The Curse of WWJD
Those people wearing the WWJD bracelets always rubbed me wrong, even when I was a kid...
I grew up in a conservative and rural part of California. Christianity took on the fabric of the culture, as it always seems to do. This means that it was mostly about gun ownership, anglo culture, sexual orientation, and moral purity.
What would Jesus do? By the time I reached high school, I saw it as a passive-aggressive ego play. A holier-than-thou stance designed to get me to submit to the impeccable morality and staunch one-sided politics of the wearer of said bracelet.
(Which was confusing when I later read that Jesus favored hanging out with sex workers and governmental extortionists and was labeled as a drunkard, etc. But anyhow…)
Later in life, when I entered into a more progressive spiritual-but-not-religious worldview, it seemed less legalistic at first glance. Though I didn’t consider myself a tried and true ‘Christian,’ I did consider myself a ‘Jesus follower’. The emphasis on Jesus, as the authors and teachers I followed said, was to try to live as Jesus lived. Soon, I noticed that even this worldview carried its own set of further left-leaning and ‘mindful’ legalities. It was thought and life control on an individualistic level, and it proved impossible.
