A Radio Host Is Upset By My “Spiritual Warfare” on the Evangelical FedEx Driver
By Terry Firma, January 14, 2019

Christian radio host and podcaster Frank Sontag is, if you’ll forgive the dad pun, cross with me. To my muted amusement, he called me various names the other day, because he takes umbrage at my recent post about Amanda Riggan. Sontag even accused me of waging “spiritual warfare” against her.

Riggan, you may recall, is the FedEx driver who recorded a Facebook video last week in which she signals what a paragon of Christian virtue she is for interrupting her route by returning to a customer who was distressed by the sickness of a spouse. Riggan offered to pray with her.

The blubbering video that she subsequently recorded in her FedEx uniform, sitting in her FedEx truck, has to be seen to be believed. It’s closing in on 20 million views.

Like innumerable other Christers, Sontag thinks that what Riggan did is exemplary behavior that fellow believers should emulate. While I acknowledge the young driver’s good intentions, I beg to differ, for these seven reasons (if you already read my previous post about this, skip the recap):

1. It’s a delivery driver’s job to bring us our packages, not the gospel.

2. Most people don’t like religious solicitors. My own considerable aversion to their ilk would easily double if such a person returned to my doorstep upon sniffing out my personal grief, judging it to be a fertile time for some Jesus talk.

3. Intended kindness notwithstanding, the driver revisited a woman who hadn’t asked to be set upon by Riggan and her exceedingly pushy brand of evangelism.

4. Other customers were waiting for their deliveries while Riggan doubled back to offer to pray.

5. Double standards are annoying. Conservative Christians all over the country would absolutely lose their shit if Riggan had been a Muslim who offers unsuspecting FedEx customers the eternal truth about Allah.

6. Unless she got prior permission from her bosses (Ron Howard voice: “She didn’t”), Riggan had no business using FedEx’s resources, matériel, and branding to promote her religion.

7. With regard to Riggan’s video, no one likes a braggart, except for Christians who think nothing of openly disregarding the various verses in the Bible that condemn public, ostentatious, self-aggrandizing prayer.

I expected that in the course of a call-in radio show that lasted the better part of an hour, and that was almost entirely devoted to my post, I’d eventually get to hear some halfway decent counterarguments. Alas. It’s par for the course that where I see Riggan’s video performance as self-promotion and vanity, Sontag and his listeners see selflessness and courage. Moving beyond that radical difference in interpretation, the program essentially turned into a slow-building collection of schoolyard epithets: “vile” “miserable,” “lying,” “hater,” “bully,” “disgusting,” and so on (there’s that much-heralded Christian love again!). No one, not even the host, rationally addressed the central points of my piece.