But Mom, I really want one! Even Daddy has a tattoo, I argued passionately. Yes, she replied, but that was when he was a drunk Marine in Viet Nam. Now he's a Christian. And with that one sentence, she struck the jugular. What I heard was something like this: Me + Tattoo = Not a Christian. In retrospect, I'm really glad my parents didn't allow me to get a tattoo when I wanted it at sixteen. I mean really, how uncool would I be today with a Lisa Frank dolphin on my ankle and the Chinese character for love on my tailbone?
Now that I'm older and study the scriptures with more voracity, I took at look at the tattoo-text in Leviticus 19. Though my mother's reason for forbidding tattoos was sincere, I'm not sure it's a Christian versus non-Christian issue. But she attended an uber-conservative church in her formative years and regurgitated the beliefs in our household. The problem is when we take a text out of context and make it a pretext for something else, we can become legalistic and dogmatic over issues that aren't explicitly sins. Or worse, we can have a gross misinterpretation of scripture.
The issues really deals with the intent of the heart and personal convictions. Here's my two cents:
Are Tattoos A Sin? from Bianca Juarez on Vimeo.
