NY Times Op-Ed: Why Are So Many Christians So Cruel?

Update: It’s Time For A New Era Of Christian Civility

New York Times Op-Ed: Why Are So Many Christians So Cruel?, by David French (Author, Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation (2020)):

Here’s a question I hear everywhere I go, including from fellow Christians: Why are so many Christians so cruel?

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve heard someone say something like: I’ve experienced blowback in the secular world, but nothing prepared me for church hate. Christian believers can be especially angry and even sometimes vicious.

It’s a simple question with a complicated answer, but that answer often begins with a particularly seductive temptation, one common to people of all faiths: that the faithful, those who possess eternal truth, are entitled to rule. Under this construct, might makes right, and right deserves might.

Most of us have sound enough moral instincts to reject the notion that might makes right. Power alone is not a sufficient marker of righteousness. We may watch people bow to power out of fear or awe, but yielding to power isn’t the same thing as acknowledging that it is legitimate or that it is just.

The idea that right deserves might is different and may even be more destructive. It appeals to our ambition through our virtue, which is what makes it especially treacherous. It masks its darkness. It begins with the idea that if you believe your ideas are just and right, then it’s a problem for everyone if you’re not in charge.

In that context, your own will to power is sanctified. It’s evidence not so much of your own ambition, but of your love for the community. You want what’s best for your neighbors, and what’s best for your neighbors is, well, you. …

There’s … a theological objection to the idea that right deserves might. In Christian theology, Jesus was both God and man, a person without sin. I’m fallen and flawed. He is not.

And how did this singular individual — this eternal being made flesh — approach power? He rejected it, by word and by deed. …

It’s remarkable how often ambition becomes cruelty. In our self-delusion, we persuade ourselves that we’re not just right but that we’re so clearly right that opposition has to be rooted in arrogance and evil. We lash out. We seek to silence and destroy our enemies.

But it is all for the public good. So we sleep well at night. We become one of the most dangerous kinds of people — a cruel person with a clean conscience.

The way of Christ, by contrast, forecloses cruelty. It requires compassion. It inverts our moral compass, or at least it should. We love rags-to-riches stories, for example, so if many of us were writing Christ’s story, we might begin with a manger, but we’d end with a throne.

But Christ’s life began in a manger, and it ended on a cross. He warned his followers that a cross could come for them as well. An upside-down kingdom began with an upside-down birth. When Jesus himself is humble, how do we justify our pride?

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Other op-eds by David French: