian enterprise is less about loving God, loving your neighbor, and loving your enemies, and more about setting up false walls of us and them, of in and out, and double standards for “believers” and “non-believers”.

            I am at a loss when Christian friends and acquaintances send me the emails about the way Barak Obama is an enemy of religion and the next week send one protesting the building of a mosque in New York City.  Mosques are religious buildings.  I don’t know why some people don’t like Tim Tebow, but I wonder if it really has anything to do with God.  Our culture mocks all sincerity, and making a big deal about anything usually seems pretty funny.  If a football player thanked his mother every time he turned around I’ll bet it wouldn’t be long before he started catching a little shit from the fans.

            The view of God Jesus seemed to be at pains to reflect, present, incarnate, and demonstrate seems to me nearly the polar opposite of the view given by my Christian friends.  His view of God was an expansive view, a turn from petty tribalism to a global embrace.  If Christianity is simply a return to the balkanization of the human race, or an imperialistic push to bring everything under its own influence, then maybe I don’t want to be a part of it.  Maybe I can’t.

            It would be easier to ask if I can still be an evangelical, or if I am a fundamentalist, than to ask of I am truly a Christian.  But history is littered with Crusades, church/state alliances, power-over evangelism, and rejected rejects.  It isn’t evangelicalism or narrow-mindedness or fundamentalism or anything like that.  The ideology that sprang up in response to the Jesus movement is not one of inclusion and embrace; it is not one of log-in-my-own-eye humility.  It is about rules of engagement that demand rejection of the other.

         So this whole thing leaves me wondering if the term Christian even applies to me any more.  I know plenty of other people have rejected the label plenty of other times, but now I am a cliche wrapped in a stereotype.  Sorry.