A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [85]
When people choose this lifestyle, they often cut themselves off from everyone who doesn’t agree with them. They end up being assimilated and absorbed in closed communities where only their own voices and views are heard, and everyone who disagrees is mocked and condemned, often with very strong language. Some, after giving themselves over completely to the lifestyle, have a crisis of conscience. But when they want to leave, their leaders and peers depict their changing perspective as a betrayal and pressure them to stay, often using fear tactics to intimidate them and keep them in their gated community. Special ministries have formed to help people exit the lifestyle, recover from the abuse and pain the community has been known to impose, and be reoriented to a healthier life and perspective. But even with professional therapy, many people feel they have been wounded for life by their years in this lifestyle.
Advocates of this lifestyle are eager to recruit others into their “love,” as they call it. Through various organizations, they raise huge sums of money to recruit youth and children into their chosen way of life, and they have been extremely adept at using media—radio, TV, and now the Internet—to gain an aura of credibility and legitimacy. They organize huge events and mass rallies to celebrate their growing clout and demonstrate that they are proud of who they are and what they stand for. Everyone knows how much influence they have in our political system, and how one political party in particular panders for their votes. But look at the countries where this lifestyle runs rampant, and you’ll get an idea what our nation will be like if some of us don’t have the courage to stand up and speak up. Wherever this lifestyle spreads, a whole host of social problems inevitably follows.
Yes, activists may use the word “love” to justify their behavior, but those who disagree with them are seldom treated with love. Many of us have already faced the scorn of the activists who promote this chosen lifestyle and defend it as legitimate and even godly. For doing so, we have received hate mail peppered with a wide range of threats and abusive speech. But even so, we have learned that we must not respond to hate with hate; we must hate the sin, but still love the sinners.
The lifestyle I’m speaking of is fundasexuality (not, as you may have assumed, homosexuality), a neologism that describes a reactive, combative brand of religious fundamentalism that preoccupies itself with sexuality.1 The term does not apply to the quiet, pious, respectful fundamentalism of straightforward, sincere people, but rather to the organizing, angry, dominating fundamentalism that declares war on those who differ. Fundasexuality is rooted not in faith, but in an orientation of fear. Its proponents fear new ideas, people who are different, criticism or rejection from their own community, and God’s violent wrath on them if they don’t fully conform to and enforce the teachings and interpretations of their popular teachers and other authority figures. It is a kind of heterophobia: the fear of people who are different. It comes in many forms—Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, or even atheist.
Sociologists sometimes say that groups can exist without a god, but no group can exist without a devil. Some individual or group needs to be identified as the enemy, as evil, as a threat,