Love Trumps Hate, Jesus Music Concert Edition

Just so you have your scorecards right, make sure you know that I and others like me - almost everyone who attends Christian concerts - are on the side of hate.

At least that's what we're told by the popular culture.

Last night, my wife and I went to the Chris Tomlin Worship Night in America concert. I'm not a big Chris Tomlin fan, but she's seen some hard rock Christian concerts with me, so I went along happily. Plus I like being with her, so there's that. The bands were excellent and we had a good, hate-filled time. Two anecdotes to show how hateful we were.

Trigger warning: If you experience PTSD episodes from being exposed to pure hate, you might want to stop reading here and go somewhere more loving. Like this.

If you've never been to a Christian pop/rock concert, you need to understand they all work like this: There's music from one or more bands and then before the headliners come out, there's a testimonial and request for donations to some charity. When I say "request," I mean something on the order of a 15-minute infomercial. Last night it was for Compassion International. Talk about a name for a hate group! Can you get any more hateful than "Compassion International?"

The testimonial followed the normal lines. The speaker had traveled to one of the places where the kids were sponsored, in this case, Ethiopia, and seen first hand how sponsoring some charming moppets had transformed their lives from utter degradation to hope and a bright future. The speaker talked about having been in our shoes, full of skepticism that the whole thing was a racket to get our money. He assured us it was not and had tearful stories to prove it.

Volunteers then handed out sponsorship agreement forms to everyone raising their hands. It was about 1,000 people out of the 5,000 or so at the concert. Pure hate in it's more pure and hatey form.

Second, during Chris' concert, he stopped and asked if there were any teenage youth group leaders who could play guitar in the audience. A 15-year-old young lady was found and brought on stage. She was given a guitar and when she heard what song she was going to play with Chris and the band, she happily said she knew it. Everyone cheered. More hate.

They played the song and this shyly smiling girl got to be on stage with a fairly big-name Christian band and strum and sing with them. She started out pretty timid, but got into it as the song went along and by the end, she was more relaxed and having a good time. It was so beautiful that my eyes welled up with tears of hate.

At the end of the song, Chris thanked her and then gave her the guitar. She almost started crying with joy. And hate, too, of course. The crowd went wild. If Leni Riefenstahl had been there, she'd have been filming for insertion into Triumph of the Will: the Director's Cut.

I can't find a clip on YouTube of the event, but here's my poor-quality photo from where we were sitting in the Das Reich seats*.

The girl in the jeans right in the middle was the lucky fraulein.

If by now you're not frothing with rage at the pure hate of this event, you might want to take notes and write to your local university so that they can organize a protest against, err, something or other to stop this kind of thing from ever happening again.

After all, we must make sure that love trumps hate.

* - I wanted to sit in the Totenkampf seats, but, as you know, those are crazy expensive.