Two Million Cards Sold!
Why Are the Cards So Popular?
by Randy Cassingham
It is a question I have been asked many, many times.
My best guess at the answer is this: people are absolutely sick and tired of others telling them what their morals should be, especially when the people doing the telling don’t demonstrate good morals themselves.
Nosy people with no idea of what you believe in are demanding the right to say what you “should” do and think. Yet their own moral leaders are in the headlines month after month after month doing the most repugnant, disgusting, abhorrent and (on virtually anyone’s scale) immoral things imaginable, such as the sexual exploitation of children by priests, to offer just one extreme example.
The sales of the GOOHF products are just one “symptom” of people being fed up with sanctimonious buttinskis. The cards are, to many, a way of saying “I’m comfortable in my position, no matter what you think,” and they’re popular with open-minded believers and nonbelievers alike.
An Antidote
Another “symptom” of this impatience was revealed December 3, 2002, by George Barna. Barna is a California-based pollster who specializes in religious beliefs — the Barna Group is the Gallup Poll of the Christian world.
Barda did a survey at the request of the American Family Association, and the results are quite telling: the poll asked Americans who don’t consider themselves Christian to express their “impression” of 11 groups of people: positive, negative, or in-between?
Evangelical Christians rated 10th — just above prostitutes, and significantly below Republicans, Democrats, lesbians, and Movie and TV performers. Even lawyers came in at #7! (Ministers, though, should take comfort: you came in at #2 — but it was a distant #2 behind military officers, who came in first by far).
(Source: Surprisingly Few Adults Outside of Christianity Have Positive Views of Christians, Barna)
They Set the Stage
Why would these Americans think so little of Evangelical Christians? Look at how they often play out in the media: at the funeral of a man who was beaten to death, some of these “loving Christians” were protesting the services with signs reading “God Hates Queers”. (Hint: “hate” is not an example of Christian love.) Were these same people protesting the trial of the murderer?
Then there are Christian fundamentalist “leaders” like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, who used their television platform — two days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks — to pin the blame for the atrocities not on the terrorists, but rather, as they so lovingly put it, “the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way — all of them who have tried to secularize America — [we] point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen’.”
Barna’s Conclusion
“Our studies show that many of the people who have negative impressions of evangelicals do not know what or who an evangelical is,” Barna said in a press release about the survey. “Too often, we develop mental images of others without knowing those people. …We find that when people examine the foundation of their impressions and then talk to a few people from the groups of which they have a low opinion, they discover that those people are not so bad after all.”
Funny, but the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians, the ACLU, People for the American Way — all of them — that’s exactly what they want Evangelical Christians to know too.
They need to get their own moral house in order before they even think of trying to dictate how others should act.
And one tool we can all use to lighten things up in this angry, hateful environment is the Get Out of Hell Free card: the ultimate message of “Thanks, but I’m comfortable in my own beliefs: Your hypocrisy won’t work on me.”
The Get Out of Hell Free Card: Don’t Leave This Earthly Plane Without One.
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Author Randy Cassingham is best known as the creator of This is True, the oldest entertainment feature on the Internet: it has been running weekly by email subscription since early 1994. It is social commentary using weird news as its vehicle so it’s fun to read. Click here for a subscription form — basic subscriptions are free.