Why are television evangelists or the corner fire-and-brimstone preachers we find on college campuses and in other places reprehensible to many people who, themselves, attend Church on Sunday and consider themselves pious?  Whenever this issue comes up in class, my students tell me that these preachers "give Christianity a bad name," and "do not reflect true Christianity."  What are we to make of this?  After all, the message that is promoted in established churches and that is promoted in fringe denominations is basically the same; what varies is the degree of a preacher's rhetorical sensitivity (or lack thereof).  Television evangelists, with their extravagance, and the fire and brimstone preachers that stand on our college campuses and harangue listeners are simply, in many cases, not persuasive.  Such religious leaders alienate potential converts with their anger or superficiality, rather than encourage people to join their community.  In other words, we worship in places where we feel most comfortable, indifferent to the fundamental alienation of the ideology of religion.  Our places of worship tend to reflect our cultural and socio-economic backgrounds.

As an example of the above, it should be recalled that both the slaves and the slave masters of the pre-Civil War United States worshipped Jesus Christ.  In addition, freed, economically deprived and racially segregated African-Americans still largely continue to worship Jesus.  How can this be?   Why would the slaves and their masters worship the same God?  Why would Black people today, who make up the most impoverished, imprisoned, and alienated of our nation, continue to identify with the American God of wealth and privilege? 

There are many ways to answer the above question, but one explanation seems particularly plausible – both groups of people worship fundamentally different Christs.  One of the great successes of Christian doctrine has been its malleability.  Its messages are general enough, its psychology sophisticated enough, that differing groups of people can identify with it and adapt it to meet their own needs.  The same book (the Bible) justifies both slavery and emancipation, misogyny and equality.  How a person interprets religious doctrine is a matter of perspective and of community.  The different sects that exist reflect the different dimensions of perspective and the needs of different communities.  Slave owners needed to justify their slavery to their society, while slaves, within the context of a slave owning society, needed to evoke an image of their aspirations for freedom.  Throughout much of Latin America during the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, Liberation Theologians evoked Jesus in the name of the struggling peasant class while the rulers of the various Latin American countries slaughtered peasants in the name of "protecting" Christianity.

As further evidence for the claim that Christianity adapts to the communities in which it is practiced, we can point to the fact that Jesus' image varies depending on the culture in which he is worshipped.  While he appears to most of us in Europe and in the United States as a white man with blonde hair and blue eyes, that image is considerably different in other cultures.  For example, in Chinese churches, Jesus appears Asiatic.  In Africa, he appears with African characteristics. (See Anton Wessels, Images of Jesus: How Jesus is Perceived and Portrayed in Non-European Cultures, Grand Rapids, MI: Wm B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1990.)

As the above begins to illustrate, there is a great deal of diversity and variance in a religion that claims the terrain of timeless historical truth.  In the midst of all this variance, we like to believe that somehow, our church, our religion, and our interpretation are more real than those of the people down the street.  It is typical of human beings to moralize from their community experiences.  Our community involvements ground our knowledge commitments.  Recognizing this point helps us to realize that all of our institutional practices, that is, our official connections with knowledge, are idiosyncratic and are thus open to the charge of political and moral inconsistency.

Omar Swartz is Assistant Professor, Department of Communication, University of Colorado at Denver, A.B., 1989, Humboldt State University (cum laude); M.A., 1992, University of California, Davis; Ph.D., 1995, Purdue University; J.D., 2001 (magna cum laude), Duke University.