Rush Limbaugh makes money because people listen to him.
So does Dr. Dobson. Sean Hannity. Anne Coulter. Bob Jones IV. and Marvin Olasky.
On the nightly news, they have a slogan: if it bleeds, it leads.
People campaigning for office--campaigning for influence and furthering their ideologies--know that the best way to secure a vote is to scare a voting bloc. Things like wars and terrorists, social security and disintegration of society get people's attention.

Because we grew up watching movies and reading stories about heroic, last-ditch attempt victories against all odds against the forces of evil, we tend to try to structure the world that way. The evil fiscal liberals want to tax and spend our economy into oblivion; the gays and lesbians want to steal the souls of our children and eat them; the atheists want to silence and contain Christians; the public educators want to indoctrinate our children. Fear drives us to desperate, valiant action against the faceless hordes.

Reading the Internet Monk brought a lot of these thoughts to the forefront. They're thoughts that have been growing for a long time--Michael Moore helped me with his insightful "Bowling for Columbine," and Dennis Miller's brilliant "Blue Like Jazz" was an inspiration, among many others, including Father Anthony Ugolnik, who visited our campus two weeks ago.

The future of Christianity in American lies in this question: will we embrace the fear of the people around us and continue to construct safe ghettos for the kingdom of heaven to stagnate, or will we embrace the unquenchable life and love embodied in the indescribable, unstoppable kingdom of heaven? I think we have forgotten that the kingdom is here--among us--living in all its mustard seedy, yeasty, salty power. It's not a kingdom of fear--it's a kingdom of laughter that's never afraid to share common life with outsiders, even the socially dangerous ones. Its inhabitants aren't scared by sin or by schemes--it's amused at their pathetic attempts to thwart heaven and saddened by the condition, their misunderstanding of heaven. It is not afraid or disdaininful or dismissive of sinners, because it is made of sinners who identify with the sinners walking around them.

It embraces people no matter who they are, just how they are: bitter, jealous, gluttonous or homosexual. It's not afraid to laugh with, to relate to, the ones society calls the lowest of the low, the inhuman ones: perverts, monsters, murderers--because everyone in the kingdom knows they began as freaks, perverts, lustful angry pitiful murderers.


I will not stand with a church that cuts itself off from the people it was called to. I will not fellowship silently with a church that discriminates among sinners. I will not be called a Christian if that means despising homosexuals, women trapped in prostitution, and the poor. I will not call myself one with a church so afraid of the people around it that it builds walls to keep the honest out. I will not worship with a church that is so afraid of unpredictability and the possibility of screwing up that it ostracizes and cripples its artists and refuses to attempt or commit to any venture that is not a sure-proven thing, already safely mapped out in a book available at the local Christian bookstore.

I will not reject the church in its many, flawed forms. But I will not stand within its tragic walls, and I will not be silent. The Kingdom of Heaven and the fellowship thereof is for all and equally so, and it is for now, and it is the only kingdom worth living and dying for--the only kingdom where you can have life, and the only kingdom where death makes sense.