If You Worship an Angry God, You’ll Be an Angry Person

A reader named Paul wrote to me with the following question:

Why is there more often than not such an intolerance, condemnation and even hatred between the different faiths and denominations ? Is it the Devil causing this?

Paul, thanks for your question. Before I get into it, I must say that I think “The devil made me do it” is the ultimate cop-out, so I believe we need to dig deeper to understand why Christians can be so unkind — not only to one another, but to anyone.

On his Redeeming God blog, Christian author Jeremy Myers wrote a post called “ Why are Christians so mean? Here are 10 Excuses Church People Give for Treating Others Badly.” His list of “reasons” is pretty sad, really more a recounting of the ways any human beings, not just Christians, justify and rationalize their own poor behavior, ranging from “Hey, nobody’s perfect” to “I’m no worse than anyone else.”

It might be tempting to think that Christians have gotten worse over time — that as our society decays, everyone — including Christians — have shorter fuses and less bandwidth for compassion and kindness. But unfortunately, history reminds us that bad behavior goes all the way back to the beginning. I recently saw a wonderful documentary about the ordination of the first women priests in the Episcopal Church called The Philadelphia Eleven (try to see it if you can). On the one hand it’s an inspiring story of women so committed to their faith and their own sense of a vocation to serve God that they were willing to buck the conventions of their time that said only men could be in leadership positions. But on another level, the movie is a heartbreaking record of how much venom and hatred was aimed at these women, because they “broke the rules” (the first women ordained as priests in the Episcopal Church did so before the leadership of the church gave them permission to do so, so naturally their opponents decried them for “rebellion” and “disobedience” — but the name-calling and the angry rancor got much, much worse than that).

The ordination of the Philadelphia eleven happened in 1974, half a century ago. Christians did not need social media or smartphones to issue death threats and warnings of eternal damnation to the people they didn’t like.