Serious question: Why does everyone presume that we Christians are somber and unsmiling, unlaughing people?

Question

I smile, I laugh when I can. I laugh many times at myself. I have never met a Christian who was somber and depressing. Where does this stereotype come from?

Thank you boythunder for the offer but I do not believe my husband would appreciate that.

This picture represents me at prayer yes but I have no problem with parties sir.

And for the record I do not believe atheists or anyone else are somber and unhappy individuals.

Answer 1

the stereotype may come from the pictures many of you post here. have you really looked at yours? you look so sad and sombre. and look at the guy named spooky--you took the same pose of sombre as a wagner symphony.

Answer 2

There are a lot of people out there that call themselves Christians who aren't. They are Satans advocates. The bad thing it that they may not even know it. I have noticed that many with new Christians, they seem to think they are all knowing even if they are not well read on the bible. I have a nephew that is this way. He thinks he can do no wrong and doesn't know that some of the things he does is sinning. People see him doing this and think it's ok to be a Christian and do that. Or else they think if that is a Christian, I don't want to be one. I don't dare say anything or else be Satan myself. I understand. I have been done this way by my own family. We just have to have our OWN personal relationship with God and do the best we can for God. Myself, I would rather take the chance of them being mad at me for pointing out something they are doing against God so that they might correct it in time than to just let them keep on going the way they are without saying anything. I think God would want us to at least try. The Bible says that Christians will be condemned in the end days for trying to do Gods will. That time is upon us.

Answer 3

Thank you for asking DebraM!

It must come from the same place as the thought that we are ignorant because we believe in a higher power. Just today I have been called "spectacularly stupid", ignorant and an idiot all because I believe in God. I don't think ones religious beliefs or lack there of have anything to do with your intelligence or sense of humor. If we put religion aside I think we would be amazed at how much we all had in common. I think you would find many of us have similar IQs and laugh at the same jokes.

Answer 4

Good question! I don't know either, and I've never really put much thought to it.

One of my mother's neighbors is very devout, and an absolute joy to be around. Always laughing, cracking jokes, and traipsing off across the country by herself, leaving her husband at home. She's a trip to be around, and I'm so glad she doesn't act her 82 years.

Edit: For the record, this particular avatar of yours is my favorite. Very becoming, calming, and peaceful.

Answer 5

I agree that this mis-stereotype is wrong. I have fun. I once had it happen in the real world that a person asked how can I be a christian, I am fun to be with. I just told them that Christians are people to.

Answer 6

People who don't understand the Christian faith only see religion as rules and ceremony. Most people think rules are boring and limit the amount of fun you can have.

In reality, having a relationship with Christ is the greatest source of joy of all! We Christian still live life and have fun - just with more purpose and more hope :)

Answer 7

I don't know, because I LOVE to laugh. I have a good sense of humor and I can laugh at myself and other Christians. People picture us locked away in monasteries or something!

Answer 8

I wouldn't be quite so quick to condemn them if I were you."He is despised and rejected of men ; a man of sorrows,and acquainted with grief : and we hid as it were our faces from him ; he was despised and we esteemed him not.Surely he hath borne our griefs,and carried our sorrows : yet we did esteem him stricken,smitten of God ,and afflicted."Isaiah 53:3-4. I never met a Christian who laughed all the time, I know that there are some but at the same time we need to remember that "Jesus wept". too.

Answer 9

I agree wtih you, most people do think that of us,Christians. I think because of the past sterotype of what Christians did. The doom saying and all the damning they did in the past! I am a Christian who is Full of Joy because of the miracles God has done in me and my household! We Christians need to remember about the GRACE of God! To impart that to the world! Be blessed!

Answer 10

I want to offer a quotation from G. K. Chesterton's "Orthodoxy" as a potential answer to this question. It gracefully addresses the gravity of the Church and the resultant freedom of the world. That is, in an indirect way, it speaks to the seriousness with which we Christians must bring to our lives so that we may laugh and play in liberty, not bondage. Here it goes:

"Last and most important, it is exactly this which explains what is so inexplicable to all the modern critics of the history of Christianity. I mean the monstrous wars about small points of theology, the earthquakes of emotion about a gesture or a word. It was only a matter of an inch; but an inch is everything when you are balancing. The Church could not afford to swerve a hair's breadth on some things if she was to continue her great and daring experiment of the irregular equilibrium. Once let one idea become less powerful and some other idea would become too powerful. It was no flock of sheep the Christian shepherd was leading, but a herd of bulls and tigers, of terrible ideals and devouring doctrines, each one of them strong enough to turn to a false religion and lay waste the world. Remember that the Church went in specifically for dangerous ideas; she was a lion tamer. The idea of birth through a Holy Spirit, of the death of a divine being, of the forgiveness of sins, or the fulfilment of prophecies, are ideas which, any one can see, need but a touch to turn them into something blasphemous or ferocious. The smallest link was let drop by the artificers of the Mediterranean, and the lion of ancestral pessimism burst his chain in the forgotten forests of the north. Of these theological equalisations I have to speak afterwards. Here it is enough to notice that if some small mistake were made in doctrine, huge blunders might be made in human happiness. A sentence phrased wrong about the nature of symbolism would have broken all the best statues in Europe. A slip in the definitions might stop all the dances; might wither all the Christmas trees or break all the Easter eggs. Doctrines had to be defined within strict limits, even in order that man might enjoy general human liberties. The Church had to be careful, if only that the world might be careless.

"This is the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy. People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad. It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses, seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic. The Church in its early days went fierce and fast with any warhorse; yet it is utterly unhistoric to say that she merely went mad along one idea, like a vulgar fanaticism. She swerved to left and right, so exactly as to avoid enormous obstacles. She left on one hand the huge bulk of Arianism, buttressed by all the worldly powers to make Christianity too worldly. The next instant she was swerving to avoid an orientalism, which would have made it too unworldly. The orthodox Church never took the tame course or accepted the conventions; the orthodox Church was never respectable. It would have been easier to have accepted the earthly power of the Arians. It would have been easy, in the Calvinistic seventeenth century, to fall into the bottomless pit of predestination. It is easy to be a madman: it is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one's own. It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob. To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along the historic path of Christendom -- that would indeed have been simple. It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands. To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect."