Don't Get Even. Don't Sit Down and Shut Up Either

Watch South Park a couple of times and you’re sure to be offended by something. Those little characters go out of their way to skewer anything on their radar screens, and if you find their antics funny one week, just hang around a while and they’ll get around to your personal sacred cow eventually.

South Park is the result of the free-wheeling marketplace of ideas that we have grown to both love and hate. Generally speaking the network on which it appears let’s the producers run wherever their satire takes them, including jibes at the most powerful people on the planet. Religion is often in the crosshairs too.

Personally, I find it a hard show to recommend to someone, even though I find myself laughing at the ribald approach to the world as we know it. Sometimes the show makes me uncomfortable with their depictions of certain aspects of my own religion, but I figure that sometimes the hypocritical sides of my coin could use a barb now and then. The last time I checked Christians and other targets of satire are justified to utter a vocal protest and rebuttal or two, but even Al Gore has been known to elicit a chuckle over the hilarious concept of Man-Bear-Pig.

All of which gives me pause regarding the reaction of the program’s lighthearted tweaking of Islam and the network’s reaction to the reaction. The network looked a lot like an ancient warning about what would happen to a nation that loses its nerve. “You shall flee, and no one shall pursue you.” (Leviticus 26:17)

Loss of freedom of speech comes about not because of legislation but because we allow those with no authority to tell us to sit down and shut up. Sit down and shut up because the debate on climate change is over. Sit down and shut up because we have talked enough already about healthcare reform. Sit down and shut up because somebody might be offended. Shall we flee when no one pursues?

South Park is offensive to me, but the God I serve doesn’t need me to fight for him. Stand up for truth and justice in the public square? Absolutely! Threaten bodily harm? God is sovereign enough to take care of that himself. He’ll handle it in his own way and time. “Vengeance is mine, says the Lord”, and the last time I checked, I’m not the Lord. Better than that, my God often has better plans than vengeance because he can change people’s hearts and turn them into brothers as he did with Saul of Tarsus There are still people in this world who believe that’s a better outcome than vengeance could ever be.

It’s distressing when we voluntarily give up a bit of our freedoms. Do that enough, and you’ll look around yourself one day and wonder where your Constitution went. Never let anyone tell you to sit down and shut up.