The Comment That Made Me Spill My Cofee!

I spend most of life in primarily three places: bookstores, classrooms, and meetings.  Yes I know, how exciting (obvious sarcasm here). Truthfully though, two out of three of these I don’t mind so such, in fact I even enjoy them.  The other I do out of necessity and it is only sometimes enjoyable, and rarely exciting (I’ll let you guess which one this is).  However, this morning I managed to find myself in an interesting meeting centered on “the state of the relationship of young black Americans to the emerging church (this is the church that is coming into being).”  In other words, it was a meeting about are young African Americans interested or disinterested in the church as we are coming to know it.  I found this meeting to be very intriguing despite the banality of many of the comments that were made about the state of young black America.  However, during this dialogue one gentleman who will remain nameless made a comment that completely threw me into the cognitive realm of disgust and indignation.  In fact, I am still trying to hide the stains in my shirt from coffee I spilled after he began to open his month to speak.  This well dressed rather misinformed gentleman had the unmitigated gall to say that in his opinion “the disinterest of black Americans with the church was the result of the demonic tool of internet blogs and websites that perpetuate atheism, Black Nationalism, and anti-Christian sentiment.” OH, MY GOD!  I hope you find this statement as ridiculous and thoroughly inaccurate as I do.  If not, the remainder of this post is for you!

First of all, the very notion of black American disinterest with the church is misleading if it is not considered within the larger context of black religion.  Despite, all the in house church commentary on Christianity it is still in fact a religion.  Therefore, any critic of religion in general is by implication also a critic of the Church.  That is to the extent that the church engages in so-called religious activities such as promoting a set of beliefs and practices, centered upon specific supernatural and moral claims about reality, the cosmos, and human nature, and subsequently codifies these beliefs into prayers, rituals, and some cases religious law.  My point here is that any disinterest with the church cannot be understood properly without some attention being given to the rise of youth distrust of so-called organized religion. 

Secondly, calling the internet blogs in and of themselves demonic in any way reeks of a sort of spiritualized pseudo anti-intellectualism that is employed to avoid the hard work of cultural and social interrogation.  Simply put, whatever I don’t understand (like internet blog appeal and religious disinterest for example) I write off as demonic.  Of course, this type of anti-intellectualism is not new.  In my opinion this is symptomatic of the real crisis in contemporary religion which is the inability of religious communities to communicate and display their essential mission (or reason for existing) within the context of the current world we live in. 

Thirdly, atheism, Black Nationalism, and anti-Christian sentiment all existed long before the internet and therefore obviously do not need the internet to continue their existence.  They continue to exist on the sheer power and persuasiveness of the concepts that they encapsulate.  Now, granted the internet does provide a medium whereby these ideologies can be more readily spread and accessible.  However, there has been no respected formal objective or empirical research done that proves the existence of the internet or blogs have contributed to any so-called Christian religious disinterest.  Besides, I am quite confident that there are more blogs and websites promoting some form of Christianity than there are blogs that are openly in opposition to it.   And if you don’t think this is true then why don’t you start a site that promotes everything not atheist, not Black Nationalist, and pro-Christian and perform your own .com exorcism of the demonic tool of the internet.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, this comment just solidifies the rampant blame game certain religious leaders love to play in an effort to evade any responsibility of their own actions.  This is why I suggested to the gentleman that we take time to ask ourselves the question, why is our presentation of the ministry so uninteresting, instead of why are they so disinterested? I posed this question in the spirit of prophetic pragmatic cultural criticism which adheres to the belief that all critical reflection should began with self reflection.  Perhaps, if the church engaged in more honest self reflection we would find that at the core of our dilemma is not the issue of the internet but an issue of identity.

In Spirit and In Truth, Billy Michael Honor