Life is rated R

Our culture is full of taboos. Words you can’t say and images you can’t put out in public lest they offend someone. Many people equate keeping these taboos with the signs of being a good Christian. Don’t cuss, don’t watch R-rated movies or read dirty magazines. There is even a Christian radio station whose main theme is being family-friendly. Everything they talk about is rated G.

Except that Christians can’t live G-rated lives. It just doesn’t work, because life is rated R.

Start with the Bible. Have you actually looked at some of those stories? Gang rape, brutal murder, adultery and lust run rampant through its pages. If you made a movie of the Bible, the whole thing, unedited, you couldn’t bring anyone under 17 into the theater.

So why does the church and mainstream Christian culture try to live in a G-rated world? I’m not saying we should start cussing just because, or enjoy gratuitous sex and violence in movies. But we can’t ignore that they exist, can’t shelter ourselves from the reality that is life.

In my last post I talked about the culture and communication gap between rich and poor. It seems like there is a similar gap between ‘clean’ and ‘dirty,’ the church-accepted standard of talking and dressing and living and the worldly lack of standards. We get to used to the clean, safe, family-friendly environment we hide away in that we lose the ability to relate to people who are unfamiliar with that environment.

People who haven’t grown up where manners were enforced, mouths were washed with soap, and parental controls governed TV stations don’t feel comfortable in the G-rated world we’ve created. People who didn’t grow up in a churchy culture don’t feel comfortable there because they don’t know how to act. They understand that the church (theology and spiritually aside) has its own set of values and rules of conduct that they aren’t used to and don’t know how to follow.

Many Christian bookstores won’t carry a book that has bad words in it. They don’t want to cause a stumbling block to people, to expose them to ‘unacceptable’ ways of speaking and acting. Yet stories are how we learn about the world. The books a person reads can tell you a lot about how they think and what they believe. So when we avoid the hard issues, we learn to forget that they are there. If we won’t watch or read about someone with problems, including language, violence, etc, people face, how can we learn to understand the difficulties they face, and the strength it takes to overcome?

Jesus isn’t family-friendly. No, we don’t need to put temptation in our way, to gorge ourselves on violence and sex until we become desensitized. But we do need more Christian literature and cinema that deals with the hard issues, that takes a step beyond the clean façade of Sunday-morning and shows the hard and dirty parts of life. Because it is in the hard stuff, the R-rated stuff, that you can see the true wonder and power of Jesus’ love and life-changing power.