This is an evangelical smackdown the likes I have never seen. The comments section was so much verbal jujitsu I almost visualised it in my head. But I didn't. I don't roll like that. And I'm blind. Sort of. What makes a good Christian? Will all good Christians end up in heaven, on Our Father's right hand? Will their goodness be the ticket to heaven? Or will it be their faith? I don't know, and it is entirely possible that in my current slightly sozzled state that I don't care.
I have had the ill-fortune of wasting my youth on many things that at the time were completely fun but of absolutely no academic or financial value. They most certainly robbed my parents of choices and opportunities that they will never, ever recover. But they taught me valuable lessons about the insularity of geographical isolation and its pernicious effects on ones understanding of the world, and our place in it.
The questions that Jestidwell's Blog raise are not so strange when one considers how faith and religion blind us to the world as it is, and we are always shocked when we truly open our eyes for the first time and are confused that what we know and what we see are so painfully different. Many of the United States' citizens I have met are woefully ignorant about my country, spending their youth in a cocoon made up of the exceptional nature of the United States, the supremacy of its military and its infallible faith in God Almighty.
In a nation of such a great wealth of choice, what they know of the world is reduced to snippets of video about starving, godless Africans who murder each other in grotesque rituals. Many Christian missionaries in Kenya from the United State live in complete ignorance that missionary work in Kenya, whether Christian or Islamic, is older than than the United States of America, and that these missionaries are plowing in an already plowed field. There are more denominations, sects and cults than Kenyans know what to do with; there isn't a part of this febrile land to which the Gospel has not been taken.
It is the arrogance of the youthful United States' nationals and their mentors that they believe that the Gospel abroad in our land is the wrong one, and that they come bearing the one true Gospel for us misguided souls. It is why they are shocked when they are confronted with the snooty The Junction Mall. It is why when that happens, they are paralysed and incapable of driving the three kilometres to Kawangware where they will find the poor, possibly starving, Kenyans they are so desperate to minister the Gospel to.
The righteousness of the backlash to Jestidwell's Blog post is a phenomenon that is not unique to Christian evangelism; like any big club, the purity of the mission is always policed by those who have no authority to pronounce on the principles of the club. So it is with Christian evangelism, as with religious evangelism of all kinds as the Islamic State is demonstrating every day these days. Jestidwell's Blog post is an innocent exploration of her faith in the disappointment of her misconceptions of Nairobi. Some of the commentators to her post are viciously judgmental, countenancing no other vision of the world and Christian faith other than their own. The only difference between them and the fundamentalists beheading people in the name of God is that Christianity has already gone through this phase, and in the United States it was in waves; Salem, and then the whole South with the questions of slavery and civil rights.
So, from Jestidwell's Blog post and the backlash from the puritans who read it, I don't know if the road to heaven requires my goodness, my faith or both.Do you?
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