I sold pest control door-to-door last summer. It was a hard job. The hours are long and the pay is commission-based, so if you don’t sell anything in a day, you work for free. But, one of the pluses of the job is that you get to see a lot of houses. You see a lot of porches. Some people have really clean, homey porches with carpet and rocking chairs. Some people have messy porches; old, brown, crispy leaves huddled together in the corners; spider webs—which I would point out as a selling point for our service—clinging to the ceiling. Some people have narrow, bowling lane porches with about a mile of concrete in between the steps and the front door. And some people don’t have any porch at all; just sidewalk and then a door.
How people decorate their porches and front lawns says a lot about them. I built rapport with one guy when I identified the saints he had statues of in his front yard—Ignatius of Loyola and Francis of Assisi.
“Oh, you must be a good Catholic boy!”
“No, Baptist. I just know my saints.”
One house had sign—directed at me and my kind—by the door:
“NO SOLICITING:
We are too broke to
Buy anything
We know who we are
Voting for
We already found Jesus.
Seriously,
Unless you are selling
Thin Mints
Please GO AWAY!”
This is a more creative variation on the kind of sign I saw every day. In door-to-door sales overrun suburban Chicago, probably one in ten doors had a “NO SOLICITORS” sign. In one neighborhood that had been hit particularly hard that summer, it was at least every other door. As a solicitor, it’s really easy to get to a place where you instinctively hate anyone who has a “NO SOLICITORS” sign. How arrogant is it to assume that no one could ever sell anything door-to-door that you would be interested in buying? How dehumanizing is it to an entire group of people to tell them that they are categorically rejected from knocking on your house? A “NO SOLICITORS” sign doesn’t make exceptions. Everyone is rejected.
But, I get it.
If I lived in an area that was constantly getting knocked, I would be similarly defensive. I would get sick of it too. It pissed me off a lot more at the time than it does now. The real problem isn’t “NO SOLICITORS” signs; it’s signs in general.
Here’s what I mean: I have a poster that I recently bought from the great photographer Roger Varland. In the foreground of the picture there’s a paved road; one yellow line stretching down the middle like a melted stick of butter. In the background there’s a dusty hill dotted with scrubby bushes and angry, dry grass. The hill is framed by scraggly, thin pine trees. A couple dozen signs crown the hill. They are white with hand-painted, red and black lettering.
One reads:
“THERE IS NO PEACE SAITH MY GOD TO THE WICKED”
Another:
“BEWARE OF DOGS BEWARE OF EVIL WORKERS BEWARE OF CONCISION”
The most confrontational take aim at abortion:
“ABORTION IS KILLING BABIES”
and,
“ALCOHOL KILLS TOBACCO KILLS DOPE KILLS MOM AND DAD KILLS ABORTION IS KILLING BABIES SIN KILLS”
and,
“IT WAS YOUR CHOICE ABORTION KILLS ALL HUGS”
Jesus’s name is everywhere, so people know where the signs get their ALL-CAPS authority.
“BE BOLD FOR JESUS”
and,
“JESUS IS GOD”
and,
“ONLY ONE WAY JESUS”
They’re even written in red letters.
The problem with a sign isn’t always that it says the wrong thing. It’s that it can only say one thing. It doesn’t allow for nuance. It doesn’t listen. A sign can’t clarify or make exceptions. It has the same message for anyone who sees it. It can only assert. It can’t hear the reality of a person’s situation. It can only tell it like it is.
Signs. Flyers. Bumper stickers. Billboards.
Christian t-shirts are one of the worst offenders. I wince when I see “God’s My Hero” shoehorned into the “Guitar Hero” logo. I knew a girl in middle school—before Facebook made Tom and Top Friends artifacts from a forgotten era—who had a hoodie that read: “Jesus has reserved MySpace in heaven.” I’m always happy when I see that someone’s actually wearing a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup shirt instead of one with Jesus written in the trademark loopy brown scrawl.
Don’t get me wrong. Jesus isn’t the problem. The problem is the reduction of the God of the universe to a slogan on a t-shirt. Or, the kind of easy-to-remember Christianese half-truths that people build their lives around.
Here’s the kind of statement I’m thinking of:
- “When God closes a door he opens a window.”
- “The family that prays together, stays together.”
- “God won’t give you more than you can handle.”
- “A Bible that’s falling apart usually belongs to someone who isn’t.”
What if the windows are closed, or your praying, Bible-believing family falls apart, or you’re dealing with more than you can handle? These sayings make up for the fact that they don’t tell the whole story with their sheer efficiency. They communicate what they want to communicate quickly.
But, that’s the problem.
People need time. People need nuance. People need more love than a sign (or a flyer, or a bumper sticker, or a billboard, or a Christian t-shirt) can communicate. People need people to listen to them. And they need the help of a living and active Church because every situation is different.
And every sign sucks.
