i talked about fight club. i know i know i know.

Fight Club was one of the first novels I truly loved. It was a compulsory text in 7th form English, but I was hooked straight away and loved the narrative style, dark musings and what Palahniuk did with his characters. The critique on Western materialism is prolific within the pages and is a sharp statement about our culture. The movie is pretty good too, and while not as good as the book, it has still commanded a cult following and displays the grit and brutality of the ideas well.

One of the best parts about the film and book are Tyler's rants and critiques about the way people in the West live. Here's what is possibly the most poignant of the lot:

"I see in Fight Club the strongest and smartest men who’ve ever lived. I see all this potential. And I see it squandered. Goddamn it, an entire generation pumping gas. Waiting tables. Slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes. Working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars. But we won’t. We’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off."

As I read this for a second time a couple of months ago, I began to see some parallels between the disillusionment towards that story of celebrity, candy culture, smiling billboards and images of the good life – parallels between that, and pop Christianity. The Sunday school flannel board Christianity. The "Jesus is Nice" Christianity that I have been fed at many points growing up in the christian subculture. I've grown to realise that this Christianity does not stand up to real life and needs to be called out for what it is.

So it inspired me to rewrite this speech of Tyler’s. This is my rant in the style of Tyler Durden:

"I see in churches some of the strongest men and woman in the world. I see the best of humanity. But I see many of these people squashed into ideals of niceness, compliance and shallow sentiment. I see greatness pushed into narratives of the good life that told us that becoming a Christian would mean we would be prosperous now that God had our backs. It told us that life with Jesus would always be an adventure, and that God’s great plan for our lives was to fulfil the desires of our hearts, like some cosmic genie. That when Jesus said that he wanted us to live life to the full it meant that we jumped from one exhilarating spiritual experience to the next. But now I don’t know what to do with moments of monotony. This message told us that we were able to achieve anything we wanted in God’s power and would walk in victory all the time. That we would know he is near because we would be in a heightened emotional state due to the fact that the Christian walk is always exciting, spontaneous and personally fulfilling. But it's not like this. And we who call ourselves Christians are slowly learning this fact. And we're very, very pissed off."

Too harsh? I think a critique is needed. Christian living is not like this. The way we do church cannot reflect an 'adventure gospel' and evangelism cannot operate under a message that following Jesus is an adventure. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is the opposite.