These days, it is getting increasingly harder to be a Christian, particularly because we live in a society that has heavily stereotyped Christians and their faith. Because of this, it’s hard for people who don’t believe as we do to understand who we are and what we stand for. Hopefully this letter will enlighten some people.

Christianity has come under attack from many angles. Promotion of different values in the media, the difficulties of the church’s past, even the literature that many of us read in English class portray Christians in a negative light. It is very easy to accept the facts that are handed to us, without trying to understand what’s really going on and what the context is. Many people think of Christians as intolerant, right wing fundamentalists. Others think that being a Christian is synonymous with being perfect, and, realizing that they aren’t perfect and never will be, count themselves out of Christianity and will have nothing to do with it. Still others also think Christianity is about perfection but see Christians with problems in their lives and label them hypocrites. These are all very common misconceptions, and all untrue.

Christians are not perfect just because they happen to believe in God. They are all human, and part of being human is not being perfect. Even though they are not perfect, they do try their hardest to be Christ-like, which is very different. By modeling their lives using Jesus, the Son of God, as their example, Christians can become better people. But this does not make them perfect and can take many years to accomplish. However, a lot of people put Christians on a pedestal where they do not belong and then act shocked when they make human mistakes.

Many people have heard the Christian doctrine of loving people no matter what they do, even if that person is a homosexual or a murderer, and label it as hypocrisy. This is an unfair judgment. There is a big difference between loving a person, and condoning his or her actions. No, Christians don’t like what a lot of people do, but that is the action. It is the people, actions aside, that they try to love. It doesn’t make sense to not love a person just because you don’t like something he or she did. If we all acted like that, we’d all hate each other.

On the subject of actions, a lot of people see Christians as intolerant because they see certain actions, such as premarital sex, as sins, while others don’t. They believe premarital sex is wrong because God specifically says in the Bible on several occasions that premarital sex is a sin. This is a truth that Christians stand on. To stand on any absolute truth at this time engenders what is labeled “intolerance.” But when people criticize Christians for their “intolerance,” aren’t they also being intolerant? If they view our beliefs as wrong, is that any more intolerant than a Christian believing that homosexuality is wrong? However, having said that Christians believe premarital sex is wrong, they understand that not everyone believes everything that they believe, and therefore can’t expect those people to live according to their moral principles. They don’t like it, but the fact that it happens can’t be helped. And it certainly doesn’t stop Christians from loving the people that think premarital sex and other similar issues are perfectly okay.

An argument that has come up recently is that Christians are intolerant because they are against gay marriage, and here we have to disagree. Marriage is the legal union of a man and woman for life as husband and wife. Note the man and woman part of it. This is the way marriage has been since the beginning of time. So, then, we would have to argue that intolerance is thinking that one can change the way marriage is defined just because it does not happen to agree with their sexual preference.

So there you have it, a viewpoint from a couple of Christian teens. Both of us feel that it is important for other people to know where we’re really coming from instead of getting the brush-off because of a label. All this is meant to show that Christians are, in reality, very different from the way they are portrayed by many modern stereotypes. Christians are people, just like all the others on this planet—they have problems and they aren’t perfect. However, there is some truth in the statement that Christians are different. They believe in absolute truths, standards of personal conduct, but most importantly, the knowledge that their “difference” is a gift, one that can belong to any person that accepts it.

~Juniors Marina Cary and Christina Koch