Many Christians place great legalistic, spiritual importance on abstinence from relatively trivial things (from dancing to movies to swearing to card playing to mowing the lawn on Sundays). This is because Christians aren’t much different from others in relation to important things (basic values and behavior concerning wealth, power, prestige, justice, security, peace, work, time). Christians know they should be different from the world in some way — otherwise, what would Christianity mean? So, in an effort to establish some kind of Christian distinctiveness, they focus on the trivial. And the trivial is that which does not require us to make difficult changes in our lives… Like the Pharisee, we “strain out the gnat and swallow the camel.”
From Christian Smith's book: Going to the Root: Nine Proposals for Radical Church Renewal (published 1992, so probably a bit hard to get. Let me know by email if you'd be interested in a copy and I'll see what I can do.)
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