On "real Christians."

This is a lightly edited version of a post I first made several years ago on Facebook. Sadly, it never seems to stop being relevant.

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Every time I hear #Christians saying "they're not real Christians" or "this isn't real #Christianity," about other Christians doing something that brings discredit on the ##religion, my skin crawls.

Because if they're not Christians ... well, neither was Constantine. Neither were the generations of #monarchs who followed, invoking the divine right of kings. Neither were the #popes and #bishops and #priests—and note that I'm not just talking about #Catholics here—who almost universally supported and legitimized the idea that #God had put our leaders in place, and to oppose them was #blasphemy.

Neither were the #Crusaders, the #Inquisitors, the #witch-burners. Neither were the soldiers who fought generations of #religious #wars within #Christendom, including the Thirty Years' War that wrought devastation equal to both World Wars. Neither for that matter were the politicians who gave us what we *call* the First World War, in which most of the major combatants on both sides proudly claimed the Christian label, and in several cases were still official theocracies.

Neither were the Christians who rounded up their #Jewish neighbors in the Second for delivery to the camps—and if you claim that was the work of a #neopagan cult that maybe a few thousand people total ever took seriously, I'll laugh in your face before cutting you out of my life. (But I'll remember who and what you are, believe me.) Neither were the people who used Christianity to justify #conquest and #slavery and #genocide and #segregation, for centuries, and in many cases still do.

In short, if you say these people aren't Christians, you're saying most Christians throughout the *entire history of the religion* weren't Christians. You can die on that hill if you really want to. But you'll die alone, and most likely at the hands of your fellow believers.

Christians are, as a rule, no worse than other people. But you're no better, either. Do you *want* to be better? Great, that's what everyone else wants too.

So prove it. Stop making excuses. Own these people, and *then* confront them. Admit that they're yours, and then expunge them. Scourge the heretics with fire and sword, and send them wailing into the outer darkness tearing their hair and gnashing their teeth. Cast them into the lake of fire.

If you do this, if you have first the moral and then the physical courage to face this monstrosity in your midst unflinchingly and with full knowledge of what it is, then you'll have plenty of help. #Jews and #Muslims and #Hindus and #Wiccans and #atheists and all the rest won't just cheer you on. We'll be right there by your side.

And while there are in the US still more Christians than all of us put together, there aren't more of *this kind* of Christian than all decent human beings put together. We can't fight them alone. Neither can you. Together we can—as long as you're honest about what that means.

If you don't? We'll be right back to #Torquemada, with a high-tech gloss. You might live a little longer than the rest of us, but not by much, and you'll go to the rack and the stake and the oven with the words of your own holy writ shouted in your ears.

Those are the only two options. Your choice.

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Addendum:

I have a great many friends who grew up Christian, and left the religion at some point. Despite having made the choice to walk away from their childhood faith, they often feel the reflexive need to defend the people they were, and in most cases their families still are.

Those who are still Christians, of whom I trust I also have a fair number left, may feel the same impulse—although interestingly, it seems to me they're less reflexive on the whole than the former believers.

We're all made of our #history. The people we were are still the people we are, in some corner of our brains. And there are complexities about being on the inside of any group that outsiders can never quite grasp. It's similar to the way I am about the #military, which is practically a religion in its own right.

Okay. Stipulated, as lawyers say on TV and maybe in real life too. I get it. Now please get this:

Unless you *grew up* as a member of a religious minority, you will most likely never understand, on a gut level, the terror the majority religion inflicts by its very existence.

This isn't unique to Christianity, to be clear. Every majority religion, in every time and place, has unconsciously (and often consciously as well, to be sure) been casually brutal to infidels and heretics. Nature of the beast. But here in the US, that beast invariably carries a cross, so there's the focus of my attention.

You don't have to understand it. Just accept that it exists, and it leaves scars. I can live with those scars, and so can nearly everyone else who bears them. That *stigma*, if you will.

But if you cut us, we still bleed. We'll heal from those wounds too, and add new scars to the old. Long after the bleeding stops, we'll remember who gave them to us.

Here I stand; I can do no other. How about you?