Thoughts on Good Christian Bitches

Christianity Today reported that they were recently contacted by a reporter asking if they had any comment about a proposed  ABC television show titled Good Christian Bitches.

According to CT the proposed show has been deemed the Christian-bashing version of Desperate Housewives.  And thus begins the full frontal assault on all things Christian.

There are only a few things that we can deride publicly and get away with it — Southerners, fat people , and Christians. Spare me the joke that they are all three the same.

“ABC has no reservations about creating hate speech against Christians, but you can be sure they would never consider a show called Good Muslim B-tches or Good Jewish B-tches,” say the folks at the American Family Association.

They are absolutely right.

Any project aimed at depicting Muslim or Jewish women  in such a negative light would draw the ire of thoughtful people worldwide.

As well it should.

So why is it okay to bash Christians so?

CT reports that the proposed show is modeled after a book by the same title authored by Kim Gatlin, a professing Christian from Dallas. Her photos, videos and plastic could land her a spot on a Housewives from Dallas gig. Strike that. It could land her on a  Christian Housewives from Dallas show.

According to the New York Post, Gatlin (ex-wife of one of the Gatlin Brothers) says that she used her own life — that of a wealthy, super-Christian, late-in-life Texan divorcee maligned by her neighborhood church-going housewives – as source material.

About the book, New York Post writer Maureen Callahan says: “There is also a distinct strain of resentment threaded throughout the book – not so much at cheating husbands or duplicitous friends as at the poor and the strivers.”

Translated that would be me and you, us regular hard-working folks.

Explaining herself, Gatlin told Newsweek: “All Southern girls are taught to love Jesus, but just because we’re Christians doesn’t mean we’re perfect. ”

(That’s a stereotype, Gatlin. You might want to spend sometime in the homeless shelters, or working in a public school. Or get to know your Muslim neighbors.)

Don’t get it wrong, she says. Her book’s title “is not mocking God. It’s mocking those of us who love God and don’t always make the best choices to honor him.”

Like writing books like hers for starters.

Gatlin might not know this but Bitch is a pretty degrading way to refer to other women — Christian or otherwise.  From a purely semantic standpoint women are at a huge disadvantage. If you want to really insult a man, you call him a Son of a Bitch or a Mother F–ker, which isn’t an insult to him as much as it it to his mama. When it comes to demeaning women, Americans say it best — almost all of our really ugly words are used to trash women.

This is the culture we are importing to Muslim nations?

You don’t have to grow up in a trailer park to act low-class. As a friend of mine who played in the NBA once said, “You can give people money but you can’t teach them class.”

Proclaiming the name of Jesus  and then calling others in your faith community Bitches is a pretty low-class way to act. Apparently Kim Gatlin was absent the day they covered “Love your neighbor as yourself” in Vacation Bible School.

CT says that Gatlin is trying to address an important matter — gossip. While I agree that gossip is something that we all need to be more diligent to avoid, especially given the impact of social media upon our lives, I think CT and Gatlin are missing the bigger issue here.

We have made sport of trashing the Church and Believers. We’ve masked it behind sarcasm and called it good-humor. We’ve elevated those who mock us best to celebrity status. I could name names but that would be gossiping. You know who they are though. You probably subscribe to their blogs.  They post videos that are funny, as long as  you don’t think about the bigger implication of the art of belitting. They write blogs in that same snide spirit of Perez Hilton, where everyone but Billy Graham is fair game. Nobody escapes their jabs. Ted Haggard and Mark Driscoll are two of their favorites, but they’ll pick on the one-armed neighbor girl selling lemonade if it’ll draw a laugh.

Why shouldn’ t Hollywood feel perfectly justified in producing a show that outright assaults Christians?

We’ve already lowered the bar for them.

“Being a Christian is becoming  more and more a do-it-yourself activity,”  says Madeleine L’Engle in her thoughtful book, The Irrational Season.

Who needs community as long as we can do this Christian thing by ourselves? And as long as we don’t need each other, it’s perfectly okay to trash talk one another.

In fact, it’s downright entertaining.

It’ll get you the most most hits on your blog.

It’ll sell your book.

It might even land you next to Two-and-a-half-Men.

What it won’t earn you, or any of us, however, is respect.

That this sort of behavior is in direct violation to Scriptures seems to bother very few, and that may be the reason why we were warned about it: “Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another–and all the more as you see the Day approaching. Hebrews 10:25

“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” John 13: 34-35.

You can slap a mask on and call it Grace if you like, but eventually meanness turns us all ugly from the inside out.