in your face(book)

Somewhere around a year or two ago I joined Facebook. My main reason for hopping on the wall-writing bandwagon was that I finally could – all of my grad student friends had been booking their faces for awhile, and listening to them reference mass messages and the scandals of who wrote what on whose wall made me feel like the kid locked out of the candy shop for not having a pound note in hand while all the other kids swarmed around buying Wonka bars to their hearts’ content. Unlike sweet little Charlie Bucket, however, I glared through the window burning with resentment. What’s so special about being a student? Why can’t I play, too?

So when Facebook opened its doors to all the little kids – and the old ones too – thus becoming a slightly less skeezy version of myspace (which I have refused to join), I joined just because I could, enjoying the satisfaction of tracking a little plebian dirt onto the graduate carpets.

But that was really my only reason for joining, as I had come to harbor a deep skepticism regarding electronic communication (which has been offset considerably by the appearance in my life, through Blogger, of two intrinsically dear people over the past few years: one through the old pink girly rant blog, and one right here on Coffee Spoons). By my senior year of college I had given up AIM almost entirely, using it only to make fun of stupid people with my sister or messaging John to see when he wanted to meet for dinner. Having watched a number of face-to-face friendships crumble through overuse of the false intimacy of instant messaging (I greatly prefer to build and maintain friendships through email and the telephone, if it must occur over distance, as most of my friendships do), I abandoned it in favor of spending face time with the people whose company I enjoyed, and lost the habit of keeping up with people instantaneously in any deep and meaningful fashion (which, frankly, I still don't think is possible on its own, especially in forums like Facebook, unless the relationship is already well-established, and even then it's only one dimension of the friendship, not self-sustaining).

So when I became a Facebook member, I didn’t friend anyone. I didn’t become a zombie or a vampire. I didn’t join any networks. I didn’t bite or poke or tickle. (I did, however, become a fan of my favorite FOX shows in the event it might in any way contribute to the longevity of said shows.) I just set up my profile and let it sit there, accepting friend invitations as they came to me (and I was amazed by the people who friended me), unless from strangers, and occasionally writing on the wall of a longtime acquaintance. A useful tool, I figured, if I needed to get in touch with anyone. But I preferred the outskirts of the Facebook circle; having gotten through the door, I held onto my pound note and resisted the piles of Wonka bars waiting for me. Entrance was all I sought.

And all went along on a streamtide of relative peace…until my parents’ generation discovered it. I had to laugh every time I got a friend invitation from yet another member of their church – nearly all of them people who have known me since I toddled about on chubby legs sporting cute little pigtails and cloth diaper pins. Say what you want about Baptists, they do two things really, really well: community and food. So when they found Facebook, it was like, as Alan Rickman’s character says in Galaxy Quest, “throwing gasoline…on a flame.” FWOOM. Their enthusiasm for the network threw my generation’s lackadaisical apathy into sharp, shadow-blackened relief.

So I suddenly found myself accepting friendvites and ignoring all sorts of group invitations right and left. My parents’ community is like a whirlpool – they’ll catch you by the heel and drag you kicking and screaming into their midst if they can, and their persistence knows no bounds. I find it largely endearing, largely humorous, and, as I possess the same persistence, I good-naturedly resisted past a lot of their persistence.

Good-naturedly, that is*, until yesterday, when I received an invitation from a well-meaning gentleman to join this group: “we CAN find 10,000,000 Christians on Facebook.”

Where do I start?

This is an excellent summation of everything I hate about contemporary Christianity. Could the name of this group be any more snide, any more self-focused, self-congratulating and self-aggrandizing? Look at us, world. We’re Christians. We’re the people of God.

Give me a break. Had the group named itself “10,000,000 people who love Jesus,” it would be guilty of cheesiness, to be sure (and I still wouldn’t join), but not hatefulness.

Consider the grammar and inflection of the title. Emphasizing “can” implies, and not subtly, that there is a vast degree of doubt in the possibility. Further, it flaunts an in-your-face determination to show up whoever’s doing the doubting (“non” Christians? or Christians? Hm. Was Camus’ story supposed to be “The Host” or “The Guest”? Reader decides) by achieving the “impossible” and finding ten million self-identified Christians on the face of the planet.

But why? Are we flipping the bird to a hostile world (who detests not so much our faith as our obnoxiousness)? Why are we flipping the bird? How are we defining “Christian,” anyway? Evangelicals tend to be the only people who identify as “Christians” rather than by their denominations. Which certainly has its strengths; but with a title like this, the group, consciously or not, is only looking for a certain kind of Christian – a “real” Christian – a Christian who believes that salvation is equivalent to a “personal relationship with Jesus,” that faith itself, expressed in a good life of quiet belief, is not enough.

So the underlying attitude of this group is exclusionary – we’re Christians; you’re not. We’re going to heaven; you’re not. We belong to this club; you don’t – not only to “non” Christians, but to Christians as well. It’s also one of guilt and coercion, with the same implications as a chain letter or one of those ridiculous mass emails that urges you to forward some hoaky message of dripping goodwill and corny graphics “if you love God.” I’m sorry? So if I don’t forward the email or join this group I’m not a Christian? I have to jump on the leave-everyone-else-out bandwagon or suffer the scrutiny of my own people?

All of that annoys me. What enrages me is the purpose. What exactly are we trying to prove with a census count? Why are we so obsessed with our own numbers? Why aren’t we out there looking for ten million people who aren’t "Christians"?

This is what really stokes my furnace. I know that it only takes a second at the most to click the “accept” button and join this group, and so the people who have done so aren’t really wasting any time, but honest to God. Why have we made the focus on our own righteousness? This group sends the message that our time is better spent finding each other than bringing a message of love and hope to people who have neither.

The people of our faith weren’t even called “Christians” in the very beginning; that label happened in Antioch, a little while later. In the beginning there was no name for what we were. There was only the transforming power of love. And while we gathered together in the temple every day praising God, the greatest focus was on saving more souls and meeting others’ needs. Not chalking up another tally mark when someone “prayed the prayer” and grinning around at each other saying, Bully for us!

This group isn’t gathering together to praise God. (You can't even leave a message on its wall, or I would have posted this entire thing there.) This group is gathering together to prove something. And the point isn’t worth proving. In the end, what we call ourselves doesn’t matter. Jesus says in Matthew 7, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.” And in Matthew 25:34-36, He expounds upon this notion to tell us, clearly, that what we do “for the least of these” is what matters. And it seems, from looking at the passage, that some of the people who will “make it in” won’t even know about it until that day.

Puzzler, isn’t it? The clearest message of those verses is that crying “Christian” means nothing. And groups like this, which serve no purpose except to make people feel “guilty and judged” (as Mal says in Firefly), or self-important and smug, are “meaningless, a chasing after the wind,” without even a kite to justify the chase.

Isn’t it nice of us to want to close the door of the candy shop on the dirty people starving for some sweetness who don’t fit our label?

Yep, we’re the best.

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* You knew this was working up to a rant.