Evangelicals Need a Thicker Skin
Taking offense to quickly at perceived slights hands control to your critics
One of the things I noted in my First Things article about the lack of an evangelical elite is that evangelicals need to get a thicker skin. Evangelicals are quick to take offense and react in a hostile fashion to perceived affronts, such as negative or incorrect portrayals of Christianity or Christ in the media.
Some of this is understandable. More theologically traditional Christians have been subject to ridicule and mockery for some time. Think about the Scopes trial. Or Sinclair Lewis’ novel Elmer Gantry. Substantively, the fundamentalists lost the various conflicts they had with the modernists, and were exiled from mainstream religious institutions.
Much of this anti-fundamentalist perspective came not from secularists but liberal Protestants, when that belief system remained a living, animating force. So while Christianity may have remained in high regard in the country, anything labeled “fundamentalist” was not.
While I won’t claim to have a full historical trace of this trait, a sort of thin-skinned approach is something that exists today and needs to be overcome. That’s not just at the elite levels, but at all levels. This even though evangelicals do legitimately have reasons to be upset at times.
A good example of a better approach is set by the LDS (Mormon) Church. I think it’s fair to say that they’ve been the recipient of far more negative treatment than fundamentalists, but they don’t have the same reactivity to criticism or unfair treatment.
The Tony Award winning Broadway musical The Book of Mormon provides a good example. Produced by the creators of South Park, It satirized and mocked Mormons and their religion, but by and large their response was muted.
The official LDS Church response was:
