Christian = Hater

Timothy Dalrymple confesses that being an evangelical Christian makes him a hater. I think he's exactly right. Here's how he begins his mea culpa:

Being an evangelical Christian, of course, I grew up with vicious hatreds implanted deep within my heart. Hatred (I refuse to use “hate” when the proper word is “hatred”) for women who obtain abortions. Hatred for gays. Hatred for criminals and illegal aliens. Hatred for people of other faiths. Hatred, basically, for anyone unlike myself and my cru.

I am a Christian, therefore I must be a hater. I eat hatred for breakfast — and yes, it takes like hate. So, at least, I’m told.

For a long time, I resisted this argument. I spent time with people who had abortions, and with friends who were openly gay, and with people whose faiths were diametrically opposed to my own — but I never felt hatred toward any of them. Love, yes. Compassion, to be sure. Concern, sometimes. But not hatred. Someone must have spiked my haterade, because I couldn’t seem to find within myself all these hatreds that, I was told, seethed and festered deep within me.

The curious thing was, I didn’t find this burning hatred in the evangelical Christians around me, either. They were good-hearted people. They took women in crisis into their homes. They worked with troubled youth and delivered food to the homeless. They started tutoring programs for children in East Palo Alto. Many (though not all) of them supported Reagan, Bush 1, Bush 2 and John McCain — which, I guess, means that they hated science, rationality, the environment, and evolution.

But if they were filled with hatred for actual people groups, it must have been buried down deep. Most of these men and women in the churches I attended felt, as I do, that abortion is wrong and that marriage was ordained by God for the joining of male and female. Many of them were strongly opposed to illegal immigration. Still, try though I might, I couldn’t peel back all the layers of kindness and sincere conviction to find the trembling, bigoted, hate-filled hater underneath it all.

Now, I no longer resist the argument. I’m willing to confess. I am a Christian — a conservative evangelical Christian to boot — and there are many things I hate. I am hate-filled.

Dalrymple elaborates on his hatreds at the link. What he says offers an excellent portrait, in my opinion, of the average Christian and the tensions with which he or she lives.