Dark Jezter said:
As one ENWorlder so eloquently put it a while back: "I take more flak from my fellow gamers for being a Christian than my fellow Christians for being a gamer."
The way I see it, the problem is that many Gamers are in a siege mentality against Christianity because it's a vicious cycle. One hates the other and it fuels reciprocity. Many years ago, some fundamentalist Christians falsely accused D&D of being Evil and Satanic, which lead to a lot of hostility towards gamers and gaming. Many of today's gamers were just getting interested in D&D in that era, and as they discovered a fun and harmless hobby, they were told by their parents, pastors and teachers that the hobby is satanic and evil and they aren't allowed to play it. The gamers knew that the game wasn't like that, so that just poured more alienation and resentment onto the natural alienation of adolescence and the teenage years, and gave it a form that would outlast that time. Now, you have gamers who have been hating Christianity because Christianity hates them (or so they seee it).
I mean, in my own life, I first got interested in D&D in Junior High, back in the early 90's (in Rural Kentucky). I had a friend loan me his D&D books, and I was just reading them in my room one day, when my father comes in. He sees me sitting there quietly reading Legends and Lore, with "Dungeons and Dragons" big on the cover. He's furious. Of course, a cursory glance at the book shows long listings of nonchristian belief systems (which under some fundamentalist lines of thought, are automatically satantic and evil). I'm told I'm going to Hell for reading those books, and they are sent back to my friend's house (with my dad asking that they be burned). I try and discuss the issue reasonably, but as far as my own father is concerned, the fact that he heard it at Church once and the Pastor said so was better proof than anything I could say. So I gave up on D&D for a few years. . .
Then I came to College and rediscovered D&D, and got some gaming friends and joined some games. I still went back to my old hometown and still attended Church (not the same Church we were attending at the first time I tried to play D&D, so it wasn't the same Pastor who railed against it). I spent much of my weekends volunteering at the church, helping them with their computer systems, doing routine office work, polishing and dusting, and so on. One afternoon, in discussion with the Pastor, he asked what I was doing that night. Well, I may have spent Saturday afternoons helping out at church, but Saturday nights I went to my D&D game. The Pastor went livid at the very mention of this. He couldn't believe that the young man who had been coming to this church for a few years, and had been helping him out around the church so often, was in his view, an evil satanic warlock who practiced the horrible "D&D" form of Satanism that is actually sold in stores. I was told by the Pastor in no uncertain terms to never play D&D again, and to bring all my D&D books to the church to be burned. When I tried to debate the subject, and politely tell him that my hobbies are my own, I was told in very blunt terms to not come back to that church, and that I wasn't welcome there until I'd quit D&D and "atoned for the sins of satanism".
I don't think my story is unique, and I personally do not hold any contempt for the religion as a whole, but I do dislike those who use their faith as a blanket excuse to condemn that which they already dislike, or those who make strong judgments without weighing the evidence and reasons themselves.
However, for all those gamers who have grown up with stories like these, there are going to be plenty who do hold some kind of grudge or intolerance towards Christianity. So they'll show it, and that just fuels the entire cycle. I wish I knew how to break the cycle.
