Using your favorite Internet search engine, look up the term “Christian news.” You’ll probably get a list of rather popular sites purporting to offer news stories of particular interest to Christian believers. Let me restate that: Mostly it’s news filtered for the interests American evangelical Christians. It’s generally right-wing and Zionist, and tends to praise certain partisan thugs in government.
One of the first things to catch my eye was the number of sexual scandals involving big name preachers. You have to give them credit for trying to show what it’s like to survive as victim of such things, too. There are any number of females telling about the difficulties of incest with their fathers, which fathers ran famous ministries. But most of it is more like some publisher refusing to offer any longer books by some scandalous author who has fallen from grace, and similar loss of sales from Christian musicians caught up in public sin.
But I suppose I find most annoying the trendy sales pitches disguised as news articles. I lost count of articles that didn’t take long to get around to, “In my new book…” And most of them engage in “smart marketing” using the most egregious high pressure tactics to get you to subscribe to their new alerts, which news alerts are just those sort of disguised sales pitches.
Another thing is this trend of reporting news about persecuted Christians around the world. That sounds like a good idea, but the problem is how they go about it. It’s always tearjerker styled writing, and I’ve caught them more than once hiding relevant facts of the story that make it seem less religious persecution and more like shutting down a public nuisance. But they always pair it with multiple donation requests by various agencies claiming to help these poor souls in heathen lands.
By the way, if you don’t happen to have at least a middle-class professional income, you’ll find yourself culturally out of place on most of those sites. They’ll talk about all kinds of “spiritual battles” you’d never face. Nobody wants to report news stories relevant to lower income believers. I can’t forget what one poor country preacher told me: “If someone comes to your door dressed better than you or driving a nicer car, they should be offering you money, not trying to coax a contribution out of you with some obscene guilt trip.”
Aside from the fact some of it might be entertaining to read only because you can see through the hype, it’s probably a waste of time reading Christian news, as if you hoped to get something more uplifting than secular news reporting. It’s the same crap with a different paint job.
America, Behold the god Mammon! “Give us your filthy lucre and with our newly cleansed Jesus bucks! we’ll buy Rolex’s, Armani suits, mansions, boats, airplanes and custom Escalades. After all Jesus was the original American and if he were here he’d have bling!” Exit thru the gift shop, today’s special; the last ever case from the last container shipped from China as ordered by Oral Roberts mere days before he was called home to his throne in Heaven -plastic hulu dancing Jesus’ for your car $150! Visit our website Jesusco.com and sign up.
Funnily enough, I spent about 5 minutes watching some current events claptrap on NRB tv today, something I don’t do, feminist workplace bs with a “Christian” label, thoroughly nauseating.