Bad Christians...

On the recent trip back home I managed to read three books - the last Harry Potter (excellent), the third Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants book (also excellent) and a book called When Bad Christians Happen to Good People by a guy called Dave Burchett. It's a book with an interesting premise - identifying those people that have been hurt by the church and suggesting ways to make amends, or at the very least not repeating the same mistakes.

Burchett is apparently an Emmy winner in sports broadcasting, so he brings a refreshing lay perspective to his topic, and he also has a down home humor that works well most of the time (but sometimes he overplays it annoyingly.)

While the book's title might imply that it's about any and all people who have been hurt by "the church" (and there's a good book waiting to be written there, no doubt), it's really mostly about people within the church who have been hurt by their fellow church members.

However, it becomes clear about halfway through the book that by Christians he means North American Fundamentalist Evangelical Christians (NAFECs). He has an amazing blind spot to the notion that there may be people who share his faith but who don't share his fundamentalist evangelical version of Christianity. He just never even goes near that notion in the book at all.

Despite that rather glaring fault, it's not a bad book, and certainly worth a read. There's a good, funny chapter about how Christians (particularly NAFECs) completely alienate unchurchy people with their jargony vocabulary. On the other hand, he's willing to acknowledge that the church has been horrible to gay people, but is unable to figure out a better way to approach the issue - after all his fundamentalism still informs his belief that gays are "wrong" - so he ends up merely advocating a kinder, gentler version of "love the sinner, hate the sin". Which I guess is better than Fred Phelps (but then again, what isn't?)

So for concept and occasional good chapters I give him five stars. For a lack of vision and awareness of the greater concept of the church and other shortcomings, I give him no more than one star. So call it occasionally great with significant patches of cringeworthy.