#chrissy stroop

This morning, I woke up to a message that comedian Sarah Silverman had taken to twitter to call out Adam Fannin, a hateful Baptist preacher from Jacksonville, FL, who called for violence against her in one of his sermons. 

The name, look of the church, and style of preaching immediately screamed “Steven Anderson cult” to me, so I did a quick search and found that Stedfast Baptist Church is, in fact, a new IFB church. I also learned that Fannin was discovered to be part of the drama surrounding Donnie Romero early this year, and is no longer preaching at his former church in Jacksonville. The official church YouTube account posted a video this afternoon basically telling Sarah Silverman “Guess what, he’s not here any more but not because of what he said about you. You’re still a terrible person. He just also is a terrible person.” (The link is there as a source, but don’t click it if you don’t want to give them views.) 

The replies to Silverman’s tweets are largely supportive, with the occasional negative comment either weakly defending the pastor (i.e. “he’s not calling for violence, he’s just saying he wouldn’t mind if it happened”) or telling her the calls for violence are wrong but so were her words. (Her words about how she’d “crucify Jesus again” were from a comedy special and taken out of context, of course.) 

One common form of comment was about how Fannin isn’t a “real Christian”. While his words certainly don’t represent anything Christ stood for, it’s unfair to claim he isn’t a “real Christian” when so many Christians attend these churches and believe the same things. 

The concept of “fake Christians” is a common one expressed by Christians about people who poorly represent Christianity. (Disclaimer: I don’t know for a fact that any of these examples are actually Christians except for the one who says so in their tweet. My assertion about these comments often coming from Christians is based on years of experiences and observations. These examples are simply taken from the replies to yesterday’s tweet.) Any time something negative is said about Christians you can expect many Christians to chime in. “He’s not a real Christian!” “Real Christians never would have done that to you.” “This person clearly never was as Christian as they claim they were or they wouldn’t have left in such a big way.” The individuals this idea of “fake Christians” can be applied to are varied, but the idea behind it is always the same. Christians want to separate themselves from people who do awful things. They question or discredit someone’s faith because they don’t want to be associated with that person’s actions, nor do they want to believe that they or the people they love could do the same things. 

The problem with this line of reasoning, of course, is that it is a sign of privilege that they are allowed to get away with it. In the US, no other religion gets to separate itself from the horrible actions of its extremists. When a Muslim commits a major crime, hate crimes against Muslims go up. When a Christian commits a major crime, other Christians play the victim and talk about how that fake Christian took advantage of their “good name”. It’s a double standard that I’m sure many of us here are aware of. This is something I posted about fairly recently. This idea is also something that a lot of more liberal Christians are currently using as their way to explain the Christians who are supporting Trump. Obviously Trump’s hateful rhetoric does not exemplify the teachings of Christ, but he’s playing on the mentality that is widespread in American churches and it’s false to say any Christian who votes for Trump is a “fake Christian”. I highly recommend this article by Chrissy Stroop, who is much more eloquent in her discussion of this topic than I could ever hope to be. 

As for former Christians who have left the church/their faith, one of the most hurtful things a person can say to many of us is that we never truly believed or were never truly Christians. (For the record, while I have left the church, I do still consider myself a Christian. I would love to attend a church that represents my beliefs, but the “church” as it is currently known is America is not something I want a part of.) In my observation, the most vocal people who left the church are the ones who were once the most devoted. They weren’t faking that devotion. They truly believed. Many of them still do, but they can’t reconcile the fact that the church behaves in a way that goes against everything the Bible tells us that Jesus stood for. So they leave, often at great cost. Then they have their experiences (often the experiences of the first 18-20 years of their lives even) invalidated by people who have no right to do so. Not only that, but invalidates the extreme struggle a person goes through when they get to a point of leaving their faith. 

https://twitter.com/3vanSutton/status/1529920691771887616

https://twitter.com/C_Stroop/status/1442892525841178643