Posts Tagged ‘The Bible’

I’ve been listening to Fiction Family’s new album, which features a track titled God Badge. The song is amazing and has been spinning around my head for the last few weeks. Some of the lyrics go like this:

Put your God badge down
And love someone
Unlock your heart
And love someone

There is no us or them
There’s only folks you do or don’t understand
You’re not your own idea and neither was this town

The lyrics are asking us to put our God Badge down, but what’s a God Badge and how do we put it down? A God Badge, simply put, is a justification—generally found in morality or religion or the bible—for our actions towards God or one another. The song tells us that we avoid loving one another and hold up a God Badge for justification; in vain of course. Then the song tells us to change our ways. Similar to the third commandment from Exodus 20:7, which reads:

You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain.

I’ve also recently been reading M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled. Pondering the lyrics, a chapter from the book titled The Risk Of Confrontation popped in my head. It’s no coincidence that the two were in my head at the same time.

Let me explain by starting off with a synopsis of the chapter. The chapter is in a larger section titled Love. The main point of this section is to explain ways to love each other well. This particular chapter points out one must risk confrontation with another in order to help them spiritually and personally grow. Our actions are sometimes wrong and sometimes others know better than we do (or vice versa). Therefore out of love we have a responsibility to risk confrontation and correct. M. Scott Peck, on page 153, goes as far as to say this:

To fail to confront when confrontation is required for the nurture of spiritual growth represents a failure to love equally as does thoughtless criticism or condemnation and other forms of active deprivation of caring.

The chapter explains this idea very well and I would suggest reading it in detail if you’d like to grasp the idea further.

So how does this relate to the God Badge thing? That question has been eluding me for quite a few years now. Probably by choice at some level that I’ve just carelessly overlooked. Here God Badge is simply using the bible (or religion or morality) in an attempt to avoid confrontation with someone and thus forsaking love. A verse that has been often be taken out of context and used to justify this is Mathew 5:38:

If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also.

I should mention that I’m generally a non-confrontational person and this subtlety may be lost on people with a more in-your-face personality. In that case the God Badge looks more like the using the bible (or religion or morality) to justify judging and condemning others.

Loving each other well is hard to do and important to see from all angles. I’d go as far to say that in modern American culture loving someone would never look like conflict or confrontation. So the God Badge can be as loud as judging and condemning your brother or as subtle as not confronting them in love.