My Feeble Attempts at Satire Miss the Mark

Last updated on: May 26, 2018 at 7:47 am by Roger E. Olson

My Feeble Attempts at Satire Miss the Mark 2018-05-26T07:47:45-05:00 Roger E. Olson

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Occasionally I use my blog to make a stab at making a point about religion using satire.

My most recent post/essay (“Totally Tongue-in-Cheek…”) was satire. Hardly anyone seems to have gotten the point.

It was not about restaurants.

The point was: What if restaurants did this? They don’t…and for very good reasons.

Why do churches do this? They do…and possibly for reasons that are very good for them.

But is the trend toward public hiding of identity and genericizing good for the public, for people searching for a church? Is it good for the churches to have a specialized ethos but hide it behind a veneer of being generic or “plain label?”

I did recently spend a couple weeks in a large American city chock full of relatively new, growing churches. Almost all of them have generic names and no identifiable theological-spiritual identities. And yet, a scholar (like I am) of American religion can “pick up on” such theological-spiritual identities hidden behind a veneer of being generic and “for all people.” When I visit them the worship tends to be planned to not identify the churches’ theological-spiritual identities.

When I use my skills as a scholar of American religion I “see” their theological-spiritual identities, but I also “see” that they are actively trying to hide them. And many of them are so eclectic as to not fit any theological-spiritual identity which often results in blandness.

I think satire is a lost art or I’m just not good at it! Maybe both.

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Totally Tongue-in-Cheek but Hopefully Enlightening

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May 29, 2018 Shopping for a Church (An Oldie but a Goodie)

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