Conservatives are hitting back at a a viral BuzzFeed video titled "I'm a Christian but I'm not..." which features gay, feminist and liberal Christian millennials explaining why they don't fit the stereotypical view of Christians.
The video, which has been viewed more than 10 million times since it was posted on Sunday, features five women and one man stating that they aren't homophobic, closeminded, uneducated, judgmental, or place themselves on pedestals - like "most" Christians.
"Just because we prescribe to a faith that has some really terrible people in it doesn't make all of us terrible," says one woman, who identifies herself as gay.
"A lot of people think Christianity ruins people, but to me, I think it's people that are ruining Christianity," says another individual, who identifies herself as a feminist. "You never really see the good that happens, you only see the hypocrites and the people who put themselves on a higher pedestal," she adds.
Writing for the National Review, columnist David French lamented that Buzzfeed seems determined to make their staff and target audience look "impossibly narrow-minded, ignorant, and bigoted."
"[I]t is truly strange to see a group of young Christians condescendingly set themselves apart from a caricature of their brothers and sisters without even mentioning Jesus or the Bible. But they do mention their sexual identity, their politics, their tolerance, and their odd and unbiblical beliefs," he writes.
"Moreover, the general Christian public - the public they seem so ashamed of in all their hip queerness - gives more of their time, money, and heart to the poor than any other American demographic. They're condemning - and setting themselves apart from - millions of America's kindest and most generous citizens. But those same people probably have icky views about abortion or sexual morality, so . . . yuck.
Writing for conservative website The Federalist, Mollie Ziegler Hemingway, a senior editor, also expressed her distaste for the video.
"When you build your faith around what type of Christian you're not, your faith is not built around Christ," she writes. "Let us all beware of smug complacency and measuring ourselves against others. The Christian measures himself against God's standards, then repents. As my study Bible says of this verse, 'God is ready to justify the worst of sinners by His generous grace in Christ.' Let's join the tax collector and cry out, 'God be merciful to me, a sinner!' And forgive BuzzFeed while you're at it - particularly when it comes to religious content, they could use your prayers."
Viral blogger Matt Walsh also weighed in on the video, arguing that if one claims to be a believer but rejects Christ's teachings, they aren't truly Christians.
"Many Christians today - not only the ones in the video, but millions alongside them - seem to think we can rightly claim to have "faith" in Jesus or a "relationship" with Him while still categorically denying much of His Word," he writes.
Walsh calls such a proposition "ridiculous," as we "can't declare, in one breath, that Christ is Lord, and in the next suggest that maybe God got it wrong on this or that point."
"Well, we can make that declaration, but we expose our belief as fraudulent and self-serving. We worship a God we either invented in our heads, which is a false idol, or a God who is fallible, which is a false idol," he writes. "As Christians, our goal is not to avoid being like the big bad "other Christians," but to strive to be like Christ Himself...We can be Christians or not at all. Now let's all make up our minds between the two."
