I’m going to be honest when I say that I love Christ, but there are times when I hate Christians. I suppose that a certain group of people following biblical doctrines will produce very similar response, and I have to admit that I am a Christian because I like the good responses. Unfortunately, there is an opposite side of the coin.

The issue that I have is that Christians love to put their own on a pedestal, and this always fails, sometimes spectacularly. The case of Josh Duggar, which I mentioned yesterday, is one example. The man became a public figure with 19 Kids and Counting, and for some reason, whenever Christian people get in the spotlight, they just have to promote themselves as role models.

In all honesty, I guess this makes sense, but at what point does a Christian role model become a celebrity? Oftentimes Christians love their Christian celebrities more than the rest of the world adores movie stars. This is especially true for any Christian who is involved with Christian entertainment, but moreso for those who are known outside Christian circles.

Some of you are old enough to remember singer/songwriter Carman, who is pretty talented, but he often over-promoted his own merchandise at his concerts. Now, Carman would hold free concerts and more than likely used the funds to support his ministry, and I am assuming that he didn’t do this to line his own pockets. Still, his merchandising video that he played before his concerts was more than a little tacky, honestly.

This has kind of led me to instinctively not like anything that has a Christian label. I know that a lot of people like the Duck Dynasty show for their Christian values, but I have to admit, that hasn’t made me want to watch it. If anything, it has actually caused me to not want it. In fact, I’m now just waiting around for the Robertson family to do something like the Duggar family.

I realize this is going to come off as negative toward Christianity, and I’m going to have to declare that perhaps there is more than black-and-white here. Yeah, I’m not going to talk about gray areas and how permissible certain things can be.

I just finished a work by Navy Seal Chris Kyle called American Sniper. Some of you have probably seen the movie that Clint Eastwood made of this. I found that Mr. Kyle was very candid about his admission of killing insurgents, swearing, drunkenness, and pornography. He still claims to be a Christian, and I’m not really going to doubt that. I will say that I’m not going to fully accept his opinion that he was fighting “evil”, just because the author has demonstrated Christian values. The book does give me chance to step back and see “the most lethal sniper in U.S. Military History” was just a man doing his job, and paid a price for it.

There is one thing that he is, or sadly was (Chris Kyle passed away very recently), and that he is human. Humans are capable of several vices, and we should not be surprised that they can. In fact, we should even be surprised that they are capable of great heinous acts like genocide. Christians shouldn’t indulge in vices, but if we believe that there are some Christians who are not even capable of such acts, then we set ourselves up for failure.