Amy's Robot

Why religion in America makes no sense +

You may have noticed when looking at your employer's holiday schedule and trying to figure out how many consecutive days you can go without showering that Christmas falls on a Sunday this year. For many of us, this happily means additional days off. And for those people who are more traditional and Christian and think of Christmas as a religious holiday, it means that they can go to church once and take care of Sunday church and Christmas church all in one go.

Unless you are an evangelical Christian. How many times does an evangelical Christian go to church for the combined super-holy Christmas/Sunday double shot? Twice? Once? Once for twice as long?

Nope: they go zero times.

Many evangelical churches in places like Grapevine, TX and Nicholasville, KY and Alpharetta, GA are actually going to be closed this Christmas. Some megachurches that regularly bring in many thousands to their Sunday services say that having services on Christmas would be a bad use of staff time, and their congregations see Christmas as a "family day".

Aren't these the same people who accuse secular forces of trying to destroy Christmas and take away its religious significance? The "America is a Christian nation" people? Aren't there a whole lot of lapsed Christians out there who probably only go to church on Christmas and Easter?

These no-church-on-Sunday-or-Christmas churches say they're just trying to accommodate their members' busy holiday schedules. A spokesman for Fellowship Church in Grapevine, which is apparently large enough to have a spokesman and has a purpose statement page that reads like a marketing theory textbook, says his church decided to offer services in the days leading up to Christmas instead. "Doing them early allows you to reach people who may be leaving town Friday."

Great! Maybe next these churches can mobilize to get Thanksgiving moved a day earlier so that everybody can be better rested when they have to get up at 3:00 am on Black Friday to go shopping.

UPDATE: ADM alerted me to a story about some violent Jesus-loving creationists who recently hospitalized a University of Kansas religious studies professor. The professor had been planning to teach a course called "Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationism and other Religious Mythologies."

Christian love.

categories: Religion
posted by amy at 11:54 AM | #