There’s a strange kind of catholicity I feel for the preachers who get out on the Drag with their damnation signs and exhort people to repent. The Gospel is so much more than what they preach, of course, but I don’t think it’s anything less than that. This sentiment is probably O’Connor inspired, I must admit.
The common line of critique from people who feel some sympathy for these preachers is that their style of preaching is not very effective, and that it turns more people off to Christianity than onto it. Fair enough, but the real reason it’s wrong-headed is that although these ministers claim some relation to the prophets of the Old Testament as justification, they miss the simple fact that the kids today are ignorant of some of Christianity’s most basic tenets and tropes and can’t receive that sort of prophetic admonition. The prophecies of God for the people of God, no matter how disobedient they were. You could call it pearls before swine, if you made it a special point to mention that the pigs were blind.
Of course, the kids who try to take on the preachers make jokes of themselves, but only because Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, and Harris have encouraged them in that direction. These atheists today are so anti-religious they can’t understand that they’re being completely religious, even zealous; if you’re trying to be an atheist, the validity of theism is still the name of the game, and you haven’t gotten over it.
This whole problem, not surprisingly, is why Nietzsche can be very, very awesome.
