There was also this:
I have to confess that this sight elicited a set of conflicting emotional responses in me – responses that were very different from the way I would have responded in my early days as a Christian.
I know what these people were ostensibly trying to do. And on a certain level, I have to agree with it. After all, Matthew 28:19 says, “Go, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit...” Mark 16:15 says, “Go into all the world, and preach the Good News to the whole creation.” The history of the Church is full of examples of “open-air preachers” who went to public places and proclaimed the Gospel, from the apostles in the Book of Acts to men such as Peter Waldo, George Whitefield and Charles Spurgeon. Indeed, Proverbs 8:1-4 says, “Doesn't wisdom cry out? Doesn't understanding raise her voice? On the top of high places by the way, where the paths meet, she stands. Beside the gates, at the entry of the city, at the entry doors, she cries aloud: 'To you men, I call! I send my voice to the sons of mankind...'”
Yet I also know that Christianity in America has earned a certain reputation, which has unfortunately now spread throughout the world. This is definitely not the fault of the Good Book, nor the fault of those people who truly understand the Good Book and are trying to obey it. But because of certain prominent leaders and shapers of American Christian culture, Christianity has come to be seen as the dogma of the defenders of the priveleged class. This priveleged class has claimed some sort of Divine right for American prosperity, and has refused to publicly discuss the back story behind that prosperity, aside from saying that “Providence” granted them power to prevail over all the people they jacked in order to secure that prosperity. Any threats (including scientific or moral threats) to that prosperity are vilified and demonized by these people. Thus the Democrats and Obama are “godless Socialists!!!”, and the discussion of anthropogenic climate change is “a tool of the Devil to distract us from the mission of spreading the Gospel!” The poor nations of the earth are said to be poor, not because they have been repeatedly jacked by European and American colonialism and neocolonialism, but because they “worship false gods and don't embrace American capitalism!!!” People in countries holding resources that rich Americans want are branded as “terrorists!” and “looters!”
This portrayal of the Faith is reinforced by people like Jerry Falwell, James Dobson and Tony Perkins, who have ostensibly labored to “restore America's moral fiber,” but who in actuality were also deeply concerned about American economic policy (probably much more so than about American morals), and who all amassed large fortunes to themselves. Both Perkins and Falwell have also had dealings with white supremacist and anti-integration groups. Then there's the travesty of Sarah Palin, another member of the privileged class with a monstrous sense of “entitlement.” But lately, it's Pat Robertson who has taken the cake with his declaration that the recent earthquake in Haiti is God's punishment on that country for having made a pact with the devil two centuries ago in order to break free from their French (white) colonial masters. As I said before, Pat Robertson has a net worth of between $200 million and $1 billion according to Wikipedia.
Thus the reputation that American Christianity has earned is that it is the religion of childish materialists, whose religion promises unlimited prosperity with no suffering involved, and that any call to suffer or to share with others or to deny oneself must be “from the devil!!!” This is very different from the Faith as portrayed by the early Church. When modern-day Christians stand as open-air preachers in public places in modern-day America, bearing signs like the one in the picture above, I'd guess that most bystanders probably think, “Yeah, right. Another bunch of war-mongering, wacked-out, weird, greedy, Fox News-watching, flag-waving idiots.” “'For the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you,' – just as it is written.” (Romans 2:24)
What Christians in this country need in order to preach the Gospel is to repair the context in which that Gospel is presented. We need to have a few public rejections of certain people and their dogmas. We need to make a few public apologies. We need to start living a lot poorer, some of us, so that we can take our surplus wealth and give to the poor. We need to start acting far more Christian – as in, actually doing all those otherworldly things that the New Testament commands. Otherwise, “it would be better for [us] that a huge millstone should be hung around [our] necks, and that [we] should be sunk in the depths of the sea” (Matthew 18:6) than that we should have to be punished as those whose lives make the Gospel unbelievable.