American Family Association Warns Christians will be Treated like Blacks in the 1960s

TO: Michael Allen, and Opposing Views

Please be more careful about your headline writing. The headline of this piece, "American Family Association Warns Christians will be Treated like Blacks in the 1960s," does two very bad things.

First, it's just plain inaccurate, because even the quoted/cited email says that it'll be "conservative Christians" (and so, implicit is not "Christians," generally) that will (with any luck, I editorially comment) be treated as second class citizens.

And, second, and most importantly, for my purposes, here: It lumps all Christians together and paints them with the same broad and -- and, in the case of MY kind of Christianity, insultin -- brush. I'm Christian clergy, but my kind of Christian faith would be unrecognizable, and likely deplorable, to Right-winged so-called "Christians."

My Christian faith is deep and abiding, but it's not so blindly passive that, in the misunderstood name of "forgiveness," refuses to identify, and call on their wrongheadedness, those are are clearly the faith's enemy. My Christian faith abhors how the the bible-thumping, biblically-literalist, biblically infallible and inerrant, gay-hating, atheist/humanist-decrying, uses-the-Bible-and-their-rhetoric-as-a-weapon, spiritually-abusing so-called "Christian" Right has so co-opted and appropriated -- nay, verily absconded with -- the words "Christian" and "Christianity" that it is likely among the biggest reasons why the so-called "nones"...

http://to.pbs.org/UH8gm3

...and those who self-identify as "spiritual, but not religious" (SBNR)...

http://bit.ly/ZdcINi

...are so on the rise. If I thought that the best that Christianity had to offer, was, in fact, the worst of what relgion and its misguided-Right-winged so-called "Christians" proclaimed, then I'd be a "none" or an SBNR, too! In fact, I might have rocketed straight to atheism, and just gotten it overwith.

Your headline does a great disservice to both the story which clearly refines who the emailer is really talking about; and also to my kind of liberal/progressive Christian who happily lives the questions...

http://www.livingthequestions.com/xcart/pages.php?pageid=4

...and doesn't, conversely, insist that we have all the answers, like THESE idiots...

http://www.alphausa.org

...who offer an alternative to "Living the Questions," with their "Alpha Course," do. Your headline does a disservixe to Christians, like me, who are "interspiritual," as Cistercian monk Wayne Teasdale deftly defined it...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_teasdale

...or are even multi-faith/interfaith, at least insofar as their willingness to respect, acknowledge and appreciate all other faith traditions... including even atheism/humanism, as it proffers itself as equivalent to a faith tradition in its efforts to have its chaplains in the military, which I, for one, support -- and exclude virtually no one.

Your headline does a grave disservice to my kind of Christian... the likely far-closer-to-what-Christ-had-in-mind (in Matthew 22:34-40) kind of Christian that actually hopes that such godawful so-called "Christians" as are these Right-winged nutjobs actually ARE dismissed as irrelevant by 2060! In fact, that's far too far off, I say! Dismiss them now, when it matters most, I say!

Please be more responsible in your headline, and other, writing around here... and everywhere else, for that matter! Please seize on every opportunity to educate the religiously-ignorant as to who is the real enemy, here. Disclosing it, as this article gratefully did, in the body of the work isn't good enough. Please make sure that your headlines at least don't mislead, as the one, here, does; and, if possible, use them to convey the essence of the message so that even the headline-only-reading will get it right.