This is a brilliant read that I couldn't articulate better myself. If you want more of this guy's stuff then follow this link: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/philosophicalfragments/2012/08/24/i-am-a-hate-filled-christian/?LLM=christine.welten@gmail.com

I am a Hate-Filled Christian

August 24, 2012 By Timothy Dalrymple 129 Comments

Being an evangelical Christian, of course, I grew up with vicious hatreds implanted deep within my heart.  Hatred (I refuse to use “hate” when the proper word is “hatred”) for women who obtain abortions.  Hatred for gays.  Hatred for criminals and illegal aliens.  Hatred for people of other faiths.  Hatred, basically, for anyone unlike myself and my cru.

I am a Christian, therefore I must be a hater.  I eat hatred for breakfast — and yes, it takes like hate.  So, at least, I’m told.

For a long time, I resisted this argument.  I spent time with people who had abortions, and with friends who were openly gay, and with people whose faiths were diametrically opposed to my own — but I never felt hatred toward any of them.  Love, yes.  Compassion, to be sure.  Concern, sometimes.  But not hatred.  Someone must have spiked my haterade, because I couldn’t seem to find within myself all these hatreds that, I was told, seethed and festered deep within me.

The curious thing was, I didn’t find this burning hatred in the evangelical Christians around me, either.  They were good-hearted people.  They took women in crisis into their homes.  They worked with troubled youth and delivered food to the homeless.  They started tutoring programs for children in East Palo Alto.  Many (though not all) of them supported Reagan, Bush 1, Bush 2 and John McCain — which, I guess, means that they hated science, rationality, the environment, and evolution.  But if they were filled with hatred for actual people groups, it must have been buried down deep.  Most of these men and women in the churches I attended felt, as I do, that abortion is wrong and that marriage was ordained by God for the joining of male and female.  Many of them were strongly opposed to illegal immigration.  Still, try though I might, I couldn’t peel back all the layers of kindness and sincere conviction to find the trembling, bigoted, hate-filled hater underneath it all.

Now, I no longer resist the argument.  I’m willing to confess.  I am a Christian — a conservative evangelical Christian to boot — and there are many things I hate.  I am hate-filled.

I hate that I fall short of the imitation of Christ.  I hate the sin that threatens to consume me, and hate that I so often take for granted the grace that refuses to allow me to be consumed.  I hate my pride and I hate the fact that I have hurt people.

I hate that when some people hear that I’m an evangelical Christian, they assume that I must hate them.  I hate that I and other Christians have sometimes done or said things that contributed to that assumption.  I hate that not only I, but other Christians around the world and throughout history, have sullied the name of Christ and marred the image of the Bride of Christ.  But I hate too that we live in an inverted world where love is sometimes mistaken as hatred, where the truth is sometimes painful and offensive.  So I hate the caricature but I also hate that we have helped to create it.

I hate that unborn children are exterminated before they have had a chance to enjoy the gift of life.  I hate that hundreds of millions of men and women, boys and girls are not alive today because of abortion worldwide, and the world has lost a treasure trove of creativity and joy and ingenuity.  I hate that women are sometimes pressured by men or by parents into abortions they mourn and regret; I hate that women are sometimes misled into believing that abortion for the sake of convenience is okay; as a father of two beautiful girls, I hate that unborn baby girls in particular are aborted in a twisted consequence of the “women’s rights” crusade for abortion.  But I also hate that so many women find themselves in terrible circumstances (I hate too that so many men are deadbeats) where they feel like abortion is their only hope.

Although I don’t believe the female vagina functions as a kind of venus fly trap to capture and kill rapist sperm (a view that has apparently been around in some circles, though this is the first time I’ve heard it), I must admit that I hate the thought of any unborn child, even one conceived by rape or incest, being killed.  I hate that some people cannot contemplate the innocence of that child without remembering the guilt the person (we cannot call him a “father”) who forced himself upon the child’s mother.  But I hate the fact that women are raped in the first place, I hate that they are placed in that situation through no responsibility of their own, and I hate that we in the church (though we have done much) have not done more to prevent domestic violence, child abuse and violent and demeaning attitudes against women.

I hate that my gay friends find my views offensive.  I hate that my convictions on this issue come between us.  And, I confess, I hate that it’s not up to me.  I hate that I’ve never found the arguments in favor of the view that the Bible does not really condemn homosexuality convincing.  I hate that the meaning of the covenant of marriage is not mine to define.  I hate that Christians have often failed to show love and reconciliation and forgiveness toward gays.  I hate that Christians have not always made it clear that God loves them and seeks them just as passionately as God seeks everyone else.  I hate that we have sometimes made it seem as though God will have nothing to do with gays until they leave their homosexual behavior behind, as though God redeems us after we are no longer sinners.

I hate that Christians have often fallen short of the example of Jesus Christ and been unkind and ungracious toward those whom society rejects and maligns.  I hate that gays are bullied.  I hate that some backwards church in Bigotville, USA, cheers at the notion of “homos” going to hell.  I hate that children who feel same-sex attractions get mockery and judgment instead of compassion and care.  I hate that many gays feel that, without access to marriage, they are second-class citizens.  But I hate too that the homosexual debate has been defined in such a way that there is no space for loving disagreement.  I hate that I’m told that my view, that marriage is a sacrament and a covenant defined by God for the union of male and female, is hateful by virtue of the fact that it oppresses a people group.  I don’t believe that’s true, but I hate that the traditional Christian standpoint has been framed as hateful, and I hate that there are gays who hate the “hateful” Christians.  Because I don’t hate gay people, and I certainly don’t hate my gay friends, but I hate that I’m told that I must hate them, and I hate that some part of those friends will never accept me because I’m trying to be faithful to what I believe God has made known.  I hate that this debate has pitted us against each other, because I love them and respect them and want to enjoy our friendship.

I hate that none of this will change anyone’s mind.  I hate that I will still be thought to hate gays even though the truth is that I hate the fact (even though I understand it, from their perspective) that this whole issue comes between me and the gay people I love.

I really hate that my Christian faith, which is so much richer and deeper and more beautiful than these issues on hot-button topics, is so often understood through their prism.  I am tempted to say that these are vanishingly small parts of my faith, but the truth is that they are not parts of my faith at all.  They are consequences of my faith, applications of the truths and the values that I profess, but they are nowhere near the heart of my faith.

I still can’t think of any people groups I hate.  But that’s it.  I’ve confessed.  I’m a hater.  Hate-filled.  And I hate that too.

Food for Thought

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/philosophicalfragments/2012/06/11/if-youre-selling-scorn-for-conservative-christians-the-market-is-hot/

If You’re Selling Scorn for Conservative Christians, the Market is Hot

June 11, 2012 By Timothy Dalrymple

I recently wrote a piece entitled “What if the Culture War Never Happened,” where I encouraged progressive evangelicals — who publicly blame the conservative Christians (largely of the prior generation) of the “culture wars” for giving Christianity a bad name and driving people away from the church — not to accept uncritically what their liberal confreres tell them about the culture wars.  Too many young evangelicals, in my view, question the culture wars but never question the “culture wars,” or the very concept and the way it’s developed in liberal circles.

Some of my progressive friends challenged me to point to examples.  I did not really want to call anyone out on the carpet, but it’s a reasonable request.  Sometimes it’s important to speak clearly and openly.  So here’s what I want to say: To be fair, this happens on both sides.  But recently I’ve seen a lot of young, progressive evangelicals denouncing and caricaturing their conservative brethren for their “culture war” concerns.  But by accepting the caricatures coming mostly from secular critics, legitimating and perpetuating them, they themselves — acting out of concern for the damage done to the church and its witness — are doing great harm to the church and its witness.  If we truly care for the public witness of the church, then we (liberal and conservative) need to stop slandering and caricaturing the other half of the church.  Don’t throw your Christian brothers and sisters under the bus.  Even if you disagree with them, you can provide a coherent, charitable explanation for what “those other evangelicals” believe.

Let me start with a generic example.  MissionGathering Christian Church in San Diego, responding to Amendment 1 in North Carolina, purchased a billboard strategically located alongside Billy Graham Parkway in Charlotte that says, “MissionGathering Christian Church IS SORRY for the narrow-minded, judgmental, deceptive, manipulative actions of THOSE WHO DENIED RIGHTS AND EQUALITY TO SO MANY IN THE NAME OF GOD.”  Click on the image to the right for the article explaining the billboard.  MissionGathering describes itself as an “Emerging” church, and their Pastor of Spiritual Formation, Alex Roller, says that the purpose of the billboard is to tell the LGBT community that “there are progressive Christians who believe in the Bible and Jesus but still support marriage equality and rights for the LGBT population.”  The church (300 members), he says, was showered with praise for the billboards they rented in response to the Prop 8 fight in California.  ”We just want them to know,” says Roller, that “our hearts are with you.”

If that was all they wanted to say, however, they could have rented a billboard with the boards, “Our hearts are with you.”  Given their beliefs on homosexuality and marriage, that would have been a fine thing to do.  Yet that’s not what they did.  Instead they called their fellow believers, who feel differently from them on this issue, ”narrow-minded, judgmental, deceptive, [and] manipulative.”  So let’s be clear what they’re doing here.  (1) They’re perpetuating the worst images of conservative Christians who support traditional marriage.  (2) They’re holding themselves our as a better alternative.  They are the good Christians, the more Christ-like Christians, who are not judgmental — even as they’re judging sixty percent of North Carolinians, a majority of Californians, over half of Christians in the United States and the great majority of Christians around the world.  In other words, (3) they’re saying “our hearts are with you” in that “we feel the same anger and scorn in our hearts as you do.”

Their intentions are honorable, but undermined by an incoherent strategy and by their deep-seated scorn for conservative Christians.  They’re trying to encourage love — by being hateful (and no, I don’t think that’s too strong a word).  They’re trying to encourage tolerance — but judging everyone who disagrees with them.  They’re trying to improve the witness of the church — by legitimating the stereotype that the conservative half of the church is bigoted and deceitful.  They hold themselves out as a better alternative — by throwing more conservative Christians under the bus.

Of course, it’s easy to argue with a billboard.  So, as requested, let me give another example.  Rachel Held Evans’ recent post, “How to Win a Culture War and Lose a Generation” went viral.  Rachel is a fine person, and I regret that I tend to engage with her posts only when I disagree with them.  I’m sure she’s deeply and thoroughly convinced she’s in the right here.  But she let her anger get the better of her.  Let’s look at the post, which begins thus:

When asked by The Barna Group what words or phrases best describe Christianity, the top response among Americans ages 16-29 was “antihomosexual.” For a staggering 91 percent of non-Christians, this was the first word that came to their mind when asked about the Christian faith. The same was true for 80 percent of young churchgoers. (The next most common negative images? : “judgmental,” “hypocritical,” and “too involved in politics.”)

(To pause: the study says nothing of “the first word that came to their mind.”  And “antihomosexual” is a catch-all term that people might check if they believe Christianity is bigoted, or merely that some Christians are bigoted, or people who simply think that Christianity opposes homosexuality.  But when your anger gets the better of you, there’s no time for nuance or discernment.)

Evans goes on to say that the belief Christians are bigoted against homosexuals (in the words of David Kinnaman) is “the negative image most likely to be intertwined with Christianity’s reputation,” and (in Evans’ words) “one of the top reasons 59 percent of young adults with a Christian background have left the church.”  Then Evans points to Amendment 1 in NC and the advertisement that featured a quotation from Billy Graham:

Despite the fact that the North Carolina law already holds that marriage in the eyes of state is only between a man and a woman, an amendment was put on the ballot to permanently ban same-sex marriage in the state constitution. The initiative doesn’t appear to change anything on a practical level, (though some are saying it may have unintended negative consequences on heterosexual relationships), but seems to serve primarily as an ideological statement

….an expensive, destructive, and impractical ideological statement.
Conservatives in the state [...] supported the amendment, and last night it passed. Religious leaders led the charge in support of the amendment, with 93-year-old  Billy Graham taking out multiple ads in publications across the state supporting the measure.

The convalescent Billy Graham likely had very little to do with the ad, but my point here is not to debate the rightness or wrongness of Amendment 1.  My point is to examine the ways in which progressive Christians talk about conservative Christians.  Conservative Christians have voted for these amendments consistently.  Yet the reason many Christians feel differently from Evans is completely unexplained.  And since (she asserts) there’s no practical reason (no reason why it might matter to give something a constitutional and not merely legal imprimatur), it must be just to spite gays.  The reader is left to conclude that conservative Christians simply are, to use the terms from the beginning of the post, anti-homosexual, judgmental and hypocritical.  Then Evans brings out the big guns of bold type and larger font-size:

I’ve said it a million times, and I’ll say it again…(though I’m starting to think that no one is listening):

My generation is tired of the culture wars.

We are tired of fighting, tired of vain efforts to advance the Kingdom through politics and power, tired of drawing lines in the sand, tired of being known for what we are against, not what we are for.

Evans wonders whether anyone is listening — and the post received 56,000 Facebook shares, and the comments cheer her on.  If you’re selling anger and scorn against conservative Christians, the market is hot.  Of course, Evans does not speak for our generation as a whole.  And these are bumper-sticker arguments.  I am for a family founded on the marriage of man and woman; I am for the defense of innocent human life even prior to birth.  And I am not trying to advance the kingdom so much as I am trying to defend the innocent and defend social structures I consider sacred and valuable.  The dead are not raised by politics, but the living can be protected and served by it.  But we go on (reformatted for space):

…Amendments like these needlessly offend gays and lesbians, damage the reputation of Christians, and further alienate young adults [...] from the Church.
So my question for those evangelicals leading the charge in the culture wars is this: Is it worth it? Is a political “victory” really worth losing millions more young people to cynicism regarding the Church?  Is a political “victory” worth further alienating people who identify as LGBT?  Is a political “victory” worth perpetuating the idea that evangelical Christians are at war with gays and lesbians?  And is a political “victory” worth drowning out that quiet but persistent internal voice that asks—what if we get this wrong?

Too many Christian leaders seem to think the answer to that question is “yes,” and it’s costing them.

Because young Christians are ready for peace. We are ready to lay down our arms. We are ready to stop waging war and start washing feet.

For conservative Christians, of course, there are not merely political victories.  These are matters of fundamental moral and theological import, critical to the health of individuals and societies.  I believe these things matter to God because human flourishing comes when we are leading the lives we were designed and redeemed for.  Sometimes the best way to wash a person’s feet is to tell him those feed are striding down a self-destructive path.

But again, the argument is beside the point.  This is not really an argument but a bit of angry rhetoric.  Evans never engages with how conservative Christians articulate the reasons for their actions.  She never gives an explanation at all — much less a charitable one — for the things her brothers and sisters in Christ believe and do.

I understand why Rachel and her fellow progressive Christians are angry.  I have many close relationships with gays and lesbians who do, indeed, find actions like Prop 8 and Amendment 1 hurtful.  I do feel for them, and I genuinely wish for the sake of our relationships that I could agree with them on these issues.  Evans and the MissionGathering church believe that Christians who oppose marriage equality for gays in the name of God are doing a disservice to the God they claim to serve and harming the witness of the church.  I get it.  But this is not the right way to respond.

This is selling anger, not offering enlightenment.  Anger is not always wrong, but it’s always a dangerous substance to deal with.  In its anger, posts and billboards like these lose the capacity to understand believers who disagree.  They rush to judge our elders and dispense with humility or nuance.  Instead of saying, “No, most conservative Christians are not hateful or deceptive.  Here is where they’re coming from, but I stand with you” — they say “I am with you” because “I scorn them too.”

Does it happen on both sides?  Absolutely.  I cannot stand the glib, bigoted “ain’t no homos gonna make it to heaven” video that’s circulating.  But one would never know, from a post like Evans’, that there are loving and thoughtful and self-sacrificial people on the conservative side of the argument who are genuinely trying to do the right thing for all people.

There is a growing genre — call it Progressive Christian Scorn Literature — about the scorn progressive Christians have for conservative evangelicals.  It seems to be celebrated on the Left as a kind of righteous comeuppance for the Christian Right, and it wins the applause of the Left for the Christian Left.  But it’s wrong and it needs to be called out.  It’s neither winsome, nor loving, nor constructive, nor right.  It will not improve our witness because it’s soaked through with bitterness and rancor.  I hope that people of good heart and mind, like Evans, leave it behind.

We cannot get beyond the culture wars by simply joining one side and lobbing bombs against the other.  We cannot improve the reputation of the church by throwing half of it under the bus.

A really good read

This is a really good read. For more posts go to this link:

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/philosophicalfragments/2012/07/02/the-im-offended-game/

The “I’m Offended” Game

July 2, 2012 By Timothy Dalrymple 7 Comments

My fellow Patheos blogger and Catholic pontificator extraordinaire Elizabeth Scalia writes a lovely post on the tactics of offense.  Speaking of the response to the Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care Act, she writes:

Amid all the predictability, though, nothing bores me more than the phrase “that offends me,” uttered by a person who decides to define himself (or herself) according to some aspect of that self — as a fat person, a thin person, a vegetarian person, a meat-loving person, a Christian person, an atheist — and then presumes to “take offense” at things, on behalf of all the people in the world who share some form of that defining characteristic.

A too-quick choice to be offended by something (and it is a choice) tells me a couple of things about a person: first, that he feels so uncertain of who he is that he must declare and define himself as “thus” or “such” in order to establish a reference marker — a stake that is meant as much for himself as for the rest of us…Second: a death-grip on an identifier, used in conjunction with feather-ruffled offense-taking, tells me that this person is a passive aggressive — someone so weak that he needs to resort to the tyranny of “shut up” because he cannot trust his ideas or arguments to hold up under debate. Rather than subject himself to a debate he knows he cannot win, he declares himself “offended” and usually demands future silence on the issue and a public “apology” (also tiresome!) that is meant to warn-off others from attempting to address it.

I used to call this ‘The “I’m Offended” Game,” and I’ve seen it played — often when the interlocutor is flustered and cannot muster a more rationally compelling response — in countless academic conversations over the course of my fifteen years of undergraduate and graduate education.  The conversation is rolling along, point-counterpoint, point-counterpoint, in a roughly linear and logical manner, until someone decides to grasp the snitch and win the whole game in one fell swoop.

“As a woman, I’m offended you would say that.”  Translation: you are a misogynist who would gladly impose a brutal patriarchy if you could.  Game over.

“As a 1/64th Native American, I find that notion offensive.”  Translation: you stand on the side of the white colonialists and cultural imperialists, who by the way gave the Native Americans blankets infected with disease.  Game over.

“As a Christian/Buddhist/Atheist, I’m offended at your comment.”  Translation: you are hateful and ignorant of any religion apart from your own, and if you do not apologize then I am going to take my complaint to the Dean.  Game over.

There is a near-term effect to this kind of maneuver, and a long-term effect.  In the near term, the flow of the conversation ends.  Any consideration of logic or evidence is thrown out the window.  What you have said may or may not be factually wrong, but it is certainly morally wrong, or at the very least politically wrong, and you must apologize.  Even if you are not wrong, you are in the wrong, and your interlocutor bears no responsibility to dignify your offensive comment with a reply.  Also in the near term, you may find that you have to defend yourself to the professor or to the head of the department or to the Dean of the school.

I must be giving the impression that I was a veritable flame-thrower in class discussions.  That’s not really so.  I relished intellectual combat when I was a teenager, but I quickly lost my taste for it when our philosophical differences became deep wedges dividing me from several people close to me.  After that, I did not disagree with people in discussions because I enjoyed disagreement; I disagreed because I felt the truth (at least, the truth as well as I could understand it) was being misrepresented and maligned.  I am old fashioned: I do, quite honestly, I feel a burning passion to defend the truth.  I hate the thought of upsetting people.  I really do.  And yet I feel compelled to enter into some of the most controversial topics known to humankind because I care about the truth and I care that people should find the truth.

While my doctorate came through the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, I took many courses at the Divinity School.  I remember one in particular where a young woman, a Th.D. student with whom I had many disagreements (she was nominally Christian, but extremely liberal and militantly feminist), mentioned her disgust and outrage at missionaries to the Native American tribes.  I made the point — and I swear it was this mildly put — that not all Christian missionaries had completely evil motives.  She was so appalled that she sat in stunned disbelief for a few moments, and once she had regained the power of speech she explained that she was offended.  That effectively ended the conversation.  The rest of the conversation centered on her offense and her troubled attempt to patch together some psychical well-being after my (apparently) blazingly offensive comment.  I refused to apologize, except to say, “I did not mean to cause you offense, but this seems like a pretty minimal and unobjectionable claim.  Surely there were some missionaries who at least had some good motives.”

I came to the professor’s next office hour and sat outside to wait my turn — and heard through the open doorway that it was the same student inside with the professor, complaining about the damage that my comment had done to her soul.  How could I defend the evil institution of Christian missionaries?  When she left, she blanched at the site of me outside the office and walked away swiftly.  The next time I saw her, I actually did apologize for offending her, but this clearly did not satisfy her.  She was going to be offended until I agreed with her in full.  I immediately hated myself for apologizing for speaking the truth — and it made clear to me that there would be no satisfying this kind of person.  Give her an inch, and she’ll demand a mile.

The long-term consequence is far worse.  While it’s helpful to be aware of the objections of your critics and detractors, it’s not helpful to be paralyzed by them.  But the classroom became a place that was littered with landmines, a place where you could not speak freely for fear of reaping the whirlwind.  Our social (and national) conversation erodes as we cannot speak clearly to one another, as we exchange sentiment and anger for evidence and argumentation, or — worse — as we hide our beliefs from one another and seal ourselves into hermetic chambers of isolated news and opinion.  This is rarely appreciated.  There are many causes for the balkanization of our political culture — but political correctness takes a huge share of the blame.  We withdraw into our own worlds where we all believe alike and do not offend one another — and soon thereafter we cannot understand one another either, like tribesmen separated by mountain ranges whose languages develop in seclusion until, when the tribes reestablish contact, they cannot understand one another.

And it’s not merely external.  We internalize the lengthy list of questions we cannot ask and things we cannot say.  Our thoughts become armed against us, and we’re no longer free to think clearly and critically and without inhibition.

“I’m offended.”  It’s a dangerous game to play.  In the short term you gain a specious “win.”  In the long term, you erode the bonds that hold us together.  Thanks for that.

This dude is awesome!!

Check out the following link, it is not only hilarious but the dude says everything I think lol.


Enjoy (and yes, this is my lazy way of doing a blog this week hahaha)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOGlSQlMUSA&feature=relmfu