Religion: Fighting Fundamentalism

I think at least Garrett will appreciate this: the people in my world are fighting a battle for "hearts and minds" against the creeping fundamentalism endemic to American religious life.

The self-styled "conservatives" think my kind are reprobates, trying to undermine what they think the Christian faith is really about. Liberals don't trust us much because we don't subscribe to that party line, either. It's tough to be nuanced, politically or religiously, but this is what we do; this is what we model for others, while trying to be friends with them. Because if one cannot do that, one can't really influence them, either.

The leader of my own Christian community, Alan, offered this tonight; a shot across the bow in terms of the normal Southern religious discourse:

I suppose, generally speaking (speaking of the Bible and me and maybe you), if you are a very hard-core Sola Scriptura evangelical Christian who's very much into pre-millennial rapture and "fags" going to hell - if you believe every minute detail of how we are to live our lives is found in the black letters (and red) of your King James Bible - if you are a serious 5-point Calvinist who believes that God has a mysterious plan that involves the horrible death of a molested child - if you secretly still think the Roman Catholic Church is the "whore of Babylon" - yeah, uhhh, you're not going to like me very much. You will, perhaps, think I am beyond liberal and perhaps not even truly Christian. I will have to learn to deal with that.

I like to offer sometimes, "See, we're not all like that."