It seems that you're only allowed to say what you believe if you aren't a Christian. Or white. If you have any sort of diversity whatsoever, we'll give you all kinds of scholarships to come make our schools more diverse and stand back while you have your say about what you feel is important. But the minute a white Christian speaks openly about something he or she believes, he's called terrible names and dubbed "judgmental" (or, my personal favorite, "ignorant").
The worst part about being a Christ-follower today is the awkward positive you can't avoid. You have to read your Bible and pray and serve meals at your church and participate in the annual Christmas pageant (checked that off the list this year), but you have to make sure it's not in the name of legalism, for the "look at what a good Christian I am, I leave tracts for waitresses" effect. If you're under 30, you have to love youth ministry, play an instrument (preferably something acoustic), and be more focused on "a relationship, not a religion." You see that your world isn't right, maybe even on a small personal scale; but you pull on a smile, listen to Gungor, and chant lyrics that you may not understand but everybody else in the congregation sings them with such passion; besides, when the band swells, you know that you're supposed to put your hands up.
But if you get any ideas about criticizing the culture around you, looking at something and saying "that's wrong" or saying something negative about this new hip version of Christianity, you can just keep it to yourself, you closed-hearted, narrow-minded, intolerant pig - how dare you impose your beliefs on the rest of us.
Listen, I get it. I understand that Christians have a sour history among the nations. I was a history major (briefly), I know how ugly footprints have been left all over the past few centuries in the name of religion. But this trendy-but-tolerant version of Christianity can't be what was originally intended. Look at the most influential men in the Bible, who were most effective when they ignored the popular and (God forbid) politically-correct rules of the day. Something tells me that Christ Himself wasn't exactly worried about His social standing when He rampaged through the market being held in His Father's house. The pillars of our faith - Noah, Abraham, David, Paul, Peter - were not trend-followers. People thought Noah was nuts; Paul went upstream in a waterfall of Jewish legalism and hypocrisy; Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego literally stood for what they knew was right and almost died for it.
Where I live, we don't have people hunting us down to throw us to fight lions before audiences anymore, yet somehow we are just as afraid to bring up our beliefs because it's not trendy or comfortable.
Since when did "love your neighbor" become "don't openly disagree with anybody ever"? We've become so focused on making up for our overly-conservative, prejudiced ancestors that we can't speak up when we're offended anymore. And in an effort to further stifle our dissatisfaction and disgust, we glaze everything over so we don't get offended so easily by what goes on around us.
SIN IS SIN. Last I checked, my God doesn't whitewash that. He doesn't judge me directly for the sins that I commit (yes: I'm a child of God and I still sin), which means that I shouldn't judge others for what they do either - I haven't been given that type of authority and, frankly, wouldn't want it even if I did have it. But it doesn't change the fact that my Isa hates sin. If He didn't, He wouldn't have promised to destroy the mastermind and all his followeres with fire; He would have let them off with a slap on the wrist and a villa in Cuba. He wouldn't have provided His children with a way to present ourselves to Him without our sin being visible if He didn't really mind that we did bad things. Evil is rampant in our world, and just because it's not popular to do so doesn't mean that we shouldn't point it out and acknowledge that it's wrong. I'm not saying to foist our beliefs onto someone else, but to play the tolerance card until you're deadened to the reality of sin is even worse - that is a crime against your own beliefs.
And if you break your loyalty to your beliefs, with whom will you remain loyal?
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