Who’s shoving what where? ☀
“Stop shoving your religion down my throat!”
The person saying this means that he feels coerced and violated by over-aggressive evangelistic tactics. As such, it’s a useful reminder that browbeating anyone is rarely winsome because the message gets obliterated by the messenger.
Nevertheless, this phrase with genuine applications is surely overused in reaction to almost any expression of Christian insight or motivation in the public square to the point that one might often reasonably respond, “How would a legitimate effort to proselytize you differ from what you call shoving it down your throat?” But this distinction isn’t my real concern.
What suddenly catches my attention is that this phrase is only ever used about religious persuasion. One never hears it used to describe Hollywood’s sexual agenda or every DVD’s anti-smoking propaganda, for example. But if “shoving a message down someone’s throat” is bad, these must certainly qualify. Also, what about the things our broadcast and print media try to force feed us by what they cover ad nauseum? To wit, am I the only one who wishes they’d stop trying to shove Charlie Sheen down my throat?
Brother Andrew, you are straining the metaphor here and more essentially, muddling “push” with “pull”.
There is an enormous difference between pushy coworkers and parents (or siblings or children) prattling moralism and religion to us versus messages delivered by broadcast and print media and Hollywood. One is explicit, and the other is implicit, even if I grant you the absurd point about a “Hollywood sexual agenda” (really, are you insinuating that a cabal of movie maker executives has actually plotted out a plan to promulgate a specified “sexual agenda”?). I do not dispute that there may be a effort to communicate a given message — but it is laced into the narrative, instead of beamed at by overt browbeating.
Secondly, these media encounters, unlike the scourge of unwelcome coworker and family proselytizing, are entirely avoidable encounters. Turn off the television or watch programs more in resonance with your philosophical persuasion. Grab your news from an alternative source within the glut of online (and even cable television, to some degree) media enterprises. But with individuals in our inner circle at home and work, it is a different matter — sure, I suppose we could opt to secure a new job because of an overbearing cubicle mate or disengage communication with a preachy parent. But that would be a reckless overreaction, rather than simply grinning and bearing, and casting aside the annoying practice for the greater good.
More critically, as James Davison Hunter has written of, Christians, with all this preaching and sermonizing, have failed to sway the culture with mere words:
How is it that American public life is so profoundly secular when 85 percent of the population professes to be Christian? If a culture were simply the sum total of beliefs, values, and ideas that ordinary individuals hold, then the United States would be a far more religious society. Looking at our entertainment, politics, economics, media, and education, we are forced to conclude that the cultural influence of Christians is negligible. By contrast, Jews, who compose 3 percent of the population, exert significant cultural influence disproportionate to their numbers, notably in literature, art, science, medicine, and technology. Gays offer another example. Minorities would have no effect if culture were solely about ideas, but that’s clearly not the case.
Though I will concede one point of agreement about Hollywood “shoving down the throat” — the incessant anti-copyright notifications at the beginning of DVDs.
