Christmas and the upside-down kingdom of God

Religion is one of the most dangerous forces on Earth.

- David French

A Dec 21 picture taken at the Church of the Nativity, believed to be the birthplace of Jesus Christ, in the West Bank town of Bethlehem.

(AFP)

If you've ever encountered true fundamentalists, you know why. When you combine eternal stakes with absolute certainty, it produces the kind of people who are happy to be cruel in the name of God.

In fact, they can view their cruelty as a form of kindness. If they treat you with decency, doesn't that make you comfortable in your sin? It's important for them to take opportunities to confront people when you can - in other words, to tell people that they're wrong, often in the most strident of ways. How else will they understand the gravity of their own sin?

To the fundamentalist, disagreement is proof of apostasy. But it can be even worse than that if you're wrong, then you might lead other people into error, and that makes you dangerous.

That's one reason fundamentalists of all stripes are often such zealous censors. A fundamentalist can see every person who's wrong as a kind of Patient Zero in a potential pandemic of paganism. And don't think for a moment that fellow believers are spared the fundamentalists' ire. They're a chief target. They have no excuse for their errors, and they receive the most vitriol of all.

The same principle can be applied to secular fundamentalists. Perhaps you've met them the people who define themselves through their individual politics, who show a kind of sneering contempt for dissent, and are very, very concerned with who is platformed and who is not.