Apparently everyone in the universe has started to think just like me.  Therefore, I can’t get anything I want on Netflix because everything on my queue has a very long wait.  Because of this I was in the local movie rental store today.  They have TVs playing with movie trailers.  I saw the most offensive thing ever.

The movie is called No Greater Love (the link is to YouTube and the trailer I saw).  Here’s the premise:

  1. These people get married and have a kid.
  2. The wife has alcohol problems and disappears.
  3. Ten years later the husband and son have moved on and the husband is about to get engaged.
  4. They run into the wife by accident at a local church.
  5. The husband wants her back but her church says they can’t get back together because he’s not a Christian.

At this point I was waiting for someone in the trailer to jump up and point out that this crazy woman ran out on her family for 10 years so she isn’t worth the hassle. She didn’t ever bother to come looking for them.  I was also waiting for someone to point out that saying that the guy who was the mature and responsible adult was now unworthy was bloody stupid.  But this didn’t happen because it turns out that this is a Christian movie so the rest of it is spent trying to get the mature and responsible man to see the error of his ways.

Christian propaganda like this just makes me want to scream.  How can a woman who did all these horrible things now be the paragon of virtue just because she took up with a religion?  How can they say that the people who cleaned up after all her crap are now unworthy of her?

When I was a Christian I also had a real problem with the parable of the laborers who were all paid the same wage no matter how long they worked.  I think that is the influence of my union-loving father but it seems like the same idea is in play here.  It doesn’t matter what you did or who you are or even what you act like now as long as you are supposedly born again then you are better than everyone who isn’t.  I know, I know, that isn’t the way it is supposed to be read but that has always been my experience in dealing with evangelical Christians.  Getting rid of this attitude is why I think that I’m a nicer person now that I’m out of the church than I ever was when I was in it.

In all the sites I pulled up looking for a synopsis of the story of this movie to make sure that I had understood properly no reviewer ever questioned the premise.  They all just went along with the fact that the man was unworthy since he wasn’t Christian.  It was a given that doesn’t need to be discussed, I guess.  So I added my thoughts to a few sites just to put an alternative point of view out there in case it might make a few people think.

Heading off to bang my head against the wall for a while now in hopes of removing the memory of this movie from my mind…