Looking at the “podcast revolution” and Christian stereotypes.

In what little free time I’ve had, I’ve been poking around the existing podcasts on the internet. A lot of them strike me as the feeble attempts of people who were unable to get into radio.

I once worked at the student radio station at CSU Sacramento. I had a three-hour block every Friday at lunchtime. It was fun, but I wouldn’t want to do it every day. Once a week is cool. Every day… well, you’ve either got to be in love with the sound of your own voice, or you have producers to help you come up with content, or you’re playing top 15 hits all day. Out of pure laziness I used to do a “bootleg set”—play an entire CD—do my Media Law homework, and while I was at it, make my own bootleg tape. (Relax. I have since bought copies of those CDs. I was taking Media Law, after all.)

I’m a little tempted to create my own podcast… Just what the world needs: audio Rants. Well, maybe when I’m finished with this summer homework, I’ll experiment with it. Throw on some jazz, dig up my old sound effects CDs, babble like Happy Harry from Pump Up the Volume (without the profanity, naturally), and annoy my server with all the extra bandwidth from the two or three nerds who bother to download it. Ah, the podcasting revolution…

I found one podcast I like so far; Wired Jesus, a fortysomething Lutheran pastor (who claims to be a Generation Xer—is my generation actually getting that old? Yikes) who is, naturally, trying to be relevant. He’s not bad.

He does make the usual mistake of claiming that Christianity is not as the media portrays it. I’ve heard this statement lots of times: that the media doesn’t portray Christians as they really are, but as a self-righteous, hypocritical, fanatical caricature.

Uh… hate to tell you, but THAT’S HOW CHRISTIANS REALLY ARE.

Maybe not you. Maybe not the people in your church. Maybe not your friends. But when you take the church—the whole church, including people that you personally might never associate yourself with because they’re self-righteous, hypocritical, and fanatical—and let’s not even get into the hairstyles—that’s how Christians really are. It annoys me to say it, but the church more closely resembles my uncle Rusty—my bigoted, homophobic, Democrat-hating, narrow-minded, anti-charismatic, anti-Catholic, undiscipled (yet his church still made him a deacon and lets him teach Sunday school), won’t-let-women-preach (even though my mother led him to Jesus), right-wing nutjob uncle Rusty—than me. (And even if Christians were depicted as people like me, I would still be unsatisfied. I’m no prize either. But I at least recognize that a significant part of Christianity involves loving your neighbor. Rusty would rather shoot ’em.)

Yet instead of doing our part to change the well-deserved stereotype, most Christians would either

1. say the media is blowing it out of proportion
2. say the media is perpetuating a false stereotype, due to anti-Christian bias
3. disavow any relationship with the church, or with Christianity, preferring to only say they’re “followers of Jesus” (and claim it isn’t the same thing as Christianity) in the typical modern belief that if you use different words you can create a different meaning.

And note how that worked with all the terms we use for people with low IQs. First there was “moron,” then “retarded,” then “slow,” then “special.” Somehow kids on the playground figured out what the new term is, and it managed to become just as insulting as the old word.

Relabeling, repackaging, and remarketing isn’t the answer. Change is. But change is hard, so it’s left abandoned and untried. Excuses are made. New labels are applied. And Christians continue to exhibit sucky behavior that only succeeds in driving the curious and the seekers away.