Same Book, Different Cover

Disclaimer: My emotions are a bit riled up right now, so please forgive me if I seem upset at all.

I don’t know what it is about Christians: We seem to have a strong desire to repackage whatever the world is doing under a “for Christians!” tagline, call it family friendly, maybe even try to enforce it as such. This is how we got Christmas, Easter, Halloween, and every other holiday that isn’t one of the Jewish festivals (and excluding the non-holidays, such as Presidents Day, [Family Member] Day, [Job] Day, etc.). Worship has become almost indistinguishable from concerts, and some churches would be indistinguishable from a self-help/confidence seminar.

Today I find out that MySpace–the cyber slums where people (mainly teens and twenty-somethings) can enjoy softcore porn, homosexuality, all manners of flirting, and so much more–has a “Christian” equivalent, labeled “Xians.com.”

I’ve spent some time browsing around that site, looking at profiles, and so forth. If these people typify the makeup of Christendom (at least in America), then I’ll have to be depressed. I couldn’t find any reference to Jesus Christ on a site that is (almost) bearing His name, and the Gospel is nowhere to be found. Just like the few and far between references to Jesus and the Gospel during Christmas, Easter, etc. (except within the churches, which try their best to legitimize the pagan festivals for reasons I cannot begin to fathom), the “Christian” MySpace succeeds at simply family-friendlying up social networking.

Perhaps someday people will realize that being family friendly means very little. If being family friendly is the mark of Christiandom, how would Christ Himself have faired? “Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. for I came to set a man against hisf ather, and a daughter against her mother, adn a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s enemies will be the members of his household. He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; and he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me” (Matthew 34-37, NASB).

One of the most important things that the Bible teaches us is to let our speech be after godliness. And Xian.com, as I browsed it, did not compel me to read, nor did it uplift and praise Jesus Christ. Comments from users were of the “about me” form (gotta have the vanity) or the shoutout form (gotta have the hookup). And occasionally a Christian cliché is thrown in for good measure, often in the form of a very kitsch peace of clip-art.

Instead of leaving comments for other users, Xian.com lets you leave them “testimonials.” Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. If you want to testify of the saving grace of God, awesome! If you want to share your testimony of how the Lamb of God died for your sins, good on ya! But don’t cheapen the word by applying it to shallow conversations of no eternal importance. I’m sure Satan’s loving that, considering one day he will be overcome by the testimony of the saints. “But I can cheapen it now!”

Oh, and the site design is even worse than MySpace, which must have been intentional ’cause MySpace was already pretty bad. I’d hate to think a site could be worse on accidental. Perhaps in copying MySpace they chose an even worse design to poke fun at them. I’ll give them that benefit of the doubt.

Lastly, if I want to play Flash-based hockey games, I will go to a game site. And if you want me to spend any amount of time reading your Xian (or MySpace or whatever page), dump the multimedia junk. It adds nothing, though I would imagine it could help keep those with a problem paying attention to text on your page a bit longer if there is something flashing and giving off audible clues that they should be interacting with you page.

But for the love of sanity, if you must have a website, at least put some effort into one with real content. You can get great, free ones from wordpress.com without the mind-numbing social networking nonsense.

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