Pastor Chris - P.C. Run Amok

"It's just sad to see that in this day and age, the most offensive thing on a shirt can be what people see as a religious symbol." Stephanie Bennis.

What's that all about you say?

Well it seems that Stephanie, a senior at Penn State University, has created quite a little stir among the Nittany Lion faithful. Apparently every year Penn State has what they call a, "White Out" game at one of the football teams regular season games. If you're not familiar with the Nittany Lion's football team, they are nationally ranked down in the States and their uniform is a simple white jersey with a number on it, and a simple white helmet with a blue stripe running down the middle. To celebrate the white out game all 100,000 fans who attend wear white, creating as you can imagine, a sea of white in the stands. As part of this celebration, each year students design and then vote on a shirt that is to be sold and worn at the game. Hey, it's capitalism at its finest. Create an event, and then sell t-shirts for it. Who says you can't get a good education at a university anymore?

So, this year Bennis and a fellow student designed the shirt that was chosen by the students as the best design and the one to be worn at the white out game. It's a white shirt with a blue stripe running down the middle of it (just like on the helmets) with the school's name, "Penn State" cutting across the stripe. At the top of the stripe is the ubiquitous Nike swoosh, hey they want a piece of the action, and on the back of the shirt are the words, "Don't be intimidated... it's just me and 110,000 of my friends" printed over another blue stripe running vertically down the middle of the shirt. If you google it you'll find a picture of the shirt.

Well, apparently the front of the shirt bears a resemblance of a cross and which has created a small amount of consternation among people, fans and non-fans alike. As an evangelical Christian, when I saw the shirt I thought it looked like a cross. If anyone should be offended it should be those of us for whom the cross is an important symbol of our faith and the sacrifice Jesus made on the cross for our sins. I could argue that the cross shouldn't be taken lightly, or misused. Let's face it, though, I could clearly see that was not the intent of the designers and I have enough common sense to realize that all they were trying to do was emulate their school colors and the simplicity of the team's helmet.

The uproar, pardon the pun (Nittany Lions, you get it?), hasn't come from the evangelicals, it's come from the loony left who find anything even remotely resembling a Christian symbol offensive, even when it's obviously not a Christian symbol. We've arrived at the place where paranoia and a lack of common sense now rule our public discourse. Of course I'm just cynical enough to believe that these anti-religious groups don't really care whether it's a cross or not, they're just in it for a piece of the action. Their names in the headlines and their palms in front of their donors, that's what this is really all about. Fortunately, in the fight against everything that is P.C., cooler heads have prevailed and the shirts were not pulled from campus bookstores. Rather, all 30,000 shirts were sold. (At $15 a pop, that's $450,000. I wonder what the mark-up on one of those things is.)

All that to say, "It's just sad to see that in this day and age, the most offensive thing on a shirt can be what people see as a religious symbol."