What Radicalized Me?
My newest column at Religion News Service
Sorry to flood your inbox this week, friends! I’ve been writing up a storm in preparation for a very busy travel/speaking schedule this spring. And sometimes things I’ve been working on for weeks all get published around the same time!
So, here is another new essay, published this week at Religion News Service (or an excerpt anyway). This is an essay I figured would make me some friends and some enemies alike. But I hope even where we disagree, we can all respect at least the attempt to be consistent and to uphold human dignity the best we know how.:
“What radicalized you?”
If you spend any time on the internet, you’re likely to encounter this viral question, usually offered or answered in the context of some political or social issue on either side of the ideological aisle.
I was radicalized by the religious right.
A young adult in the 1980s, I was raised in a Christian home and was — and am — a Christian myself. But even as a young adult, I didn’t understand the churches I attended to be fundamentalist or conservative or any such label. We were “Bible-believing” congregations that embraced the inspiration and authority of God’s word, a view I still hold. In those days I lived largely outside evangelical Christian culture and the rising moral majority movement.
Until, one day, I was radicalized after being introduced at my church to the pro-life position on abortion. The abortion issue — brought to me, not by the Catholic Church, which had long stood against it, nor by the pacifist or radical feminists who also opposed abortion for generations, but by the religious right — changed me.
This isn’t where the story ends. Read the rest here (no paywall, no subscription needed).
Thanks for putting that into words. The imago dei in every human being makes them a person worth defending.
It was by memorizing and reading the Bible that I left my fundamentalist influences behind - the more time I spent in it, the more I questioned the fundamentalist use of the Bible as a weapon of control. I too firmly hold to the image of God being the basis for cherishing human life, but there is another, still more imporant truth that the Bible holds that should prevent us from applying concern for the imago Dei in narrow, restrictive ways and that is, that Jesus saves us from sin - not ours only but also the sins of the whole world. The entire world is soaked in innocent blood and reeks of death and we are all tainted by it in ways we do not often ponder - he removed the stain of blood and the stench of death by his death, and his mercy demands that we show mercy to others.
I am younger than you, but old enough to remember the spate of violence and killings of abortion providers by anti-abortion extremists in the 1990s. Those murders were condemned of course, but the pro-life movement did still imagine themselves more righteous than the abortionists and their clientele. Self-righteousness always leads to sinning so that good may come - by the 2010s, I realized that pro-life publications were exaggerating and outright lying for greater effect. Peter warned the church in his first epistle not to use their liberty in Christ as a cover for evil (2:16), but over the years, I have realized that the movement has enabled evil, as people use the issue to ignore other evils, not just by becoming one-issue activists or voters at the cost of other equally important ways to care for humans, but also, on an individual level, by persuading themselves that they are righteous because they condemn abortion, allowing them to ignore other sins in their own lives - how many utterly sleazy politicians and other disgraceful public figures have touted themselves as pro-life.