follow-up to "Christians are jerks"

(This post is a little late - I started it about 2 weeks ago, but my brother has been visiting.)

Richard Beck posted a little while back on Christians being jerks. Here's a follow-up post on why that might be. From the post

Despite what I said in previous post, I don't think most Christians are jerks. Rather, I think Christians tend to behave like jerks due to failures of attention. I just don't think Christians are mindful enough.

I commented a while back on the original post of "Christians being jerks" (and before that, on the related idea of moral bs). Both address the fact that quite often, the world sees Christians (evangelicals especially) as being jerks, hypocrites, etc, and offer explanations of why. I tend to relate to this most recent post most of all - from my experience, most Christians I know are very genuinely and passionately trying to be the salt of the earth, but somehow end up leaving a funny aftertaste.

The main idea Beck offers is that much criticism directed towards Christians is the result of sins of ignorance or inattentiveness. Previously, he offered the example of Christians going from church to Sunday lunch - they're often known as a group of impatient, haughty, dismissive, lousy tippers. This time around, he qualifies it by explaining why this behavior isn't something done purposefully, or even consciously, but that in not paying attention, we let our default setting (our sinful self, if you will) get to us. He gives examples of, say, standing in a long checkout line at Walmart and letting frustration and impatience get to us. We can become angry at people we don't even know (road rage, anyone?), dehumanizing the person without ever thinking about their own struggles and what might be going on in their life, simply by not being attentive to our own state of heart.

(as a culturally-specific note) :: To be fair, among the Chinese-American crowd, I haven't often seen rude crowds of Christians leaving lousy tips at restaurants (probably because the Chinese culture emphasizes politeness, or because our parents emphasize cheapness - i.e. going to places where we don't need to tip), and many of my friends really go out of their way to love and care for whomever they meet. However, I do remember when we held small groups or house church meetings at friends places, often the guests would leave a fairly large mess of dishes (and sometimes stains) for the hosts to clean up afterwards. I don't believe this was rudeness, but simply an immaturity/inattentiveness and ignorance of the trouble we bring to others unconsciously (and as a personal comment, I'd like to add that Beck's example of the being Christlike at the urinal is a particular pet peeve of mine).

I think the analogy can be extended to many different places. One example I've seen before might be social justice ministries. While research into doing effective social ministry has taken huge strides recently, that area of ministry has historically been (and sometimes still is) less effective than it's practitioners might believe. A book I saw on a blog recently (When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor...and Yourself), for example, talks about the way in which misguided attempts to help alleviate poverty have actually made it worse.

Evangelical Christians are often noted for their passion and focus, a strong point of theirs. However, at the same time, I think this characteristic may tend to lead to inattentiveness towards some other things (this is not to say all evangelicals are like this). Perhaps this is why, when Jesus spoke about the two greatest commandments, he spoke about loving God without divorcing it from loving your neighbor as yourself - so that "turning our eyes upon Jesus" would not cause us to turn our attention from everything else as well.