Twitter Angst and the 2012 Olympics

by Ben Howard

Everybody has been on a bad vacation.  That one family trip where everything felt tense all the time and you were waiting for something to spill over.  That one road trip where your dad yells that he’s going to pull over to the side of the road, and then actually does it.  That one trip where you or your brother or your sister just decide that everything unequivocally sucks because you feel like being an angst-ridden hormonal teenager.

I’m pretty sure Twitter is the angst-ridden hormonal teenager of the 2012 London Olympics.

Now, lest this post devolve into a kids-get-off-my-lawn curmudgeonly rant, I’ve definitely added my voice to the misanthropic murmur of social media over the last few days and weeks, but I’m starting to feel uncomfortable with it.  I’m starting to feel uncomfortable and tense about the aggressive snark and cynicism which has started to ensnare my generation’s observations of the surrounding world.

On Friday, I watched the opening ceremonies with some friends.  To be fair it was gorgeous and epic, but at the same time it was weird and at points incomprehensible.  There was a salute to the National Health Service, which was weird, and a scene where 200 flying Mary Poppins (Poppi?) battled a 100 foot inflatable Voldemort, which was weird, but awesome. 

However, when I got home I checked Twitter and Facebook before I went to sleep and was barraged by a series of tweets and status updates about how much the ceremonies sucked and how stupid it was and it was all so…predictable.

The last few days have been filled with bitter tweets about Olympic spoilers, and rants about why NBC won’t show events live, but instead saves the best events for prime time (the best response is Will Leitch’s column here.)

To be honest, I don’t care.  It isn’t important.  I just want to enjoy a worldwide spectacle.  I just want to be a part of the fun.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about how difficult I find it sometimes to be authentically happy and how rare and beautiful it can be to just enjoy something without deconstructing it to find deeper meaning.  However, in the world I live in, and likely the one you live in too if you’re reading this, it’s hard to escape the cynicism.  It’s hard not to breathe pithy statements that border on bitterness and arrogance.

I’ve often felt the same way about the church.  A few years ago I got to the point where I could never leave a church feeling anything but bitterness and spite.  Some of it was arrogance, and some of it was pain.  There’s a thin line between making fun of something because you love it, which gives us a healthy perspective and a dash of humility, and making fun of something because you hate it.

I wonder when we know that we’ve crossed the line and I wonder how we get back.  Thankfully through the love and support of friends and a healthy church community, I can get more out of a service than anger and frustration.  They blessed me with that gift of grace.  But how do we move a society that way?  How do you we help a society embrace beauty even when its flawed?  Or is cynicism justified and I’m just being naïve?  I’d love to know your thoughts because I’m still working this one out.

Peace,

Ben

When he isn't channeling Andy Rooney for a post about the Olympics, Ben spends his time in a field with Snoopy waiting for the arrival of the Great Pumpkin.  Any day now.  You can follow him on Twitter @BenHoward87.

Favorite Memories from My Fundamentalist Christian Beginnings

by Jonathan Harrison

As none of you know, I grew up in a particularly jovial spiritual tradition.  200 years ago, an old white dude decided that he wanted to create a denomination that rivaled the Spanish Inquisition for unbridled forgiveness and joy, so he used bass-ackwards logic (read: the myth of objective thought) to interpret certain scriptures to agree with his preconceived notion as to what a church should be. Some other dudes took that and ran with it.  A few centuries later, his spiritual foresight inspired unemployed librarians (i.e., me) to write bitter posts about all their “favorite” memories of growing up in a particular tradition that will not be named for legal purposes.  Below, my favorite memories of growing up in a fundamentalist Christian tradition. 

• The day our elders told us we couldn’t paint the youth group room anything except white because other colors were “unbiblical” (true story). 
• Subsequently, when they hosted a meeting to address the shocking drop in youth group Sunday school attendance (from 40 people to 2 in two years) none of us showed up because there was no biblical precedent for us being there.  Love it.
• The day a guest preacher told us there were only three (biblical) physical positions in which to pray.
• Speaking of prayer, the month where the subject of every sermon was about how you couldn’t pray to Jesus.
• Also the few months where the main topic of theological discovery was what to wear to church on Sunday morning.  Our preacher kept saying “you should wear what you would wear to your best friend’s funeral.” Despite the fact that if your best friend came back to life your initial thought would probably not be, “Where’s my suit?”  This was also a pretty accurate representation of the enjoyment factor of every Sunday morning.
• Wow! These are all coming out all at once.
• Little did you know, miracles don’t exist. They stopped after the completion of the Bible. God doesn’t do miracles today, and if you happen to be an old man who has the cajones to get in front of the congregation and say, “I’d like to believe that God could do miracles today if he wanted to,” the church’s youth minister will get in front of the congregation and denounce you as blasphemous. The interactions at the Golden Corral buffet after THAT Sunday morning were especially awkward. Let me tell you.
• When the hot girl never showed up, and you always tried to figure out what you did wrong that week to deserve such a punishment. #firstworldproblems
• The myriad discussions on why attendance for that particular denomination (which technically wasn’t a denomination, but the, “one true church”) had plummeted over the past few decades.  $5 says they're still trying to figure it out.

Ok. So I’m bitter. I’m not going to deny it, and going off in such a manner is the polar opposite of the spirit of forgiveness. I'll own up to that. One thing I’ve struggled to do over the past five or six years is learn how to forgive a particular religious tradition that’s still very much a part of my life. God loves people who perpetuate this kind of mentality as much as he loves people like me.

For the longest time, I judged others that have been sucked into years of cyclical spiritual abuse instead of, you know, trying to help them out of it. Judging is a heck of a lot easier. Judging won’t get you disowned by your family, yelled at, or labeled as worse than an unbeliever. However, judging also means you will be judged as well, which is infinitely more frightening, knowing all of the terrible things I’ve done. It took prayer, and reading the Bible of all things, to make me finally realize that.

Jonathan Harrison is On Pop Theology's regional expert on Nick Cage juvenilia  He writes over at driedhumor.wordpress.com.