Interesting video from YouTube. Of course there are any number of churches who agree with her, as evidenced by their marketing approach, therapeutic sermons, programs, and simple, easy approach to Christian faith. In the words of Hazel Motes, “If you want to get anywheres in religion, you got to keep it sweet.” And don’t we ever try to keep it sweet for the sake of success. The video provides an excellent contrast between the religious consumer wants of the disoriented, insane modern person with the difficult path of Christian faith and discipleship.
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October 8, 2009 at 9:31 pm
Eric Brown
Wonderful satire. . .
October 9, 2009 at 3:04 am
masonbeecroft
agreed… However I wonder if many would hear it as satire.
October 9, 2009 at 4:33 pm
Wyldeirishman
That was sheer brilliance, no question!
So much so, in fact, that I’m seriously considering sending it along to both our Pastor and our DCE.
Incredible how we continue to operate under the false pretenses that the market place ought to dictate our doctrine and practice; even more incredible that there exist those in even the most allegedly steadfast corners of Christian orthodoxy that likewise cleave to this mindset.
“If it’s not ‘fun,’ then who cares?” How is this not ‘friendship with the world?’
October 11, 2009 at 3:08 am
Laurel
Hazel Motes also declares, “nobody with a good car needs to be justified,” thus turning his Essex into his god!
O’Connor is surely turning in her grave, for she wrote in letters:
“What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.”
“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally. A higher paradox confounds emotion as well as reason and there are long periods in the lives of all of us, and of the saints, when the truth as revealed by faith is hideous, emotionally disturbing, downright repulsive. Witness the dark night of the soul in individual saints. Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul [...] I must say that the thought of everyone lolling about in an emotionally satisfying faith is repugnant to me. ”
“If what the Church teaches is not true, then the security and emotional release and sense of purpose it gives you are of no value and you are right to reject it. One of the effects of modern liberal Protestantism has been gradually to turn religion into poetry and therapy, to make truth vaguer and vaguer and more and more relative, to banish intellectual distinctions, to depend on feeling instead of thought, and gradually to come to believe that religion is our own sweet invention.”
October 11, 2009 at 4:37 am
Wyldeirishman
Laurel,
Those quotes are amazing! Who is the source?
October 11, 2009 at 6:20 pm
Laurel
Flannery O’Connor, Catholic fiction writer famed for her “grotesque” short stories.
The quotes are from The Habit of Being, a collection of her letters. I also recommend her “occasional prose,” which is collected in Mystery and Manners, and Ralph C. Wood’s Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South.