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Christian Girls, Bad Boys

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I don’t know why I read the article “Let’s Mock People Attracted To Aaron Hernandez.”

I don’t like to see people mocked.

I don’t know who Aaron Hernandez is.

I don’t follow sports.

But the picture accompanying the article in my Facebook feed showed a pro football player; that and the strange juxtaposition with the article title pushed the oddity meter high enough to draw me in. I was almost certain where all this data would lead, but I think God took it in a different direction.

Tim Baffoe, the author of the article, turns out to be a high school English teacher who also writes sports commentary for a Chicago radio station’s website. In other words, he interacts regularly with young women in his role as a teacher. Perhaps his story, as acerbic as it is, serves as a warning.

I sure hope it does.

Aaron Hernandez is an NFL player now accused of murder of a fellow football player. (I suspected as much.) He allegedly also shot another man in the face. It is now coming out that he may have been responsible for an earlier, unsolved, drive-by shooting that killed two others.

Much has been made of the culture of violence that surrounds football. When is there not a story about a football player who decked his girlfriend or molested some woman he thought he could manhandle with impunity? I’m not sure why, but people were shocked when we learned that the New Orleans Saints had a bounty system in place for hurting rival players. Shocked.

But back to the Baffoe story, which I suggest you glance through. Really, just a glance, since you’ll get the gist immediately.

In the wake of the Hernandez arrest, Baffoe encountered a number of Twitter comments by young women who felt compelled to note in a public forum that despite his penchant for murder, Aaron Hernandez is “hot.”

The groupie who swoons over the serial killer is not a new trope in our society. While I am incapable of understanding why, way too many women out there adore violent men, and the more violent those men are, the more women they attract. Girls screamingAnd not just homely girls who feel their only shot is with a loner who kills people, but women with advanced college degrees, who may be pulling in six figures a year. Attractive women who draw the attention of every man whenever they walk into a room. Smart women who absolutely, positively should know better, but who can’t seem to stop thinking about the bad boy.

Where the line should stop, though, is with Christian women.

But if you read on in Baffoe’s article, a Proverbs 31 verse from the Bible shows up midway in the text. And then comes more than one example of a Tweet from a woman who appears to be a Christian talking about how attractive Aaron Hernandez is—for a murderer.

I can’t recall that the woman depicted in Proverbs 31 had a thing for guys who kill people indiscriminately.

I don’t know which is worse, that Christian women find murderers attractive or that they confess that attraction in public.

Keith Green once said that going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than going to McDonald’s makes you a hamburger. I guess that quoting a few Bible verses and claiming to be a Christian doesn’t make it so for these women.

Still, what disturbs me is that I know they are the tip of the iceberg. Not only as an example of confused women who can’t tell good from bad when it comes to men, but as people who call themselves Christians and yet cannot tell good from evil.

At its most basic, murdering other people is the standard of wrongness. If people can’t get that right, how can they discern anything?

Somewhere, these women got just enough Christianity so as to be inoculated to its fullness. I suspect that’s where we are in the Western Church in 2013. We have an entire generation now wandering this planet who have developed enough antibodies to genuine Christian faith that they are immune to it.

Parents, Christian leaders, and the general Church itself has much to be proud of—if inoculation was the goal. I think we can mark that campaign a success.

Sadly.

I’m wondering if we are too far gone in the United States. Something is horribly broken, and I’m not sure what must be done to fix us.

The Church, Tech, Ethics, Jaron Lanier, and the Destruction of the Middle Class

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Jaron Lanier - www.jaronlanier.comAfter reading my recent post “‘Free’ and the Destruction of Worth,” reader Brian Auten sent notice of a compelling Salon interview with tech futurist Jaron Lanier—“The Internet Destroyed the Middle Class”—in which the polymath suggests he and other prognosticators underestimated the negative impact the Internet would have on our lives.

As a musician, Lanier thought the personal freedom offered by the Internet would enable music makers to take greater control of their careers and enhance their freedom to create the kind of music they wanted to make, free from corporate interference. Sadly, the Internet has instead reduced the net worth of musicians and created a career wasteland for many of them.

In a bold confession, Lanier admits he was shortsighted concerning the negative impact, saying his naiveté helped fuel the downturn.

Lanier goes on to note that rather than freeing people to do what they want, the Internet has destroyed aspirations—especially those related to jobs. The promise that the Internet will let us pursue the job we want to create for ourself has instead been replaced with the reality that it and other tech tools are allowing fewer and fewer people to do the work that once employed thousands, leaving no options for the displaced.

While many will just nod their heads and say We told you so, Lanier brings up an ethical issue raised by the destruction of middle class jobs that few are discussing:

Do corporations have an ethical responsibility to society to create jobs simply to employ people, even if technology has rendered those jobs less essential?

This is a question that has bothered me since the economic meltdown of 2008. Because it seemed that at one time companies DID stay loyal to employees whose jobs were less essential. There was a long view that a working middle class was universally better than a nonworking middle class that would slide gradually into poverty. And it may very well be that attitude of support for the less essential employee made America great.

Globalization and the race to the cost bottom may have put pressure on companies to abandon this ethic, but the 2008 meltdown pretty much sealed the deal in their collective minds.

Which brings me, as it always does, to the Church.

In the fin de siècle period (around 1900), the American Church was actively addressing many changes in American business. As more women entered the workplace, the Church was concerned for their welfare, especially in what could have become a predatory environment for young, inexperienced women moving from farms to the burgeoning big cities. And this was only one area of concern and active involvement. Speaking to the business world was a huge concern for the Church.

Today, the Church seems more concerned with how to start a workplace Bible study than any greater vision related to social change and the general welfare of employees.

This paradigm shift has worked against the Church in the long run. American Christians no longer prioritize general human welfare. In the case of the typical workplace, the Church’s concerns are not the ethics and operation of that workplace and how Christ can impact it, but the Church thinks solely of how to preserve some aspect of institutional church operation within that sphere.

I contend this is a wrong, selfish mentality. We Christians should be less concerned with preserving traditional church functions and more with the general welfare of people. It’s as if we have no more confidence that the Church can survive because we are afraid of the world’s successes against traditional Christian bastions. So we operate from a position of desperation instead of from our position of strength in which all the riches of heaven are on our side.

What is today’s Church saying about the ethics of hiring people simply so those people can have a job? And how can this NOT have an impact on the Church itself? The starving man is more concerned with food than with the Gospel, but give him that food in the name of Jesus and his ears will suddenly open to the message of Christ. We see this demonstrated again and again in the Gospels and the Book of Acts.

What is the need? Meet the need. Then speak about Jesus. It could not be more simple.

In addition, the Church has decided in the last century that it has nothing to say to corporate leaders about other aspects of employee welfare. And where is the boldness, in the midst of the ongoing ethical meltdown in big business, from a Church that should be able to promise those businesses that if they give them their people, the Church can return a more ethical employee?

Instead, the primary Church goal is relegated to fighting the corporation to ensure that a handful of employees can enjoy a lunch break Bible study in a back room someplace. Yes, that may be needful, but God help us, the vision is so vanishingly small!

What tech has done to the workplace and general employment MUST be something the Church, like it once did 100 years ago, speaks to.

Tech is increasingly outpacing the ethical answers the Church once provided to society. In other news, it is now possible to print guns with 3D printers, those printers available to the average consumer. What does this or any other tech-driven issue mean for the Church?

Are we Christians asking these questions? If so, where are the answers?

Is the Church simply in survival mode—or are we Christians actively working toward addressing the most intractable issues of our day, issues that, in the end, affect every person on the planet?

If the Church can’t answer these questions, who will?

The American Conscience and the Horror of Denial

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Anonymous businesswomanJocelyn is in her final year at an Ivy League law school. Though she came from humble roots and didn’t enjoy the birthright of a silver spoon in her mouth, Jocelyn took a can-do approach to life. Valedictorian of her high school class, her establishment  as a 17-year-old of a hospice program in Charleston, S.C., geared specifically for the poor was a deciding factor in her acceptance to every notable university to which she applied. Perfect SATs and an IQ of 142 fast-tracked her for great things post-grad school. You can recognize Joceyln on campus by the designer handbags she indulges in and her winning smile. At 5′ 8″ and 118 pounds, the willowy brunette has the looks to match her intellect, as her offers from international modeling agencies will attest. Several of her professors remarked that with her combo of stunning good looks and brains, Jocelyn could write her ticket anywhere.

In contrast, Jessie didn’t make it past 10th grade, which was a disappointment to upperclassmen at her high school who expected the easy source of a good time to keep producing for another couple years. The hair color comes from a bottle, and the attitude is pure sass—pretty much the only thing pure about Jessie. Looking for more, she left her small town in Indiana and headed for the big city, where’s she’s a common sight in local bars and on street corners. Her weapon of choice is a pair of crimson stilettos she found on sale at DSW, and with her long legs and short shorts, Jessie attracts a lot of attention. Or she did. A couple face-busting fights with that guy who hangs around her, a meth bust or two, and some other hygiene issues have taken the luster off the small town transplant. You’d guess 40, but she’s actually just 26. And if you had to conjecture about her life trajectory, the angle is downward, with the streets looking meaner. The other day, she got bypassed up for a younger girl, with the man tossing off a “skank” after looking her way and deciding no.

Now if I asked you which was a prostitute, would you say Jocelyn or Jessie?

The answer? Both. Sure, Jocelyn’s clientele is more upscale and her prices higher, but law school isn’t cheap.

Which brings us to infamous abortion “doctor” Kermit Gosnell.

The New York Times blog ran a post called “What the Gosnell Case Doesn’t Mean.” I find it telling that the URL slug for that post is “what-the-gosnell-case-doesnt-tell-us,” a surefire sign that even the writer knew better. You see, anyone breathing knows exactly what the case tells us. Better that our enlightened betters now inform us of what that telling actually means. And so goes the media’s infatuation with its own moral brilliance, informing the great unwashed of meaning.

The only difference between Jocelyn and Jessie is the pretense we constructed in our own minds about the virtue of one over the other. Both women made their money selling their bodies to men. Strip away the settings and the details, and the outcome is the same.

The only real distinction between the Gosnell case and the typical abortion mill that escapes our collective judgment is the level of sloppiness.

The great lie of denial that happens every day in America is that seemingly rational people can’t bring themselves to be aghast at the Jocelyns of this world. Same for abortion. The abortion doctor in Beverly Hills is no different than Kermit Gosnell, save for a cleaner operation and better quality K Cups in the waiting room. The outcome is the same: Two people go in, and only one comes out. Context means nothing to the one who doesn’t leave alive.

That Americans, for the most part, can’t understand this is why The New York Times blog writer can get away with the denial he spews all over the monitor. By insisting that Gosnell is NOT the typical face of the abortion industry, he perpetuates myths and salves the conscience of a country. Vilifying Gosnell is our contemporary version of “one man must die for the good of the nation”–except we feel better about our choice over that of the Jews and Romans, because our scapegoat is so obviously guilty.

We tell ourselves how enlightened we are, that we can’t be fooled by mere facades, and then we declare our support for the “right to choose” and ask for Jocelyn’s number.