By  Kevin Stoda

I came across an article from Beliefnet author, Frederica Mathewes-Green.  The author has had a journey through Hinduism and later turned back to Christianity in the form of Eastern Orthodoxism.

In her article, “Loving the Storm-Drenched”, Mathewes-Green writes to a largely Christian audience who is not enamored with the era of culture warring that we witness around us today.  I think that a lot of what she shares has to do with good common sense for progressive audiences of all shapes and backgrounds, too.

TONE OF VOICE

Mathewes-Green asks us all to take a longer view, i.e. by not simply hitting back when attacked.

She speaks about our tone of voice.  She states that the tone which “we adopt from the culture: sarcastic, smart-alecky, jabbing, and self-righteous. We feel the sting of such treatment and give it right back; we feel anger or even wounded hatred toward those on the ‘other side.’ But God does not hate them; he loves them so much he sent his Son to die for them.”

Moreover,  Mathewes-Green charges, “We are told to pray for those who persecute us and to love our enemies. The weight of antagonistic and mocking big-media machinery is the closest thing we've got for practicing that difficult spiritual discipline. If we really love these enemies, we will want the best for them, the very best thing we have, which is the knowledge and love of God.”

In other words, we have to ask ourselves whether we are getting knocked off balance constantly and can no longer walk the walk that we talk?

The author, Matthewes-Green, correctly notes that in terms of the language of interpersonal communication, “Smart-alecky speech doesn't even work. It may win applause, but it does not win hearts. It hardens the person who feels targeted, because he feels mocked and misrepresented. It increases bad feeling and anger. No one changed his mind on an issue because he was humiliated into it. In fact, we are misguided even to think of our opponents in the ‘culture wars’as enemies in the first place. They are not our enemies, but hostages of the Enemy. We have a common Enemy who seeks to destroy us both, by locking them in confusion and by luring us to self-righteous pomposity.”

Whether one is Christian progressive, Buddhist, Muslim or Hindu, one needs to recall:  “Culture is not a monolithic power we must defeat. It is the battering weather conditions that people, harassed and helpless, endure.”

TO FIGHT A BEAST OR NOT?

In order to make her case, Mathewes-Green talks about Hollywood and Christians’ relationship to cinema over the past 80 to 90 years.

Among numerous ebbs and flows of culture, religion and politics over the decades, Mathewes-Green notes that it was not the (WTCU) Woman's Christian Temperance Union which dealt a near death blow to the media tradition of exalting at someone’s drunkenness or drunken behavior. 

Instead, it was an awareness by the 1970s of how many lives had been destroyed or hurt by alcoholism—not only on the nation’s highways, but in homes and public space, too.  This national awareness led both to television and Hollywood making ever more less light of the town drunk.

In such an example, a “so-called prudish point of view on alcoholism” had become a reality in Hollywood and in education in the evolving American cultural landscape in the decades after Prohibition was ended in the early 1930s.

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