Are All Christians Christian? Maybe not.

I have relatives who openly and constantly proclaim their strong Christian beliefs. You might say they are continually  bearing witness, publicly declaring their great love for Jesus. They believe they are confirming their deep commitment to God but are they?

 

I was raised a Christian. I taught Sunday school in my teens, and yet I am repulsed by self-admitted sinners who readily accept Jesus's gift of imputed righteousness. They put their faith in Jesus and this faith is, in their eyes, the conduit for God’s grace—a grace available to all sinners.

 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor killed by the Nazis, had a word for this. He called it "cheap grace"—forgiveness devoid of true repentance or transformation. If a sinner is truly "in Christ", they must forsake their evil ways. Sinners cannot persist in their sinning ways confident that Christ forgives all.

 

Bonhoeffer practised what he preached: "costly grace". Bonhoeffer saw cheap grace as one of the greatest dangers to Christianity. He went so far as to help form a church in opposition to the mainline German Christians movement which supported the Nazis.

 

For his efforts, Bonhoeffer was arrested in April 1943. He spent about two years in jail where he suffered greatly. Just weeks before the war ended, he was hanged.  Bonhoeffer's death was true to his message: “When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die.”

 

Most evangelicals have not been asked to put their lives on the line for Christ but they were asked to get vaccinated against covid-19. Many refused. When vaccination was mandated they saw this as an attack on their God-given freedom of choice.

 

This attitude is not in keeping with the Christian religion of my youth. Back then, I would have argued that Saint Paul taught personal freedom ends where the danger to another begins. If refusing the covid-19 vaccine puts the old and the weak at risk, then the choice to not get vaccinated appears to be driven not by Christian values but by selfishness with an overlap of pride. 

 

But the covid vaccine is the least of my concerns. A big concern, one of many elephants in the room, is the truly horrifying war in the Middle East. On October 7, 2023, Hamas crossed the border into Israel, killing about 1200 Israels and others and then retreated with about 250 hostages.

 

The Israelis responded with an all out attack on Hamas with massive collateral damage. As of the middle of September, some 65,000 Palestinians have died. About 39,000 are women and children.

 

I believe Jesus would be appalled. Jesus said: “When he drew near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, ‘If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes.’”
— Luke 19:41–42

 

What were the things that made for peace? I believe they were, and are, compassion, forgiveness, generosity, and trust in God, in stark contrast to the violence, division, and hard-heartedness encountered as a rule.

 

Palestine and the war are complex situations but, no matter, this war must stop. The monstrous number of dead is shocking but the number of injured and the types of injuries are truly horrifying. Today, hell flourishes in Palestine.

 

Like many on the extreme-right, my relatives are not appalled. They don't even believe the widely reported casualty numbers. They are insulated from reality by a mix of theological conviction, political ideology, and media distrust.

Sources such as the NYT or the CBC are discounted as "fake news". 

Today's state of Israel is seen as a direct fulfillment of God’s promise. Its survival and expansion since its birth in 1948 are signs that all is unfolding according to God's plan. As God's plan does not included the slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent civilians, the reports must be fake news. The New York Times, CBC, BBC and even UN reports are all part of the fake news conspiracy.

 

How would Jesus react to the fake news conspiracy story? It is hard to say but let me hazard a guess. He would see this refusal to see truth as the sin of wilful blindness. The Jesus of my youth was discerning, not gullible. He would not have been taken in by either Roman spin or manipulation by the Pharisees. He would not have dismissed all the MSM with one broad brush stroke.

 

In a related situation, Jesus confronted those who shut their eyes to what was immediately in front of them. Quoting the prophet Isaiah, he said: “Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand… their hearts have become calloused, they have closed their eyes” (Matthew 13:13–15).

Working for three decades in the media did not give me credibility. 

There is so much amiss with today's extreme right-wing Christianity that I will begin wrapping up this post. Otherwise, I might go on and on almost endlessly. Instead, I will leave you with this thought: For all the talk of love, Christians on the extreme-right are fear-driven, anger-filled and insulated by hate.

 

They demonstrate fear of losing their culture (replacement theory), fear of religious displacement (Christians are under attack) and fear of the other (gay people, Muslims, immigrants) just to name three.

 

Anger is also a mixed into this nasty brew and there is a lot of anger to go around. Liberals, progressives, Muslims, gays, immigrants, woke folk and all-too-often blacks quickly come to mind. These are all easy targets for right-wing hate.

 

In this worldview, love isn’t absent—right-wing Christians still talk about it and talk about it incessantly—but in practice love is restricted, contained and finally stripped of the compassion of Jesus.

Fake News (Tweets) and CBC Ontario Morning

Donald Trump likes to call the mainstream media "fake news." He's wrong but that doesn't mean the MSM can ignore his charge. Those in the media must take those words to heart and attempt to never lend any credence to Trump's accusation.

Sadly, almost all of us have had a contact with the media that went poorly. I have often met folk who have told me that a story with which they were closely associated was reported incorrectly. They may have even talked directly to the reporter behind the story. By the time the reporter condensed the story to a sound bite for television or radio, or boiled the information down to an eight-inch story in the daily paper, the story was corrupted, changed, shaded with error.

Check out this tweet from CBC Ontario Morning:

It makes the claim that giving a child "a taste" or "even a sip" of alcohol is "not a good idea." It is important to note the shortness of this tweet. No attempt has been made to convey the complexities of the story.

This is a story that has been reported in the past and sometimes it has been reported very poorly. That said, let's cut right to the chase.

New Orleans magazine reported on this story. Allow me to quote a paragraph from that article.

“First sipping isn’t an early indicator of issues that would be of concern to parents,” wrote one of the psychologists in an August 2014 press release about an updated look at the same group of children. They showed that taking the first sip before age 12 correlated with a family’s permissiveness towards alcohol rather than predicting that a child was slated for abuse problems in young adulthood. There is no evidence that earlier sippers have more alcohol dependence, delinquent behavior, marijuana smoking, misuse of other illicit drugs, risky sexual behavior, car crashes or interruption of planned schooling than the late sippers."

If you want to stop reading now, you can. But, for those who want to read more, please, read on as I take a look at what some of the studies actually say:

For instance: adolescents who have consumed at least a full glass of alcohol or more are significantly different from adolescents who have simply had a sip of alcohol. And one might ask what the researchers define as a sip. But the important point is that adolescents benefiting from greater parental discipline, living with better rule enforcement and more comprehensive monitoring and enjoying positive family relations are less likely to have consumed a full glass of alcohol. 

And just how extensive is the problem of children consuming full glasses of wine, similar what is shown in the picture accompanying the tweet? According to the studies I found, it is not as extensive as we might expect. Many children consume no alcohol at all: almost 40% at 11 years of age have never tried alcohol and almost 60% have had only a sip or less. The little girl shown represents a little more than 2% of 11 year olds. If she is less than 11, she represents an even smaller proportion of children from her age group. Perhaps we should pity the little girl pictured. She appears to need improved parental monitoring. Going by the studies that I have found, there is a good chance her parents are not even aware she is engaging in a toast.

Screen grab: story discusses taking an early sip of alcohol.

So, if sipping, and only sipping, has not been implicated in future dangerous behaviour, why are we even discussing sipping. The answer is simple: the children who have had only a sip of alcohol and those who have had a full glass or more, have been combined in some reports into a single category. The whole issue has been muddied.

It appears there may be only one study explicitly investigating sipping of wine and beer in early adolesecence and that is Children’s Introduction to Alcohol Use: Sips and Tastes. And what was the conclusion of this study?

A young child’s sipping/tasting of alcohol . . . appears NOT to be an early indicator of the likelihood of future problem behavior.

It actually appears that parents are doing a fine job of keep alcohol away from their kids. There may well be no problem here. Most children only get to sip alcohol but once or twice, implying that this was opportunistic behavior rather than an attempt by parents to introduce their children’s to alcohol use. It may not be the sip that is the problem but the parental attitude.

Bolstering this interpretation is this fact: fully a third of the mothers and over half of the fathers did not even know that their child had ever had a sip or a taste of alcohol. Most sippers either sneaked their solitary sip when their parents were not watching or were given the single sip on the sly by someone such as an older brother or sister.

The public deserves better than this tweet. Our media must take advantage of every one of the 280 characters Twitter tweets offer. Teenage abuse of alcohol is a problem. The link between a young child having had a taste or a sip and having problems as a teen with alcohol is a link that researchers are still disputing.

Lastly, here is a link to the Lancet article that has been causing the recent stir. Association of parental supply of alcohol with adolescent drinking, alcohol-related harms, and alcohol use disorder symptoms: a prospective cohort study.

The Lancet article has a lot of negative things to say about parents supplying drinks to their children and this should come as no surprise. What is interesting is that the article reports under "Findings":

"Parental supply of alcohol was not significantly associated with the odds of reporting symptoms of either alcohol abuse or dependence, compared with no supply from any source."

I have to admit, I found the above statement out of place in the context of the Lancet article considered in its entirety. Putting all the info together is the job of the media, the job of the journalist. Sadly, all too often, the media handles complexity very poorly. (I would guess that Ontario Morning did not spend a number of days, possibly weeks, putting together their take on the research into underage drinking. It's an interesting story and I bet that it was sent to air as quickly as possible.)

Maybe in a future broadcast, Ontario Morning can investigate the role of the media in underage drinking. Yes, in researching this post I came across research claiming the depiction of alcohol in movies, on television and in social media can be linked to early alcohol abuse. This sounds like a great scare story. 

I can see the tweet now: "Let your child watch CBC dramas? We reveal why this is not a good idea, not even a glimpse. Research shows it could lead to alcohol abuse."

The above is a screen grab from the Huffington Post, Australian Edition.