Friday, September the 15th, 2006

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WWDD

It has become fashionable among pious young Christian folk, particularly in the United States, to wear wristbands bearing the letters WWJD. This simple formula announces that the wearer has devoted their life to Christ, and faces any and all situations by asking the question What Would Jesus Do? Leaving aside the objection that the daily challenges faced by a mystic carpenter in Palestine two thousand years ago may not be wholly applicable to the kinds of ‘issues' facing a young person hanging around a mall in Poughkeepsie in the twenty-first century, I think there is much to be said for this approach. If nothing else, it must lead to some interesting behaviour.

For one thing, Jesus had a tendency to perform miraculous feats, such as walking on water or distributing improbable amounts of bread and fish. Then there were his occasional temperamental outbursts, as when he shooed a gang of moneylenders out of a temple. It's to be hoped that the pious teenies emulate this kind of thing rather than Jesus' rather priggish sermonising, for which he had a weakness. Although there are one or two nuggets of wisdom in his preaching, more often it is reminiscent of the airy New Age twaddle one might get from Deepak Chopra and his ilk.

The difficulty remains, though, that a contemporary teenager is going to face circumstances that Jesus simply never had to deal with, all those years ago. Nowadays, the average young American Christian does not spend much time involved with oxen, say, or fatted calves, much less with tares and talents and the blood of the lamb. Young Tad or Biff is likely to get more het up about soda pop, baseball caps, and stadium rock. Working out what Jesus would do thus becomes a very fraught endeavour. Hours upon hours of Biblical study will go some way to resolving the problems, but sooner or later the morally anguished teen will resort to booze and drugs and firearms.

Here at Hooting Yard, we have come up with an elegant solution to these modern dilemmas. We will soon unleash on the market wristbands bearing the legend WWDD. What would Dobson do? There is a simple beauty to this, in the sense that, whatever the situation, the answer is always “Write a pamphlet! (out of print)”.