You Live Where?

Aptly nicknamed “Sin City”, Las Vegas continues to intrigue me with its blatant immorality. This fascination is made more acute by my belief that I have been called to proclaim the gospel and that this is where my ordination ultimately positioned me. I am impressed by Las Vegas’ “openness” and “honesty” in that it flaunts what most other cities try to hide or deny, but this should never be misinterpreted as my having any respect for Sin City’s licentious hedonism. Even the urban myth that Las Vegas has more houses of worship (i.e. churches) per capita than any other major metropolitan area in the United States belies the fact drawn from my experience that religion here is doing no better job of drawing people into authentic communion with God than anywhere else. Indeed, the stale dogma and creed of unenlightened religiosity complements rather than challenges the city’s propensity for avarice and greed. I can no more say that God had a hand in my being here than I can about anything else grounded in such a simplistic theology, but I am by now convinced that this may well be one of the most challenging places on Earth to proclaim the Christ. If ever there was an environment intentionally designed to distract, displace, and yes, even destroy the spiritual connection with the Creator, this is it. This is certainly not to say that God is absent from this place, “He’s” simply out of sight and out of mind (e.g. Altizer and Hamilton’s contention that God is dead), and there is very little about Las Vegas that focuses upon becoming reacquainted, of renewing the relationship. That said, Las Vegas continues to exhibit a dark truth about the nature of the corporate capitalism that sadly is becoming the American way.