This Business of Jesus

I had a co-worker of mine recently attend what she thought was a medical consultation, and she was telling a few of us this morning that although there was talk about her sore back, they asked her to return for an information session with her daughter and husband. The practitioner and the group are Christians, and she said that she immediately came to realization that the session was probably a recruitment of some sort. I've heard of things like this before, and when I was hearing the story, I couldn't help but feel bad for her, especially when she was told that the referral was meant for people who were considered lost or homeless.

D.C. Talk, pictured above, is one of the more successful Christian pop groups, and I had the opportunity to read a book called "Jesus Freaks" two years ago, that they co-authored. When I was first introduced to D.C. Talk, it was during a stint after school a while back, watching Musiqueplus. I thought the song I was listening to was cool, and about 6 months later, when I read that D.C. Talk was actually a Christian pop group, I was floored. It was my first realization that Christianity was strategically making inroads into every day life, infiltrating things like video channels, and I discovered that it was obviously not just a lot more popular than I ever thought, but essentially mainstream in a lot of ways. A short while later, Jars of Clay released "Flood", which was a mainstream hit, and I had a coronary.
The book, Jesus Freaks", was example stories, and admittedly I was engrossed in reading this. Not so much for the stories of Russian prisoners of war who were unwavering in their belief in Christ, and who refused to denoucnce him, even through the experience of torture, or the more modern examples of sticking to your guns for your faith...no...I was eating up how they packaged the book, how they wrote it, and how they were obviously appealing to individuals in the same market demographic as what McDonald's or Nike was targeting.

It seems to me that Christianity is the only religion that is aggresively and actively recruiting the hell out of people. Most cults don't think this hard about how to get people to join, and I can think of no other religion that is working so hard to get people to come on board. This is the truth, really. I've said this before in casual conversations, and sometimes I'll get into a debate where someone argues that every religion is guilty of doing this, and/or that people are free to do what they want or to listen to what they want to, and that essentially Christians who rejoice and recruit are exercising their freedom to do so, and that that in is in fact what defines us as a free society.

This is true, but, I think that the public is a lot smarter than that. I don't think that religion is something you should be recurited into. There is a difference between rejoicing publicly, and holding a medical seminar, only to be introduced or pitched on faith, but I believe that the jist of it is the same. They're both putting it out there, and it's tacky.