Have you ever heard something that was intended as a critique, but you took it as a compliment? This is the way I felt after reading Lewis’s dismissal of Christians who talk about Jesus “all the bloody time” and are not “NORMAL” like the Christians he knows in Europe.

A few weeks ago, someone in my timeline posted a link to a Business Insider article from last summer. In it, Benny Lewis wrote about the time he spent traveling throughout the United States. He listed 17 things that surprised him about day to day life in the United States.

He described the piece as a “rant” and pointed out some legitimate concerns about trends in the United States that we often miss. Our cities are not walkable, the portions in our restaurants are too generous, we are a generally unhappy people who force out fake smiles, and we wrongly stereotype other countries. I completely agree.

As a follower of Jesus and a pastor, I paid the most attention to his 11^th thought about life in America. I’ll allow him to speak for himself.

“Look — I grew up in a religious town in Ireland, went to an all-boys Catholic school, and some of my friends in Europe are religious. Even if I’m not religious, it’s up to everyone to decide what to believe. I find religious people in Europe to be NORMAL — it’s a spiritual thing, or something they tend to keep to themselves and are very modern people with a great balance of religion and modernism.

But I can’t stand certain Christian affiliations of religious Americans. It’s Jesus this and Jesus that all the bloody time. You really can’t have a normal conversation with them. It’s in-your-face religion.”

Have you ever heard something that was intended as a critique, but you took it as a compliment? This is the way I felt after reading Lewis’s dismissal of Christians who talk about Jesus “all the bloody time” and are not “NORMAL” like the Christians he knows in Europe.

(As an aside, I have the privilege of knowing some European Christians who would also fall under Mr. Lewis’s critique. They love Jesus and speak about him often. This is also true of Christians I know in South America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. God bless them and may their tribe increase. The desire to talk about Jesus is not a uniquely American phenomenon, but one that characterizes every follower of Jesus.)

I don’t know where Mr. Lewis’s travels brought him in the great state of Alabama, but if we would have gotten a chance to speak, here’s what I think I would have said about this particular observation–Christians keep talking about Jesus because we can’t stop talking about him. When you consider who he is, what he has done, and how he has changed us, how could we ever stop talking about him?

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