When Christians attack
Photo by Girl with red hat on Unsplash
[The devil] is always sending errors into the world in pairs – pairs of opposites. And he always encourages us to spend a lot of time thinking which is the worse…he relies on your extra dislike of the one error to draw you gradually into the opposite one. – C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
I’m thinking of two Christians who are older than me and who once taught me about Christianity when I was young.
Back in those days they impressed me with their devotion to Jesus Christ. You could say that Jesus was always “in their hands” (the way they served people) and “on their lips” (the way they talked about Jesus).
Imagine my confusion and dismay, all these years later, when I find that these two Christians rarely, if ever, demonstrate or speak of Jesus anymore.
Both of them, at one time some of the mildest and tenderest Christians I knew, now use some of the coarsest, most slanderous, violent language (and none of it has to do with Jesus or the kingdom of God).
Jesus used to be the only thing on their lips; now those same lips are flamethrowers for contempt and rage.
One of them followed the way of one tribe in politics; the other followed the opposite tribe. One would seem to be content if the other (and all others like him) cease to exist on the face of the earth. Meanwhile, the other seems to want to punish and shame the first.
They don’t even lead with assertions about their own ideas anymore; they go straight to condemnation of ideas (and people) they consider opposite (and, therefore, despicable). They lead with the most exaggerated claims about their opponents, thereby leaving no room for those opponents to reply without screaming their own most exaggerated claims. Reaction triggers reaction ad nauseam.
They have fallen into the trap that C.S. Lewis described in Mere Christianity. The devil has gotten them to so dislike one error, that they have fallen into the opposite error (and both of them call their respective errors “Christianity!”).
But Lewis says: “Do not let us be fooled. We have to keep our eyes on the goal and go straight through between both errors. We have no other concern than that with either of them.”
There is a place, a time, and a way to be critical of error. The church may be a powerful “conscience of the state” (as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said), but it will not be so if we fight one error by getting in bed with its opposite. The alliances we might make with the powers and principalities of this world sear our own conscience as with a hot iron (see First Timothy 4:2). We lose our “saltiness.” And you may recall that Jesus says un-salty salt might as well be manure (see Gospel of Matthew 5:13).
One of the great tragedies of my life is seeing some of my Christian elders and teachers lose their saltiness and sear their own consciences for the contempt and hatred they have allowed to metastasize toward the errors of others. They have fallen into error themselves and they can’t even see it. The devil celebrates.