Of Christians and Cosplayers

By Michael O. Varhola

Every Memorial Day Weekend I attend a big fan convention at the George R. Brown Convention Center and Hilton Americas hotel in Houston called Comicpalooza that is noted for its many costumed attendees (like those shown in the picture at right taken during the event by my friend Chris Van Deelen). And, each year, I hear stories from attendees about unpleasant interactions they have had with members of the annual Texas Conference of the United Methodist Church, an event that for some years has been held at the same time and place.

Perhaps because I make an effort to not pay attention to other people, largely out of respect for their privacy and as part of an effort to preserve my own, I have never really picked up on more than a few disapproving glances from the Methodists — until this year.

On the last day of Comicpalooza, I needed to start getting my out-of-town people transported to the airport and went down to the lobby of the hotel to figure out which entrance they would be departing from. I saw an older woman with a clipboard standing near the revolving door and, thinking she might be with my convention's transportation team, walked up to her.

"Excuse me," I said. "Are you with Comicpalooza?"

Suffice it to say, I was struck when she snarled back at me:

"Do I look like I'm with Comicpalooza?" It was only then that I saw the bus she was guiding passengers toward was one carrying members of the Methodist conference.

"We're all just people," I replied in as even a tone as I could before walking away, "so there is no way for me to tell without asking."

Based on this experience, it certainly would have been easy for me to launch into a rant about the hypocrisy of Christians in general or Methodists in particular. It bears mentioning that an exceptionally unpleasant person I have known my entire life and who has had a significant negative impact on it, is by all accounts a devout Methodist, so I have no affinity for this particular sect.

As easy as it might be to do that, however, for a number of reasons I do not think it would be right.

To start with, while I was momentarily stung by her harsh words, I was not me that was harmed by this unpleasant woman, whatever her intent might have been. What she did harm, however, and, indeed, even invalidate her relationship with, was her own church. I have known so many people over the years who have been driven away from organized religion by people just like this who cruelly abused their positions as parents, relatives, or other authority figures. It is impossible to calculate the damage they inflict on the organizations they so shoddily serve by their inclinations to mistreat others. I am secure in my faith and cannot have it easily shaken, but I have to wonder how many young people over the years might have ultimately rejected Christianity because of the example this woman set.

"They claim to know God, but by their actions they deny him," Titus 1:16 says. "They are detestable, disobedient, and unfit for doing anything good."

In all fairness I also have to mention that I had numerous minor positive interactions with individual Methodists over the course of the weekend. These ranged from pleasantries exchanged in elevators to having a fun conversation with an attendee who happened to be using the hotel hot tub at the same time some of my friends and I were. Not taking those into consideration would hardly be fair to the people who were naturally kind, or even those who were merely neutral in their demeanor and intent on minding their own business. 

All this serves to remind me of the fundamental fact that people are people and that one can find good and bad pretty uniformly no matter where they look. While perhaps counter-intuitive, it is indeed true that labels people assign themselves and organizations they belong to play so much less of a role in who they are and how they act, for better or worse, than many might imagine. And so the important thing here is not to see the tiny things that make us all a little different, as this wretched woman did, but the big ones that make us all the same in so many ways. Tolerance, compassion, and forbearance are what is called for.

So God bless the Texas Methodists. I sincerely hope they had a good and productive conference. There is plenty of room for all of us, in this world overall and at the places we share for our respective events, and I look forward to seeing them all again next year.

Well. Most of them anyway.