(no subject)
I might give this to the Crusader:
At SAU, It’s easy to be a Cynic.
No doubt in my mind, a Christian campus is the easiest place to be a justified agnostic. The duplicity of Christian ideals and the less than ideal “Christian living” causes anyone with questions to wonder why anyone bothers to be Christian at all. Personally, I sat for a year with a chip on my shoulder, and watched chapels from the balcony. It wasn’t just occasionally poor speakers that fueled my skepticisms, it was how strangely easy it was to point fingers at Christian failures.
Case in point: Two Action Jackson boys, roughly fifth and sixth grade, are pulled from the inner city of Jackson to have a nice meal in the DC. What do they witness? On one account, a student stuffing stacks of chocolate cookies nearly a foot tall into his coat and sneaking out the side doors. No more than a few weeks later, a student made out with a fistful of metal forks right before their eyes. An overnighter was a worse idea. Roaming the villages, the kids witness a student openly massaging a girl in his room that was not his girlfriend, candidly admitting to playing her. Simply cases of spotting bad apples in the bunch? I wouldn’t be so quick to be condemning. I would venture that the worse examples of Christianity are not the ones here as a means of avoiding a drunken flunkout that might happen if they were elsewhere. No, the worst examples of Christianity, I dare say are the “best” ones.
Put another way, the worst attitude at SAU is not careless Christianity, but competitive Christianity. Students act as if ministry involvement earns them points in the social ladder. Or, that a ministry trip looks good on a resume for the dating market. Why do people use Christianity as a means of acquiring social recognition? A positive peer pressure pervades the campus. That is, one which causes students to feel so compelled to be super-Christian that the only way to stand out and find identity is to be the best of the best, uniquely Christian (some odd subtype), or to rebel (and many do). It makes sense that in a place with such a high percentage of religiosity that a common central interest, such as Christianity, could so quickly become a means of competition. The dating atmosphere, brimming with potential, makes things doubly competitive. It is as if Christianity has become, for many, a conditional hat to wear so long as it is profitable.
Moreover, my point is not to point fingers at everyone on campus before I walk out of here in May. I just feel as if there is something to be owed to classes entering Spring Arbor each year, and that which is owed is an apology. In other words, I’m sorry that your love affair with a Christian campus can leave you feeling disillusioned when you begin to see people warts-and-all. In a place of 20-somethings, all somewhat obscured from secular tensions on their worldviews, it makes sense that classroom arguments would consist of many peripheral questions or that fad-like spiritual enthusiasm would run rampant from time to time. Jesus is somewhere squashed between those wearing Christ on their sleeve and those with blatant moral collapse.
Finally, back in my balcony seat, I realized I had to come to grips with my own cynisms. The intense Christian focus divides campus into those that care and those that don’t give a rip about God. In a year of inner struggle, I have realized how easy it is to view SAU’s brand of Christianity from an “outside” perspective as nothing more than a rat race without the cheese-a chaotic and often aimless search for identity or fulfillment apart from Christ himself. One side chases it through social competition, the other through secular means. Chapels pump one side up, and leave the other laughing at what appears to be so absurd. I challenge the students themselves to disengage from pointing fingers at everything wrong with SAU, or it’s students, and to keep a focus on doing that which is central, simple, and at the core of Christianity-a simple reliance on God for day to day living. It’s easy to unearth frustrations. Knock on that door, and a thousand doors of complaint will swing open. The only other choice, and one that is mine, is to look past the failings of this place, and these people, and to simply focus on Christ. It is the only way to avoid such easy, destructive, and judgmental, cynicism.