Secular

I was flipping through an old copy of Relevant Magazine and an article about Tony Hale (Buster Bluth on Arrested Development) caught my eye. I'm a big fan of the show. I'm a big fan of folks who follow Christ that simply do their jobs well. It was only natural that I'd stop-down to read the entire article.

What got my brain engaged was this quote (article written by Adam Smith):

"Hale believes that many people in the Church shun artistic expression that is no overtly Christian, and he warns against such division between the sacred and the secular. 'It creates an 'us [versus] them' mentality,' Hale says. 'I think it comes from fear. We put our faith in a box, and it's pretty and it's safe and anything outside the box seems scary."

"He points to an episode of Arrested Development in which a married fundamentalist Christian woman becomes infatuated with the show's main character, Michael. 'It seems like the word secular is used 50 or 60 times in that episode,' he says. 'They talk about her falling for 'that horrible secular man.' I wish every Christian could see it. Christians use that word far too much, and it becomes a synonym for bad or evil.'"

I've noticed the same things.

That us-versus-them thing does come from fear.
We put our faith in a box.
We label those who don't know Christ as secular and therefore they're the people who always do bad things and Christian folks are the ones who always do good things.

Let's do all we can to take the word "secular" out of our vocabularies. Starting right now.

(says the guy who had input on naming our recent Bible conference "Thinking Biblically in a Secular World"--please don't think I'm missing the irony here--but it makes my point: What if we just called it "Thinking Biblically About The World?")