Taking offense and getting angry aren't exactly the same thing. Anger has to do with the intolerable difference between what is and what ought to be, which is to say, with injustice. Offendedness has to do with my own discomfort with the difference between how I feel and how I'd prefer to feel. Offendedness makes it all about me.
Back before he sank without a trace from our public square, Sam Harris became a lightning-rod for many Christians who took "offense" at his attack on the Christian faith. Rather than discuss his "arguments" in any kind of detail, they puffed up their chests in righteous indignation and pronounced his work "offensive". I would add that much the same treatment was visited upon Richard Dawkins for his God Delusion, which was really nothing more than a rehash of arguments around for a couple centuries or so, packaged with a fevered proclamation that getting rid of religion (about which Dawkins evidenced no understanding whatsoever) would make the world a better place. When I wrote about these two gentlemen, I was attacked in similar fashion; it was somehow beyond the pale that someone who is a professed believer say anything about the air-tight arguments these two geniuses make about religion! I was confused, intellectually incoherent and dishonest, and as much a part of the problem as my fundamentalist relatives in the faith.
Finally getting around to talking about the issue of offendedness, we can begin to dismantle the industry of Christian whining about the lack of respect they receive. We can talk about religion in intelligent, thoughtful ways, rather than get sidetracked over who offended whom and how. I always thought it funny that no one quite understood that I was not at all "offended" by the "arguments" made by the likes of Harris and Dawkins. Rather, I took them seriously enough to expose them for the silly, shallow drivel they were. How can one get offended by someone ignorant enough to believe that redressing an 18th century skeptical argument against the existence of God is somehow presenting something new and incontrovertible in to such a discussion?
We Christians need to toughen up. When you enter the public square, and declare yourself a believer, assume that there are those who won't like you for that very reason (there's a Bible verse or two on this subject I could quote to make my point; my hope is I don't have to). Don't be so thin-skinned. It isn't personal when I or others disagree with you. I don't take offense when folks get touchy with me. I might laugh, or get frustrated at a lack of understanding, or wish that people who said we Christians are ignorant rubes would be a little less ignorant themselves. That's not being offended, it's just trying to keep the discussion going without taking another's terms for the rule of the debate.
We Christians need to suck it up a tad. God isn't outlawed in the classroom, removed from the public square, or no longer a part of our social and cultural life. Anyone who says these kinds of things, and claims offense at them, doesn't think too much of God, after all.
