Christian Good Cop/Bad Cop Game
I remember watching those old police movies in which two police officers are interrogating a suspect and one police officer pretends to be this over the top, loud, angry, and erratic cop threatening the guy with the worst treatment possible if he doesn’t cooperate while the other cop pretends to care about the guy and his rights. This cop tells him that if he cooperates the cop will push to get him a lower sentence and some roses or something. This is called playing “Good Cop/Bad Cop.”
I have found that whenever I get into conversations about Christianity I find myself smack in the middle of that game. On one hand, I am talking about the Bible and what it says and how cruel so much of it is and then along comes the Good Cop Christians (sometimes even a fellow atheist) who tell me that none of that really matters and all Jesus is saying is give peace a chance (despite the fact that the character of Jesus actually said that he did not come to “give peace a chance” but rather he came with a sword). Then I’ll talk about the horrible, immoral, and downright dangerous thing that a the Religious Right are doing right now and how they must be stopped and then the next thing I know along comes the Good Cop again telling me that those Christians are just extremists who have it wrong (despite the very large number of these Christians [45%] and the fact that their view of the Bible is actually fairly liberal considering what the Bible actually says).
These Good Cop Christians will quote one of the small handful of verses that are about compassion and ignore the tons and tons of really shitty verses calling for violence and hate. They will tell me that I can’t blame Christianity for the actions of the Religious Right (the Bad Cop). Yet if you look at the Bible, it is clear that the Religious Right have the Biblical High Ground when it comes to so many of these issues. People forget that back in the day when more people took the Bible seriously, there were all kinds of really horrible things going on (like the torture and murder of blasphemers). The only reason why Christianity has gotten rid of some of those horrible things isn’t because it was discovered that the Bible didn’t say those things, but rather because modernity has made those things silly and immoral.
Awhile back, I read a book by Jim Wallis, the founder of Sojourners. He is one of the leaders of the “Good Cop” crowd and I have to tell you that even his brand of Good Cop seemed pretty damn bad to me. But there are other “Good Cop” Christians who are surely better than Reverend Wallis. My point is that I am growing tired of being stuck in the Good Cop/Bad Cop game. I don’t criticize Christians as people, but I do criticize what most if not all Christians believe. Even the Good Cop Christians believe some pretty wacky stuff when you get right down to it. One problem is that they don’t really hold to their own doctrine and I can’t say I blame them. But they have no religious grounding for rejecting the parts of the Bible that they reject (which is about 95% of it by my guess).
If people want to pick and choose which parts of the Bible they wish to follow, that is fine with me. I do that with most of the books that I read. But I am also not claiming that the books that I read were divinely inspired. Once you add that into the mix, all bets are off and Christianity becomes open to criticism. In this sense, atheism is like the Internal Affairs of this Good Cop/Bad Cop game.
Filed under: good cop-bad cop, Religion
