The latest cartoon from David Hayward is interesting to think about in connection with the sorts of rhetorical claims one sometimes encounters from conservative Christians regarding American society. “Keep Christ in Christmas” they may say, or “Put prayer back in public schools.”
What they often fail to notice is that they have only allowed selective bits of Jesus and his teachings into their churches and their individual lives, and even those are sometimes interpreted against the grain of his likely meaning when understood contextually.
And so I think that perhaps one appropriate response to such attempts to export their partial and selectively-interpreted Jesus into other parts of society might be “Allow Christ – all of him – into your Christianity. If you do that, consistently, then (and only then) we can discuss putting him elsewhere.”
UPDATE: I probably ought to have called this post “Behold, I Stand At The Door And Knock.”
