A Christian Journey posted by Ben

As I drove up to Toledo last night for a quick business meeting, I had a great conversation with a close friend of mine who has been attending a Foursquare church for the past few years.

A passionate and articulate liberal bixsexual, she had stunned me when she first announced that she had found Jesus, especially in the context of a post-denominational evangelical church. However, the more I spoke with her about it, the more I came to see the meaningful spiritual support that she was receiving from that community. And when she spoke with me about participating in open discussions with a twenty-somethings womens group from the church, a group where the members could be frank about their experiences, both positive and negative, I was doubly impressed. Could this be happening within a movement known for toeing a pretty hard-core conservative line? Could they be managing to engage in open and honest discussion about real life, in all its glorious complexity?

It seems not.

Sounds like the way things went down is that a few members of the group became uncomfortable with my friend's participation and her frank and open participation in the group. She was asked to stop participating, because of that discomfort. Can you imagine that she felt like the church itself was still a safe place to go after that?

For my friend, I truly hope that she is able to find a way to continue her growth in faith in a community that understands that Jesus didn't eat with the tax collectors to help them stop being tax collectors. He ate with the tax collectors to bring them the message of God's grace and their salvation from sin, while leaving any decisions about their lifestyle for them to make. For her former Foursquare church, while I hope that they will someday realize that if they truly want to grow as a Christian community, they will need to open their arms to all of God's people, I believe that they will only continue on a path that is ultimately insular, exclusionary, and unable to see that Jesus doesn't call them to interact only with rich white folks, but to engage with people from all walks of life in a way that is loving, respectful, and open to the grace of God.

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Stepping out of Christian-speak for a moment (I strongly believe in trying to speak the language of those whom I discuss) I think that a broader theme here has to do with fundamentalism in general, be it religious, economic, or political. That theme is the threat that fundamentalism of any stripe sees in any articulation of alternate ideas and fundamentalism's need to suppress the expression of those ideas to the full extent possible. While I'm still looking for the best way to formulate this thought, it goes something like this:

Any belief system that requires the suppression of alternate perspectives will ultimately breed fanatics who advocate killing those who disagree with their dogma.

If this sounds reactionary to you, do a quick search online for Christian conservatives who advocate killing or imprisoning liberals, athiests, Muslims, abortionists, or any other perceived "minority" of your choice. Their numbers and vitriol will shock and horrify you.

To revise The Usual Suspects revision of C.S. Lewis: "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he had all the answers about Christianity, that peace meant war, that love meant hate, and that turning the other cheek meant striking first without mercy."