Hypocrisy on a Grand Scale

Shaun Wong via Compfight

Have you ever read Jon Acuff’s blog Stuff Christians Like? He highlights popular Christian culture using humor and tongue-in-cheek advice. His latest blog post, 3 ways to be a better Christian hypocrite, is a prime example of the latter.

Anyone who has spent even a casual amount of time in the Christian blogosphere knows how vicious Christians can be in the name of God. This is actually nothing new. As long as Christianity has been around, we’ve had to deal with hypocrites. (And really, aren’t we all guilty of this sometimes?) But now we have the power to reach an unprecedented number of people with our mixed messages. With a few keystrokes, we have potential access to a global audience.

Use this power wisely, dear friends, and pray that we do so as well.

We’ll share Jon’s third tip here so you’ll be curious and read the whole post:

3. Just be consistent. In the first year of writing Stuff Christians Like, I didn’t really understand the difference between mockery and satire. Here’s what I’ve come to 6 years later. The goal of satire is to share humor with a purpose, the goal of mockery is to cause a wound. Mockery always has a victim and sometimes not a point other than pain. Granted, mockery is a fast way to get a laugh. Read some of the old posts on this site, I was definitely writing more from a place of mockery. But what I learned was that mockery is a great shortcut to a laugh now, but it removes your ability to speak in love later. And the love later mattered more to me. (Also, God is pretty clear about his feelings about mockery in the book of Proverbs.) That’s why I try to write about issues, not individuals. When I write about issues, folks show up and have a rich discussion from a lot of different angles. When I write about individuals, sharks show up at the smell of blood in the water. Are you going to make mistakes at this? Sure. But know this, you’ve got a choice. You can attack people or you can love people. Just be consistent.