Something occurred to me today. For centuries, especially in the English-speaking world, Catholics were often portrayed as superstitious, anti-intellectual, hostile to freedom, and blindly obedient to authority. Some of that came from real conflicts. Some of it came from centuries of Protestant polemics and what historians call the Black Legend. Either way, the image became deeply embedded in Western culture.
Then Hollywood arrived and inherited many of those assumptions. How many movies have we seen where the religious figure is narrow-minded, afraid of science, obsessed with rules, or trying to control people's lives?
What I find interesting is that I don't think those stereotypes stayed confined to Catholics. At some point, people stopped making distinctions. The stereotype became "Christians."
The priest became the pastor. The Catholic became the evangelical. The old caricature of one denomination slowly became a caricature of the entire faith. The Black Legend backfired And the irony is that Christians helped this happen. Protestants spent centuries attacking Catholics. Catholics attacked Protestants back. Every denomination seemed eager to explain why the others were the problem.
Meanwhile, the broader culture looked at all of us and concluded that Christianity itself was the problem. I find that depressing because most ordinary Christians I know are not the people from those stereotypes. They're teachers, engineers, nurses, scientists, parents, and neighbors trying to live out their faith as best they can.
We still have theological differences, and those differences... honestly don't matter too much. But I sometimes wonder whether we spent so much energy fighting one another that we forgot how we appeared to everyone else. To many people outside the Church, we're not Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox, or anything else. We're just Christians.
Maybe it's time we remembered that too.