So as I sit at work in my hoodie, and scan the various blogs I frequent, a disturbing theme has come up. First touched on by Inkedblog, it concerns TammyFaye and Jim Bakker’s son. He is currently doing a PoMo style church, and he’s got tattoos. Oooh, scary. I remember reading about how he was starting a ministry to reach out to skate-punks and “Millennial”s in Atlanta several years ago in a Time magazine. He had a quarter-page profile, and it sounded like he had something good. Regardless of Jay Bakkers personal theology and praxis, what stuck out the most were the descriptions of Christian ministries used by the various bloggers and newspaper columnists.
”Indeed, through Tattoo Theater we can find deliverance from the holy warriers(sic) who invade our coffee houses and troll our bars.”
“Typical of fundamentalism of any kind, it stresses the coming apocalypse, subjugates women and squashes competing ideas - and devotees make no secret of the fact that they are committed to imposing their extreme beliefs on others via institutions of the state. Sandler takes us on a wide-ranging journey, from the classrooms of chaste home-schooled students to the 6,000-member Mars Hill Church in a hip Seattle neighborhood, where "a bright candy coating of secular cool (sweetens) the bitter pill of addictive orthodoxy."
Final word: Sandler exhorts secularists to fight back with a passion to rival these evangelists: " . . . we must recognize the same hunger for meaning that Christians do, and we must respond by lacing our television shows, newspapers and magazines . . . with a greater sense of life's value, all with enough humor, style, and rock and roll to make it palatable; a teaspoon of irony to help the medicine go down."
Words like “invade,” “subjugate,” “imposing,” “fight back,” them’s is fighting words. Someone even left a comment on the Sundance Channel production company’s press release page saying “Has he considered snake handling as the path to global lovableness? There's a vacancy.” Lots of hostility, but is it for the right reason?
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