Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Dancing a fine line

Not being a huge fan of country music or contemporary Christian music, I didn't even realize that Sara Evans was an evangelical Christian, or at least draws her audience from that base. I saw her on an episode or two of Dancing with the Stars (which, in my opinion, has made a mistake this season by ensuring that the stars are better trained--half the fun of the first two runs was seeing how inept they were to begin with and predicting who would actually improve and who would keep tripping over that extra left foot); but that was the limit of my knowledge of Ms. Evans. Until her name started popping up in all my news alerts for 'divorce.' She's going through a nasty one. It's rarely easy to figure out the whole story in these situations, but this article had some interesting things to say about Ms. Evans and her Christian audience:

"'There's the Sara Evans who...makes it sound like divorce is the most horrid thing on the face of the earth. And then there's the Sara Evans who sings 'When You Were Cheatin' ' with glee, and that song sure sounds like it's from the point of view of a divorcee enjoying some comeuppance — which kind of sounds like the Sara Evans we see headed for divorce court as fast as she can. Does that make her a hypocrite, as some people are saying? Not necessarily, if you look at it from the evangelical point of view, as I'm sure Sara does, where a lot of people believe that, biblically, you're free to pursue a split if your spouse has committed adultery...Just as no one wants to be politically 'Dixie Chick-ed,' nobody who has a strong evangelical fan base — as Sara does — wants to be 'Amy Grant-ed' and seen as somebody who filed for divorce when she didn't have to...I think Sara is making it pretty clear to any of her Christian fans that she believes she has a solid biblical basis for this split...I've also seen some people online be kind of taken aback by just how much stuff there is in the court filings and wonder if she's so angry that she's out for vengeance ... which, of course, is not seen as a Christian virtue.'"

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