Article

Networking with Jesus

Tweet Share

Occasionally one finds an atheist who knows blasphemy when she sees it.

Barbara Ehrenreich, pseudo-Marxist social critic, writes in her latest book, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream about attending “undercover” a Christian ministry for job-seekers in Georgia. She writes of the charismatic speaker encouraging the unemployed seekers to learn how to network. “And who should be our first networking target?” the motivational speaker queries. “The Lord.”

Now we’ve all seen this kind of trivialization of the apostolic faith. But what struck me was the way in which this atheist feminist materialist took special offense at blasphemy against a God she doesn’t even believe exists. Writes Ehrenreich:

I’m sorry, this is too much for me. I endured the Norcross Fellowship Lunch as an atheist, but now, at the Mt. Paran Church of God, I discover that I am a believer, and what I believe is this: if the Lord exists, if there is some conscious being whose thought the universe is, some great spinner of galaxies, hurler of meteors, creator and extinguisher of species, if some such being should manifest itself, you do not ‘network’ with it any more than you would light a cigarette on the burning bush.

I hope Ms. Ehrenreich will not be offended if I say “Amen.”

Only when we see how lost we are, we can find our way again. Only when we bury what’s dead can we experience life again. Only when we lose our religion can we be amazed by grace again.

Purchase

About Russell Moore

Russell Moore is Editor in Chief of Christianity Today and is the author of the forthcoming book Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America (Penguin Random House).

More