Here is a fine little excerpt from a big selling book in the USA—it’s a quote all about how waitresses in the fast food restaurant business see some of their customers:
The worst, for some reason, are the Visible Christians—like the ten-person table, all jolly and sanctified after Sunday night service, who run me mercilessly and then leave me $1 on a $92 bill. Or the guy with the crucifixion T-shirt (SOMEONE TO LOOK UP TO) who complains that his baked potato is too hard and his iced tea too icy (I cheerfully fix both) and leaves no tip at all. As a general rule, people wearing crosses or WWJD? (What would Jesus do?) buttons look at us disapprovingly no matter what we do, as if they were confusing waitressing with Mary Magdalene’s original profession.
The book is called Nickel and Dimed—On (not) Getting By in America.1 The book isn’t written for the specific purpose of criticizing Christians—the quote is simply one observation made by author Barbara Ehrenreich as she writes about “low wage America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity”. Ms Ehrenreich is an established journalist and a well-published author, who decided to join ‘low wage America’ to see what it is really like to work at the ‘opposite’ end of the socio-economic group. One of the jobs she scored was as a waitress in a fast food restaurant.
How do you (dear reader) feel about this little extract? Does it make you cringe because it is right on the money? Or do you think it’s the usual anti-Christian ‘mum made me go to Sunday School and I hated it’ polemic? I suppose you could throw it in the bin with the Mike Carlton columns from The Sydney Morning Herald. But while gossip writers such as Carlton and his ilk have the depth of a car park puddle when it comes to Christianity, Ms Ehrenreich is of a different calibre. If we do behave this way, then it really is ‘cringe time’—or for the more ancient readers of this magazine, it’s a ‘bad witness’.
Is it true in Australia? I asked a Christian lady friend of mine, who is a manager at Macca’s,2 “What’s it like when the Christian group comes in?” My friend, sadly, confirmed the main thrust of the quote. Ms Ehrenreich had hit the nail right on the head.
But surely Ms Ehrenreich and the Macca’s manager are talking about the ‘youth’ Christians—not those of us who are more mature in years. We older ones would never ever give a wrong impression as a group of Christians out for the evening. Perhaps Ms Ehrenreich is just failing to see the excited and unthinking nature of Christian evangelical youth?
My gut feeling is that we adult Christian diners are not much better. We are sometime known for our bombastic graces loudly proclaimed so that all can hear in the restaurant—but I don’t think we are known for being the people who are a pleasure to serve, who treat the staff as ‘people’, and who are the ones who express our thanks and tip the best. When we do ‘stand out’ for our behaviour, it is often because of adult variations of what Ms Ehrenreich has spotted. I don’t think waitresses excitedly look forward to serving a table of Christians because they are actually fun to serve, or because they appreciate the meal better.
It just seems funny that we Christians are the people who are all about relationships, but no-one wants to relate to us. It may be easy to blame the gospel for the way people respond, but I suspect that we are the problem long before the gospel even gets on the table.
Endnotes
1 Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed – On (not) Getting By in America, Henry Holy and Company, New York, 2001.
2 For our overseas readers, “Macca’s” is the Australian colloquial treatment of the term “McDonald’s”.
