To rant or not to rant

  • Orthodixie gets into some pretty inter­est­ing stuff here. Our cul­ture has more than enough going on in it at any minute to exhaust the patience and good will of any of us so that, like Rip Van Winkle’s wife, we’re in dan­ger of dying from burst­ing a blood ves­sel scream­ing at a New Eng­land pedd­lar. Rea­son dic­tates we pick our bat­tles. But do I use that as an excuse to absent myself from ever fight­ing the good fight at all?

    When is the day that turns the cor­ner past all rea­son? Then again, my typ­i­cal thought on see­ing Chris­tians up in arms and protest­ing is: “Oh. My. Gosh.” And, like the Phar­isee, I secretly thank God I’m not like them.

    Inac­tion can be viewed as sophis­ti­ca­tion. Per­haps, in God’s eyes, too smart by half.

    When it comes to crit­i­ciz­ing the world around us, how far do we go? Can we decry the apos­tasy, blas­phemy, unright­eous­ness, hypocrisy and still go to church on Sun­day, still be — in some sense — pray­ing for them and for the whole world?

    I hope the answer is yes. Responses on the Ortho-blogosphere would have me believe it’s not quite as self-evident as I think.

    I can’t see the wis­dom of that posi­tion myself, and I know that in my case, it would be moti­vated in no small part from the strong temp­ta­tion to resist any con­fronta­tion, think well of every­one and be thought well of in return, have my tiny share of domes­tic tran­quil­ity (no mat­ter what I had to sell in order to get it) and to avoid look­ing like That Sort of Chris­t­ian. In short, I’m a bit of a cow­ard, and if walk­ing away from this cul­tural fight is the right thing to do, in my case, I’d be doing it for all the wrong reasons.

    So I rant. Some­times. And some­times, I just skip it. And which one I do may have more to do with whether I’ve got some time to kill or can think of a funny way to say it.

    And as long as I’m being painfully hon­est, I’ll admit that I rant against lib­er­als more than con­ser­v­a­tives and Democ­rats more than Repub­li­cans and Madonna more than Jerry Fal­well. Not because there isn’t such a thing as a right wing, but because they don’t seem to be cru­sad­ing against active Chris­tian­ity, and I don’t see how I can say the same about the left wing.

    That’s sub­jec­tive, I know. But I thought I’d come clean.


    Related posts:

    1. Rec­om­mended read­ing (and a rant)

    May 25th, 2006 | Grace | 2 Comments |

2 Responses and Counting...

  • Jan Bear 05.25.2006

    I think all of us (I espe­cially) spend too much energy wor­ry­ing about whether our protest/satire/rants/quiet conversation/ignoring the prob­lem is the right move. The truth is, in a big war, there are infantry­men, bombers, medics, typ­ists, gen­er­als, etc., and some­times an infantry­man gets called upon to become a gen­eral, but if the typ­ists walked away from their typ­ing, the war effort would be less effective.

    In other words, there’s a time to rant, a time to deride, a time to feel sorry for the stu­pid and mean­ing­less life of the sin­ner and a time to walk away from the prob­lem, so that we can regain per­spec­tive on the whole sit­u­a­tion. There’s also a time to eval­u­ate what’s work­ing and what’s not, so that we can pur­sue effec­tive strat­egy. I think that’s where the “Boy­cott First! Read the Book Never!” folks make their mis­take. There’s also a time to dis­cuss and argue about effec­tive strategy.

    And to appre­ci­ate the irony that some­times our strate­gies unify us with peo­ple whose goals dif­fer from ours. It gives us a chance to reach across the chasm, but it’s help­ful not to for­get our unity with those who share our goals but not our strat­egy. (Or vice versa.)

    Exam­ple: I agree with Ann Coul­ter on a lot of what she says, but I think her rhetoric is unnec­es­sar­ily inflam­ma­tory. So I end up among a group of lib­er­als who hate what she says, but are not opposed to being equally inflam­ma­tory, if they thought of it. What to say? Noth­ing. I’m not a good enough debater to take on six peo­ple at once. I felt guilty about that sort of thing for a while, until I had a chance to talk one-to-one with a sim­i­larly minded lib­eral about one topic. There we could find com­mon ground and explore our realms of agree­ment and dis­agree­ment and leave as friends.

    And I love your rants on this blog.

    Great post, very though-provoking.

  • Grace

    Omigosh, this has so much pure truth in it that my head may explode.

    And either we two rep­re­sent a trend (always a favorite con­ceit of mine) or we’re just com­ing to very sim­i­lar places. I used to be happy enough just being a hot­head — now I don’t see things quite the same. I know too many peo­ple that are really try­ing to do good in their lives but don’t see things my way. So what am I sup­posed to do — obsess on how to tell them how wrong they are? pity them? thank God that He did not make me a sin­ner like them?

    It seems to me that I lose track of the cul­ture war part of it and will­fully ignore the great costs that hap­pen all the time as a result of it. When you hang out lis­ten­ing to the talk­ing heads (or talk­ing air­waves or talk­ing blog-heads) long enough, you can visu­al­ize a coun­try full of ene­mies of decency and san­ity. But if I rely on my own expe­ri­ence, I know a lot more peo­ple who just want to do the right thing and are rarely cer­tain that they’re right and every­body else is wrong.

    This all sounds con­fus­ing when I try to write it down. Hope it makes some sense.

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