A common 21st Century malady

As we delve further each day into the new century (which, as of this writing, is still, for some sad reason, personal-jet-pack free), we see more and more evidence of a trend that, in and of itself, isn't fond of evidence. It is the trend of emotionalism, where otherwise well-meaning people give their emotions--and anything attached to them, such as opinions, perceptions, and the like--equal footing with objective, verifiable, no-doubt-about-it facts.

This malady afflicts, to varying degrees, both major political parties in the United States; it is pervasive in the Democrat Party (with the prime example being their core pro-abortion position), and is making inroads in the Republican Party (with the prime example being those in their party who don't address illegal immigration as both a law-enforcement and a national-security problem). It is ever-present in the larger society, where litigation is the weapon of first choice from those who make careers out of being aggrieved. And it is even rearing its ugly, maniacal head in Christian churches, where the old campfire song "They'll know we are Christians by our love, by our love" is being reworked as "They'll know it's a church fuss when they see our laundry."

Those of us who are Christians are, by definition, people of fact. If it is not a fact that God is Who He says He is, if it is not a fact that Jesus stepped out of a grave one Sunday morning, if it is not a fact that the Bible is accurate and authoritative, if it is not a fact that the only way to spend one's eternity in Heaven is through a salvific relationship with Jesus Christ, then we Christians are wasting our collective time. If the Bible is not factual, then it is not credible, and we are no better off than followers of any human-constructed religion; to coin a phrase, "we are of all men most miserable." Thankfully, those are all objective facts: Our choice to accept them as such gives them no more credibility than rejection of those facts gives them less.

The recent brouhaha at Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis (sounds like a pay-per-view event, doesn't it? "The Brouhaha At Bellevue!!"), where a small group of members has bypassed the Biblical mandate to keep church disagreements within the church, is an example of emotionalism being the sole fuel for a viewpoint. Just as in the legal concept of the "fruit of the poisonous tree," the entire group is contaminated by the emotional choice (still ongoing) to broadcast their personal disapproval of just about every aspect of what goes on under the leadership of Bellevue's pastor, Dr. Steve Gaines. Using a website orbited by several satellite blogs, the group publicly disagrees with everything from salaries to song services, with lurid headlines billboarding stories of each new imagined transgression.

The headlines are a key to the lack of restraint which is a key element of emotional appeals--desperate times calling for desperate measures, and such. Since officially violating Biblical dispute-resolution principles by going online in August 2006, this anti-Bellevue group (their viewpoint being "anti-Bellevue" because of a refusal of responsibility for the consequences of their behavior) has used personal disparagement as a calling card. Bellevue members who do not share their view, and Bellevue's senior staff have been defamed in various media as "cowards," "the Mafia," Stepford robots, and supposdly employing a "Hitler style of management," among other libelous appellations. This anti-Bellevue activity has even gone to the extent of publishing the e-mail addresses (and, until they had to good sense to remove the information from their main site, the home addresses and telephone numbers) of the deacon body--which, at Bellevue, is composed of more than 180 deacons.

When emotionalism drives people to engage in behaviors that are counterproductive to the larger cause of Christ, it should be a reminder to us all not to fall prey to the same temptations in our own lives. The blogging site I use has as a positioning statement the phrase "Push-Button Publishing." Just because something is suddenly easy to do, such as publishing your opinion when something at church doesn't please you, does not mean it is automatically right to do. The advent of this century has not brought with it jet-packs (though we must not give up hope), but it has brought with it a new ease in indulging one's own subjective emotions. We must guard against pushing buttons in an emotional reflex; after all, the Christian church is a place where Jesus is glorified and saints are equipped, not a place where every whim and opinion must be sated.

--Mike