More on the T-Shirts …
A reader suggests a way to “fight T shirts with T shirts” after the jump …
I am catching up on your posts from the weekend and I am really [upset], to put it mildly, at what people claiming to be Chrisians continue to do in the name of Christ!!
I am somewhat frustrated that my pastor did not address this in church yesterday although perhaps he is unaware of this as well. I am planning on e-mailing him the link to the youtube clip with Frank Schaeffer and asking what action he plans to take–we cannot turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to this injustice!
There is another thing that makes me both sad and angry. I just recently finished reading Horsley’s Jesus and Empire, which really demonstrated just how political Jesus and his message was/is. It is really challenging me to be more political with my faith. That said, I could see the book being extremely dangerous in the hands of those advocating the distibution and wearing of the “Pray for Obama” T-shirts. It appears that we, evangelicals, want to continue to hold to our personal salvation paradigms and continue to neglect the political injustices that are taking place around us. All the while, there is this fringe of the right wing that calls itself Christian that is taking the political action. Only it is not the political action of peace and love that Christ call us to but acts of hatred and violence.
Perhaps a T-shirt or bumper sticker that read “Pray for those that pray for Obama (Matt 5:44) and pray for me a sinner”
R: I’m not a big T-shirt-messenging fan, but I like the sentiment of your idea, and your approach strikes me as a way of overcoming evil with good. You might change it to, “Pray for those who pray against Obama (Matthew 5:44) and pray for me a sinner.”
I think it’s important to remember that it’s only a small minority – a fringe, as you say – that is hateful and violence-prone. Most of the “right-wing” folk I know have great hearts, are against things worth being against, and want good things. In fact, if we could bring together the upsides of the right wing agenda and the upsides of the left wing agenda, and then leave the downsides of both on the ground, and then deal with all the millions of issues created by the new alliances (because nothing ends up being simple or easy), we’d be in a really interesting place.