|
18 October 2010
The Campus Crusade of Christ in Chile pulled off a major promotional coup on October 13 and 14 when over two dozen of the 33 miners trapped in a Chilean copper mine were pulled out of their tomb on international television wearing CCC T-shirts that said "Gracias Señor" and "Thank you, Lord".
The event had been carefully orchestrated over the ten weeks leading to the rescue between Christian Maureira, national director of Campus Crusade for Christ in Chile, and trapped miner Jose Henriquez, who was a pentecostal Christian. Henriquez appointed himself as the miner's "spiritual leader" and led prayers among the miners twice each day during their entombment.
After contact with the surface had been reestablished, Henriquez sent a letter to Maureira asking him for help to promote God in the face of this tragedy. Maureira responded by having MP3 videos of the movie "JESUS" and readings of the New Testament delivered to Henriquez in the mine. A day before the final extractions were to begin, Maureira arranged to have dozens of the "Gracias Señor" T-shirts sent down to the miners.
The blatant cynicism of using the heavily-publicized event to promote Maureira's and Henriquez' faith was underscored with the T-shirts including the "Thank you, Lord" message in both Spanish and English, despite most of the miners knowing only Spanish. It was clear that the point of the T-shirts was not to provide personal support to the miners but to exploit the situation to ensure that Jesus was promoted while millions of eyes were viewing the rescue.
The stunt was successful: Of the tens of thousands of news stories generated over the rescue attempt, well over half mentioned miners "thanking God" for their survival and rescue. But none of those stories seemed to compare those proclamations of thanks against the obvious discrepancies of God failing to keep the mine from collapsing in the first place and the investing millions of dollars of secular technology and resources provided by the Chilean and US governments to extract the surviving miners out of the mne.
And that's probably just fine with Christian Mauriera and Jose Henriquez. But to secularists, it was clear that God had nothing to do with protecting or saving these miners; and setting up a publicity stunt to proclaim otherwise was simply the latest hypocritical and cynical ploy of an institution and its leaders to deploy whatever deception and misdirection is needed to promote their brand of religion.
"If God and Christianity were true, religious apologists would not need to resort to publicity stunts to maintain their survival," past AAI president Stuart Bechman noted. "By doing so, they undermine their legitimacy as moral leaders and make a mockery of the very faith that they proclaim to hold."
"Secularists would be far more impressed with religious leaders who take extra steps to ensure that the truth of any situation is fairly represented, and who own up to when their faith was irrelevant."
