The piety game

There is a game some Christians like to play that I call "Who Loves Jesus More?" It's a form of one-upmanship, of letting people know that our church is a little holier, our Bible a little more accurate, our prayers a little longer, our lives a little purer.

I know the game because I played it myself when I first became a Christian, thinking that a Christian is defined by his intellect. I often still play it. Perhaps you've heard it played yourself, for example, by the young mother who loudly announces in a group of friends that she doesn't let her children watch Sesame Street, or the man who denounces all versions of the Bible that are not New American Standard or New King James. I once heard, while driving through the back woods of Virginia, a radio preacher loudly proclaiming, "I thank God I'm a King James man!" As if Jesus spoke with thees and thous, as if people using the New International Version are all in a racing-striped handbasket headed straight to perdition.

The problem with the enduring sin of pride is not only that it jeopardizes our souls, but also that we teach it to our children. Two episodes with my oldest son brought this to mind recently. In the first, he was at a seminar with my wife for homeschooling families who use a classical education model. While the adults were in their own training, the children took part in classes and games based on the curriculum they had been through the past year. In Caleb's group, the teacher asked the children to name members of the animal kingdom. Caleb rightly said, "Man."

You can guess what happened. One of the children denounced him as an evolutionist, and others joined in, happy to discover a secret member of this pernicious cult in their midst. They were merciless about it, even as he tried to remind them that they all had learned the five kingdoms, and since humans were not in the plantae, fungi, protista, or monera kingdoms, they were necessarily in animalia. Of course, this only made his antagonists more vehement. I wondered whether any kind of ignorance or spitefulness my children might encounter in public schools would be worse than this.

In the second instance, Caleb told a boy in his weekly Bible club the call letters of his favorite Christian radio station. Rather than reply that he likes a different station, or that he prefers orchestral arrangements, or better still, keeping quiet, the boy announced, "I thought you said you were a Christian!" Apparently, some Christians are too Christian for Christian radio. I can certainly sympathize with the notion that too many Christian songs are either bad art or bad theology or both, but it seems decidedly un-Christian to accuse someone of being a heathen because he hasn't reached one's level of Christian refinement.

Children learn this sort of wickedness, as they do most wickedness, from us. It's the worst form of pride, which is spiritual pride. Those of us most proud of our piety are probably the most in danger of Hell, and the most likely to be surprised when we end up there, doubly damned, first for our own pride, second for teaching it to our children.

As always, these children who mimic us are our mirrors. Caleb certainly has learned his share of judgmentalism and pride from his father. Especially at a time in our lives when questions of church and right worship are frequent in our home, I am reminded again and again to be on guard against cultivating in my sons the pride to which I am too often prey. After all, we all have logs in our eyes, perhaps their father more than most. Thus does every wrong we suffer become an opportunity to be reminded of our own frequent wrongness? That's a hard lesson to impart to my children, especially when I'm still working on learning it myself. But then, most important lessons are like that, aren't they?