The following is reply to a Charlotte Observer column by Isaac J. Bailey, “Franklin Graham’s God isn’t mine; is he yours?” (http://www.charlotteobserver.com/opinion/editorials/article134819004.htmlfb_comment_id=fbc_1288950587859919_1289747547780223_1289747547780223#f35461721bd9bd)
I’m bowled over by Isaac Bailey’s remarkable incoherence. Is he presenting himself as an expert on Christian exegetics, or the purveyor of trendy pronouncements of Hollywood celebrities? Maybe both? Quoting a study-of-the-moment as scripture, while attempting to morph the Bible into the preface for the Democratic Party platform, is folly on steroids.
Mr. Bailey apparently doesn’t want a Christian to be a Christian. This may come as a surprise to Bailey but being Christian means acceptance of the deep truth of the Gospel, not the Koran or Bhagavad Gita. To be an adherent of a particular faith is by nature to be exclusive. A person gets baptized as a Christian, not as a proselyte of a fashionably amorphous and undemanding spirituality common in west LA.
Mr. Bailey wants to obliterate the doctrines that define Christianity in the same manner as progressivism’s desire to interpret the Constitution out of existence. Remember, they claim, it’s a “living thing”, like the Constitution, waiting to be shaped by the boundless imagination. In his mind, we can have a new Jesus, like a new Constitution, every time a thought becomes fashionable among the beautiful people. It’s all so ludicrous.
Really, people like Bailey have movie-land visions running around in their heads of snake-handlers and fulminating sermons when they think of traditional Christianity. It’s a fictional script implanted in the mind that has little room for a devout, fundamentalist, and evangelical Christian being also caring, considerate, compassionate, and tolerant.
To put it bluntly, prejudice among “progressive” types is as common as anywhere else.
RogerG