Be careful of receiving and spreading hearsay

The Bible doesn’t say don’t believe everything you hear or read.

It does, though, quote Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew as saying,

“Be wise as serpents and harmless as doves.”

Jesus was speaking to his 12 disciples, but from the context, I

have a hard time reasoning that he meant his advice to stop there.

R. T. France, in the Tyndale New Testament Commentaries series,

wrote that “the principle is relevant to Christians in all ages who

must live and witness in a hostile world.”

Christians, France wrote, “are not to be gullible simpletons ...

neither are they to be rogues.”

The Orthodox Study Bible’s commentary on the text says Christians

are to be “wise as serpents that they might not be unnecessarily

wounded, and harmless as doves that they should not retaliate against

those who do them wrong.”

When it comes to receiving and spreading hearsay, that principle

beats “Don’t believe everything you hear or read,” since it admits a

very real underlying potential for harm.

Every few months or so, I get a shower of e-mails connected by

common themes. Certain events apparently provoke them: the Sept. 11,

2001 terrorist attacks, or holidays like Ramadan or Christmas.

Lately, it’s been the London subway terrorist attacks, U.S. Supreme

Court rulings on the public display of the Ten Commandments and Cindy

Sheehan’s anti-war protest in Crawford, Texas.

Characteristically, the e-mails focus on Islam, Muslims or Arabs,

or on supposed travesties against the freedom of religion by the U.S.

government. The e-mails are shrill, often arriving in large, 16- to

20-point type, usually poorly written “forwards” of vague authorship

and origin.

They are likely to begin or end with imperatives such as this: “If

there is only one thing you forward today ... let it be this.”

In the past few weeks, I’ve had my fill of them again. I got the

widespread e-mail protesting the omission of “so help us God,” from

the words (excerpted from President Roosevelt’s famous Dec. 8, 1941

speech) inscribed on the World War II monument in Washington, D.C.

“What gave them the right to change the words of history?” it asks

and concludes, “If you agree, pass this on. If not, MAY GOD BLESS

YOU.”

But the words on the war monument -- “No matter how long it may

take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people,

in their righteous might, will win through to absolute victory” --

are not those that include Roosevelt’s admonishment of “so help us

God.” Two paragraphs separate the words set in the monument’s stone

from those containing that phrase.

A deliberate choice to avoid public use of the words “so help us

God?” Perhaps, but that’s not been confirmed. It’s certainly not a

twisting of Roosevelt’s words. Rather, it’s the e-mail of protest

that contorts the facts.

I also got the well-worn, so-called “Robin Williams peace plan,”

with such peaceable tenets as “All illegal aliens have 90 days to get

their affairs together and leave,” and “If there is a famine or other

natural catastrophe in the world, [the United States] will not

‘interfere.’ [The unfortunate victims] can pray to Allah or whomever,

for seeds, rain, cement ... “

Two of the e-mails I got were new to me. I was taken aback by how

much they upped the ante regarding the hatefulness that seems to give

life to these things.

One e-mail contained a photo of a large crowd of dark-skinned men

-- most bearded, their heads covered -- in what appears to be a

foreign country. It’s purported to be a photo of a protest in Syria.

Several of the men hold signs. “We are idiots!” broadcasts one. “Bomb

us next,” and “Please kick our asses,” read two others.

The accompanying explanation says Syrians don’t know English, so

they hired an “English-speaking civilian” to accomplish the task --

much to their, albeit oblivious, chagrin.

The sender introduced the e-mail with one short sentence: “I

enjoyed this very much and had to share it.”

The other e-mail was in the form of a joke, in which a Mexican, an

Iraqi and an American are drinking beer. At the end, the American

shoots his drinking partners, making a comment about illegal

immigration.

A little more than a year ago, I lost a longtime, dear friend as I

put to him another aspect of these electronic messages that

periodically glut my in-box. That aspect is this: So far without

exception, their senders, all people with whom I am in some way

acquainted -- readers, friends, even extended family members -- all

identify themselves as Christians, in particular as evangelical

Christians. I wondered why.

Why would a group of people who are taught, “Love your enemies,

bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray

for them that despitefully use you; that ye may be the children of

your Father which is in heaven,” and “In everything, do to others

what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the

Prophets,” perpetuate such malicious rhetoric?

My friend took offense. He took my question as a slur against

evangelical Christians as a whole.

“I’m sure,” he wrote to me later, “the unfairness of what you said

would be immediately evident to you if you just changed the words,

‘evangelical Christian,’ to ‘black’ or ‘women’ or even just

‘Christians.’”

But skin color and gender alone don’t necessarily bind a group to

a shared standard by which they aspire to live the way being a

Christian does. If those who send me these e-mails identified

themselves as Reformed Christians, or liberal Christians or Catholic

Christians or fundamentalist Christians ... or simply as Christians,

my question would remain the same.

Why do these professed Christians repeatedly choose in this manner

to be such gullible simpletons and rogues?

* MICHELE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She

can be reached at [email protected].

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