Get over yourself: in defense of the broad brush

Against narcissism

Lord willing next week will see our series on church leadership resume with “The Case for Christian Elitism.”

In the meantime, I wanted to take a detour to talk about a social media-era phenomenon that simply has to stop.

Imagine you’re at a wedding. Nearly everyone has taken their place on stage—all but one.

The music stops.

The rear doors open.

A new song begins, and the minister asks everyone to “Please rise” for the bride’s entrance.

“Excuse me,” someone shouts over the song, “but that is extremely insensitive to the groom’s 102-year-old great grandmother who physically cannot stand up out of her wheelchair. How dare you ask everybody to stand.”

Now everyone in the room knows the caveat behind the request, that there is an understood “if you are able” attached to the “Please rise.” This person has chosen to ignore that, though, in order to take a valiant stand for Granny Johnson—even though Granny Johnson knew she wasn’t being discriminated against, either.

Here’s the kicker. You turn to see who could be this disruptive to wedding norms out of their ignorance. The loud voice comes from a perfectly able-bodied woman who for some reason has remained seated. We’ll call her Stacy. Like Granny Johnson, Stacy is not standing for the bride. Unlike Granny Johnson, Stacy does not have a good reason. Yet, she has the gall to try to cover her own disrespect by using Granny Johnson’s inability as her own excuse.

Ridiculous, right? Stacy would be rightly criticized and even asked to leave, right?

Well, apparently not. This playbook gets used to great effect all the time. I came across a tweet that phrased this ideology with perfect succinctness:

“Because of the mere existence of an exception, it is unloving to esteem the innate goodness of the norm.”

In our social media-exacerbated narcissism everything has to either be about us, or about the imaginary person for whom we can take a courageous stand. “Standing for the bride’s entrance is good and proper.” “Oh yeah, what about all the people who can’t?”

Let this kind of obnoxiousness pay off and next thing you know we will no longer be able to ask people to stand at a wedding. You know, just in case a Granny Johnson is there or a Stacy is there to get offended for her.

A real-world example: my mother-in-law once posted the old, viral post about how putting your shopping cart away is the test of a good citizen. This should not be controversial - it is good to put your shopping cart away. Yet controversial, it was. “What about people with disabilities?” “What about the elderly?” “What about young moms?” What about people who develop acute knee tendinitis on Tuesdays in April? Did you ever think about them? Huh? Did you???”

Again, unbridled narcissism. Develop a thick enough skin to know when you’re the exception. But I suspect it’s rarely the Granny Johnsons who are taking issue with broad brush, normative teaching. No, Stacy is driving this train.

And this is the part that should anger us enough into saying “no” to all of this insanity: the Stacy types are the ones the norms are intended to correct. They do not want to be corrected, so they drag the Granny Johnson types over and hide behind them as human shields.

This all matters greatly because this applies to so much more than shopping carts and bridal processions. Our ability to prescribe Biblical norms is at stake.

For example, let’s look at the family. It’s just one of many topics in which this thinking is an issue, but it will suffice for today.

More young people than ever are forgoing marriage, and that includes Christian young people. Once married, more than ever are voluntarily deciding to forgo kids. This is not God’s intention. We should be proclaiming from the pulpit God’s design for the family, the goodness of marriage, and why children are important.

But we don’t because of the “What abouts.” “What about Granny Johnson” becomes “What about those who want to get married and can’t?” and “What about those who cannot have children?” They should know intuitively—but also be reassured from time to time—that they are an exception. The church is not asking them to do something they cannot. Nobody is mad at Granny Johnson for not standing, in other words.

I think they know that, though. It is generally not Granny Johnson, but Stacy, who is the roadblock.

“Christians should get married and have kids” is a plain, Biblical teaching that applies to the large majority. The couples who have chosen the Instagram dog-mom lifestyle don’t want to hear it, so they hide behind the involuntarily single and behind those struggling with fertility challenges to make normative teaching offensive. Those people’s struggles are painful enough without being dragged around as cover for somebody else’s disobedience. It’s truly despicable that anyone would do so.

But because we want a broad, lowest-common-denominator Christianity that never calls anybody to holier living, we cave in.

“Somebody might get their feelings hurt and leave if we say good things are good and bad things are bad without a million qualifiers. I guess we had better not say those things are good and bad.”

No, raising the bar of holiness also means we raise the bar of expectations on the listeners.

Broad brush teaching works because you are smart enough to know when something applies to you and when it does not. If it doesn’t apply to you but it’s true, say “amen” and encourage those to whom it does apply. And if you know it does apply and yet you don’t like it, the issue is not with the brush, but with you.

It’s time we get over ourselves and start learning to say “Amen” to Biblical truths rather than finding human shields to hide ourselves from them.