The Seven Pointless Things That Christians Fight About




Growing up as a Pastor’s kid in the eighties gave me a front-row pew to the kind of vitriol and anger that can emerge from an otherwise lovely and mild-mannered Christian when you say or do something that challenges their strongly held beliefs. When my country conducted a nationwide plebiscite on whether same-sex couples should be allowed to marry, the Senior Pastor of my old church went on a one-man campaign to lobby for the “no” vote, distributing literature warning people about the horrifying moral slippery slope we would find ourselves on if we allowed certain people — most of whom won’t have anything to do with the church — the freedom to marry the person who they actually love.

I remember the look of righteous indignation that the pastor gave me when I dared to suggest that the world would not end if same-sex couples got married, and — shock, horror — maybe God was not as offended by the idea as he was. I soon learned that it was pointless to try to argue with this man. Christians have a habit of taking the moral high ground, staking claim to some ideological position on a particular issue — even if that issue, when you boil it down, doesn’t even matter all that much in the grand scheme of things, or worse when their position is just plain wrong. If there is an argument to be had about matters of doctrine, many Christians are up for the fight.