Us and Them: Stereotypes Among Christians

A month ago I sat down to a pizza dinner with a close friend. I’ve known him for many years and I’d consider him a very upright and caring man. He is comfortably atheist, but always willing to listen. He had recently been surprised by another friend whom I have never met. She was raised in a Christian household and has accepted Christ herself. In a conversation about religion, she told him to accept Jesus or he would be going to hell. Hearing this story from my friend, I thought at first that she was rather thoughtful to be concerned about our friend’s eternal life. But of course, if you turn the words around, the same sentence reads that you’re going to hell despite any attempts to be a good and just soul.

Looking for some response to my dear friends, I asked what church she went to. In some backwards way, I see now that I was trying to defend my faith by stereotyping the denomination of this person who I have never met, and a theology which I know little about.

I can only imagine what this whole thing must have looked like from the point of my friend. Not only was he accused of being a person worthy of hell, but I was stumbling for words of comfort. I’ve always known that Christians hold a lot of stereotypes about other Christians. But it wasn’t until this incident that I realized every Christian stereotype I knew or had heard were all hurtful in some way.

I feel like we have fallen terribly far away from the call of the Gospel in what it is to be Christian. To love one another and be recognized as Christian simply by the love we share for all human kind.

I find all too often that the friction between different denominations is enough to fully seize the body of Christ and stop it from moving at all. In junior high youth group my youth group leader explained that the different denominations are like different flavors of ice cream. Some people like chocolate, some vanilla, and some grow to love strawberry. The point is all the same, no matter the flavor. Different people have different ideas and will go to different churches, looking for different experiences. The end result should be the same. Not to bicker at how another form of worship is wrong, or how state that another denomination looks more like a cult. Rather to love: feed the hungry, satisfy the thirsty, greet the stranger, clothe the naked, and comfort the sick.

All of the pointing fingers in Christianity not only gives discredit to the whole church as seen by those outside church walls, but also weakens the Body of Christ.

“Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body—whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink. Even so the body is not made up of one part but of many.” 1 Corinthians 12:12-14

Robert