Fake Church? How Would You Know?

Fake Church? How Would You Know? May 29, 2015

Pete Enns a while back channeled Rachel Held Evans on the value of candor among Christians. It made me wonder if Enns and Evans had ever seen Whit Stillman’s film, Metropolitan. This is a movie that sets Jane-Austen-like characters within a group of upper crust high school seniors during the late 1970s as they go through the rituals of Manhattan’s debutant season. During one of the after parties the group decides to play Truth or Dare and one of the girls, Audrey, argues against playing (because she fears finding out that the boy on whom she has a crush won’t reciprocate her feelings). Another girl responds, “I don’t see how knowing the truth can do anyone any harm.” To which Audrey says, “It’s not just the truth, it’s how and when you learn it.”

Honesty and transparency have a vague appeal. So writes Evans:

My mother used to tell me that we weren’t the type of people to air out our dirty laundry. What she meant was good Southern girls didn’t go around talking about their troubles or divulging their secrets. (I can only assume it was by some divine corrective that their daughter turned out to be a blogger.)

But this is a cultural idiom, not a Christian one.

We Christian don’t get to send our lives through the rinse cycle before showing up to church. We come as we are–no hiding, no acting, no fear.

Enns agrees:

I teach college students and I raised three of them. I can tell you what I hear a lot: church is fake, and if church is fake, God is fake, and life is too short for fake, so no thanks.

But Whit Stillman disagrees. We have a word called discretion for a reason. Some matters may be better left discreet. Do we really want to see how sausage is made? Do we really want to hear our parents talk about sex? Is it fake if we don’t pull back the curtain to view these awkward realities?

Confidentiality is another word that comes in handy. Do all church members really need to know that I sometimes have lustful thoughts about the buxom organist? If a older mom is going to have a mastectomy, does the whole congregation need to know? Or if the wealthy family in the church makes a generous anonymous donation to pay for the building’s new carpeting, does honesty require that church officers reveal the identity of the benefactor?

Maybe Enns and Evans need to think this one through. Not to mention that people can actually deceive about being honest.

But if Enns and Evans really want candor, they always have the Internet (and Facebook) where commenters, like this one, can be amazingly honest:

This is my sixth major bout of stones in the past 20 years. I’ve had about every kind of treatment one can have for them. My all-time favorite moment was three years ago when my renal artery was nicked during a urethroscopic laser lithotripy. I bled internally for a week. Back in the hospital after I couldn’t piss because of the blood clots, I was catheterized, but the blood clotting kept blocking the catheter. At one point a young Vietnamese urology resident came to check on me. He grabbed the free end of the catheter, lubed it up with a little KY, and proceeded to jackhammer it in and out of my urethra to try to break up the clots in my bladder. If I hadn’t been so heavily medicated, I’m sure I would have fainted.

God gave us TMI for a reason — a very good reason.

Image By Blaise.musique

Update: more limits on honesty from one of the most honest of Protestants:

1) How old is the child? Capacities to grasp what you are talking about vary with age. You will not confess to your 5-year-old that once when you were 12 you dabbled in homosexual pornography. You won’t say that to your 5-year-old child. He doesn’t even have the categories to know what that is yet. You might confess this to a 15-year-old whose sexual identity is confused and he has come to you kind of scared and wondering about some feelings that he has. And you might then go back and pick up some of your own struggles and help. So the question there is: How old is he?

2) How spiritually mature is the child? If you are dealing with a hateful and rebellious 16-year-old who would only hang your dirty laundry on Facebook as soon as you say it because he is so down on you, then you might want to wait until there is a more tender, mature season in that kid’s life to reveal some things.

3) What is the nature of the sin? Some sin may be of such a nature that if a child heard it, it would frighten him, confuse him, and give him a kind of insecurity that just wouldn’t be good for him. For example, there might have been in your life a sexual sin against a minor when you were babysitting at age 17 or something like that and you didn’t go to jail. But that would be the kind of thing that would require the greatest care in sharing, if you ever shared it, because of the kind of disorientation it might create in a child’s mind.

4) What are the circumstances right now as the possibility of divulging this sin presents itself? I am thinking mainly about privacy here. My guess is there are some sins that would have a far better effect on a young person if you shared it with the person if they were alone with Mom or Dad when the sin was shared. Probably not at Pizza Hut, but taking a walk by the river. And not with the brothers and sisters around, because kids can feel really awkward around brothers or sisters or another parent when dealing with something heavy and awkward. And they might have questions that they are willing to ask Mom or Dad if they were alone in a safe place. So, consider the circumstances.


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