Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 24, 1993 TAG: 9310220036
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CODY LOWE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
You may have caught it as the car sliced into your lane, forcing you to hit the brakes and swerve aside.
It seems all that driver cared about was lording it over you.
I can't believe how often the people who cover their bumpers, trunks, hatchbacks and doors with expressions of religious piety are perfectly willing to be terrible examples of their faith.
There was the woman who must have been in a awful hurry to say "Follow me" to her church. She tailgated me for a couple of miles before zooming by in a no-passing zone and cutting right back in front of me.
By the time I read her bumper sticker I wished she'd have to follow me to a police station to be charged with a traffic violation - and blasphemy, too, if we could find a statute against it.
Then there's the man who pulled out from the gas station without even looking to see if there was any traffic in his lane. There was. Me.
I was tempted to test his bumper-sticker theology that "There's No Problem God and I Can't Handle Together." I was pretty sure God would be on my side if I created a problem for that guy.
People who wear religiously distinctive clothing, jewelry or proclamations ought to remember that their actions say a lot more than their symbols.
On a somewhat grander scale, that was really what offended so many people about Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. They said one thing, lived another.
Still, a lot of people don't get it.
Religious people are as suspicious of the media as any group. They even have some justification for that.
They get particularly upset when newspapers, radio and television seem to focus on the aberrations - the ministers who abuse children, televangelists who fleece their flocks.
It seems to me, though, that most people will see that those are the exceptions. That's why they are news - they are so far outside the norm that they become spectacular.
The real damage to a group's reputation comes when outsiders view its average, run-of-the-mill members as hypocrites.
Anybody who has ever tried to recruit new members to a church has heard the argument. "Well, old Jim goes down to church every Sunday mornin', but he's out cheatin' on his wife and beatin' his dog that night, so I don't see why I should go."
Some preachers will say that's just a cop-out by the "unsaved." That "old Jim" is an exception. That Christianity doesn't promise to make its followers perfect people.
That's true. But any religion worth its salt should transform its followers into better people.
That's why it's so damaging when bumper-sticker Christians break "little" laws or are simply boorish or impolite.
Those are much more powerful sermons than Jimmy Swaggart or Robert Tilton or even Billy Graham ever preached.
\ Cody Lowe reports on issues of religion and ethics for this newspaper.
by CNB