[Culture Wars]

The Oppressed Christians

I am a member of a small Buddhist group in Portland, Oregon. This past week, we received a package from DreamWorks that was on its way into the recycling bin when I intercepted it. Addressed to "Church Officiant," it turned out to be a promotion for the new Dakota Fanning vehicle "Dreamer."

Now, aside from the fact that my Buddhist group is called Kagyu Changchub Chuling, I didn't find this particularly out of the ordinary. We get a lot of yellow-page generated mass mailers. And after all, we're pretty ecumenical, so it wasn't even particularly off-target. Even the enclosed Bible study seemed reasonable enough. Until I thought about it a little more and it occurred to me:

This was a Hollywood movie.

Remember Hollywood, that demonic cesspool from which sprang Michael Medved's career? From a religious point of view, I have nary a quarrel with the mailer. But from a political point of view, this springs to mind: isn't it the Christians who, several times a year, create a huge stink about being oppressed in the country they dominate? Off-hand, I recall the huge stink last year (led by Bill O'Reilly) about how secular society wouldn't let Christian's say "Merry Christmas"; the charge that anything less than a full-size statue of God handing Moses the Ten Commandments in various state capitols was tantamount to religious exclusion; and that ever-popular pique about how kids get brainwashed in bio class by that unreliable theory of evolution, when it's demonstrable that, biologically speaking, intelligent design is irrefutable.

Well. For a non-Christian, it highlights why the Christian conservative political agenda is so frustrating. They want it both ways--to be the martyr and to have full penetration throughout the culture. Yet methinks that any religion dominant enough to be targeted by direct mailers (and to have those direct mailers target every other religious organization, just for good measure) to try to sell movie tickets ought not feel overly threatened.