By John Pierce
Often political/theological alarmist groups will send their press releases and loud-but-weak commentaries to me. Removing these from my email inbox is a daily task.
It is understandable that such groups would wrongly think I want to receive such ideological nonsense. Having “Baptist” in our organization’s name surely leads them to that assumption.
So while the content of the messages is usually ignorant if not offensive as well, I generally take no offense at being put on the list. I just delete them or reroute them to the junk box.
Why not grab all of the Baptist media emails you can since so many who proffer nutty alarmist ideologies also bear the Baptist name? I get that part.
However, I do find it interesting how some of these organizations respond to my lack of interest in their deliveries. Sometimes the sender — who intruded my time and space without permission — doesn’t take rejection well.
Over the years I’ve learned to not respond with something like: “Stop sending me this nonsense.” It just results in insults and more nonsense.
So now I simply “unsubscribe” through whatever method is provided.
Even so, some of these passionate culture warriors fire back with one last swipe like: “Well, OK, if you don’t care about the truth…”
Or, “Sorry, I thought you were a Christian; if you were then you’d care about…(whatever is the misguided issue of that day).”
However, my goal now is to consider this exercise no more of a time waster than plugging in my laptop when the power is low or trying to find basic info on a church’s web site like the name and email of the pastor. (Oops. Let out a pet peeve there.)
As in most life experiences, my hope is that a good lesson can be found here as well.
Perhaps, in this case, it is that saying something stronger doesn’t make it more truthful — or that insulting those who reject one’s message doesn’t make the message more appealing. Or perhaps both.
Director of the Jesus Worldview Initiative at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee and former executive editor and publisher at Good Faith Media.