The Problem of Optimism

Has anyone else ever noticed how much the Church in America has to say about self-image? Maybe it's just me, but whenever I look out at how Christians are talking about the love of God I keep noticing the same phrases repeated again and again about how God values us and how beautiful we are to Him and how no sin is beyond His forgiveness. It's all perfectly true, but I feel like it's responding to another culture's issues. It's as if Christians were convinced anyone who hasn't accepted Messiah is being held back because they don't think they deserve God's love.

Before I go any further, I need to clear up two things. The first is that I am a big fan of what might be called "easygoing pessimism"(the idea might be summed up with the statement "life sucks and we're fallen, but God is good and the only way out is through") and also extremely distrustful of anything that strikes me as "cheesy." In other words, I'm quite biased on this subject, but emotional objectivity is not the same as rational objectivity and I will try to be as rationally objective as possible. The second preliminary issue is that I realize our culture really is plagued with low self-esteem. We are bombarded every day by advertisements that tell us how we are supposed to look and how we should act and what we need to achieve, and it gets to us. We have all fallen short of the glory of God and we all know it.

The problem is that while we all feel our fallenness deep down, we still feed on the cheap slogans and secular spirituality of lukewarm optimism which exists as a reaction to that epidemic of self-loathing. I may be wrong, but based on my own experience as a former agnostic and my time among non-Christians I would say that the average American's resistance to the Bible comes from the optimist side of our cultural coin rather than the pessimist side. People don't reject the Crucifixion because they think God wouldn't do that for us, they reject it because they think God wouldn't have to do it. They think that there shouldn't have been a cost to our forgiveness and that we're all good enough (except for a few notable dictators and murders) for our goodness to outweigh our sins when the sheep and the goats get split up. Our culture is filled with happy thoughts that never quite satisfy our inner sadness but are nonetheless the first cliches to rear up when the Bible is mentioned. We who live in constant fear of our neighbor's judgment have lost all understanding of what it means to fear the judgement of God and are posed instead to look down and judge the Creator of every single thing that has ever existed.