Understanding
The Menno Melange quoted this excerpt from Bert Newton’s article in The Mennonite:
Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, one of the most popular shows on television, parodies daily news shows, has its own anchor, Jon Stewart, its reporters out in the field and its commentators. Each week it also has a religion segment called “This Week in God.”
Once Steven Colbert, the host of the segment, showed actual news footage of a televangelist expressing his support for the president’s war on terrorism. The televangelist said, “We’ve got to kill the terrorists before the killing stops. I support the president. We need to chase them all over the world, for 10 years, if it takes that long. We need to blow them up in the name of the Lord.” At that point, the camera switched back to Colbert, who said, “And in a related story, Jesus has quit.”
As an evangelical Christian, what I found interesting about that segment was the response of the secular studio audience. They laughed and clapped robustly. I thought, We evangelical, Anabaptist Christians struggle with much of the rest of the church over whether Jesus is about peace–we spend time working out a theology of peace–and for this secular studio audience there is no struggle at all. They don’t have to work out anything. They just assume Jesus is about peace. They assume Jesus would not agree with the televangelist, would not support the president’s war on terrorism or talk about blowing people up in the name of the Lord. They get it.
