Lifeway Chrisitan Bookstores
A lot of things going on this week that are worth looking into. The first is the debacle that surrounds Lifeway Christian Bookstores. For those of you who know me, it comes as no surprise that I can’t stand Christian Bookstores. Those in the Christian publishing industry know what a farce they are in their continue publication of cotton-candy theology and the mass produced Jesus junk they sell for a profit. Every time I go into one of these stores, I come out completely discouraged because the stuff the put forth is nothing more than Leave It to Beaver Humanism with a dash of Christianity to boot.
What has brought Lifeway Christian Bookstores to the forefront is that the Southern Baptist Convention had them pull all their copies of the movie “The Blind Side,” because some baptist pastor didn’t like that fact that the movie had some cussing it. If this is the case, then that pastor will have to rip Philippians 3:8 from the Bible, since the word that we translate as “rubbish” could also be used as a much harsher form of the word dung. There are also other places in Scripture, especially the Old Testament, where prophets used harsh profanity in describing the enemies of God.
The point is that life is full of people who cuss. We are to strive for a purity of language, but that comes through the Holy Spirit working in our lives, not taking good movies off the book shelves.
Rachel Held Evans has more on this at her blog site. She writes:
Christian bookstores have developed a reputation for producing a highly sanitized customer experience, purging from their shelves any language, content, or theology that doesn’t meet their uber-conservative standards. Walk into your local LifeWay and you will find plenty of Precious Moments statues, specialty Bibles, Veggie Tale movies, and Thomas Kinkade prints…but little trace of art or literature that intrigues, agitates, and inspires—as true art should! The Christian bookstore experience is, in a word, safe. Butsafe is not how Christians are called to live, and safe is not what artists who are Christians are called to create. In fact, based on LifeWay’s own standards, the Bible itself—which includes profanity, violence, and sex—should be banned from the shelves.
What most people don’t realize, however, is that the problem of sanitized Christian bookstores extends far beyond the inventory on the shelves to create an entire Christian subculture that is so sanitized and safe it often fails to produce art that is relevant to our culture or our lives.
Now I’m going to say something that will probably get me into some trouble, something that many editors and writers are afraid to say for fear of losing their jobs or their book contracts, but something which desperately needs to be spoken out loud: Christian bookstores have a chokehold on the Christian publishing industry. And this chokehold not only affects the inventory you find on Christian bookstore shelves, but which books are contracted by publishers, what content gets edited in the writing and editing process, and the degree of freedom authors feel they have to speak on their own blogs and platforms. As a result, the entire Christian industry has been sanitized, while its best artists look elsewhere for publication.
Obama Continues to Lie
Guy Benson, at Townhall.com has an excellent piece showing that the Obama Campaign is dead set on lying about Romney and his time at Bain Capital. It seems Team Obama are set on employing the Marxist Maxim that if you repeat a lie enough times, it becomes the truth, which is a lie in and of itself. But when you have punted any pretense of being truthful and honest, as Obama has done, then the little things do not matter, such as being truthful. I hope and pray that the people of this country see through it and withhold their votes for the man.
Benson writes:
The Obama campaign’s dishonest attack ads portraying Mitt Romney as a “corporate raider” and a “pioneer” of shipping American jobs overseas have been debunked by multiple independent fact checkers. WaPo called the first such spot “misleading, unfair and untrue,” and FactCheck.org found “no evidence” to support Obama’s allegations. Undeterred by facts and unconstrained by truth, Chicago has produced a second ad on the very same subject, repeating the very same discredited claims. An NBC News affiliate in Florida examined the new spot and reached the same conclusion as the other truth-seeking entities: The ad is “false.”
The end result of hope and change:
Allen West on Hannity:
I really like what Allen West has to say on the economy and especially his enemies. He really doesn’t care what his enemies say about him. He is committed to the truth and doesn’t chase after the false-notion that he has to curb his speech in order to get the left to like him. We need more men like Allen West in politics.
Dear LORD, tell me the SBC didn’t really do that! Reminds me of Frankie Schaeffer’s book Addicted to Mediocrity, the cover of which was worth the price of the book. It shows a pudgy little guy in painter’s overalls leaning way over his ladder to roll sparkly-clean white paint over the Sistine Chapel’s stunning depiction of God’s hand reaching to impart to Adam the spark of life. I am a lifelong SB and though there are no SB churches where I live now, I still have lots of contacts back in TX, and I will ask them about this.
And God bless Col. West. Mercy, can that man tell ‘em how the cow ate the cabbage!
I am praying that Romney asks Allen West to his VP or in charge of the military.