Essay:The lie of "moderate" Christianity.

Whenever engaging with Christians in debate about such social issues as same-sex marriage, feminism, and evolution, freethinkers are bound to come across an escape hatch, usually signified by the phrase, “Oh, that’s just the extremists”. By adopting the title of moderate, the Christian church, particularly Protestants, can espouse hatred of the “other” without it come across as hatred. In not recognizing this tactic, we allow our opponents to make hate speech acceptable.

When it comes to LGBT rights, I doubt that any Christian would disagree that their religion is very anti-gay. However, they like to disguise this by saying that they’re not anti-gay, just pro-Christian. To anybody that has studied the civil rights movement, this sound very familiar. Some very interesting parallels can be drawn from the arguments used against gay marriage, and the arguments used against inter-racial marriage. If you doubt this connection, use this simple thought experiment: Take an argument against LGBT marriage, and replace the term “LGBT” with “Interracial”. The result is exactly the same arguments that were being used by the KKK back in the 60’s. Christians will of course deny this similarity by saying that being LGBT is a choice, but after study after study has shown this to be false, this is no longer is an excuse. But why all this denial and deception? Because if the church actually obeyed their religions commands, they would be considered a hate-group at best (a fact that is not lost on the SPLC). That’s why many consider the Westboro Baptist Church to be more honest, at least, than most Christians: they at least acknowledge their hatred as hatred.

Feminism has even more disguise thrown on it. Many a Christian will willingly self-identify as feminist, and the only people that openly oppose feminism are about as close to extremist as you can get. But in their subconscious actions, they show their true colors. Before a wedding, women will give the bride-to-be a cookbook, while the men give the groom tools. Girls are given dolls and shown how to sew while boys are taught how to hunt. While it is true that girls are allowed to participate in more masculine activities, like hunting, if a boy expresses interest in knitting and his family freaks out because he must be gay. The explicit sexism of the Christian narrative is never so obvious than in the story of Adam and Eve, where Eve was created simply to bear Adam’s children and to soothe his loneliness. Her entire existence is contingent on serving Adam. Yet, by verbally aligning themselves with Feminism, the Christians get a free pass to go under the radar of feminist discussion, and many a future atheist is never realized because of this.

In contrast to the last two points, minimum cover goes into disguising the contempt for which most (over half, according to the latest PEW surveys) Christians hold the theory of evolution. Where they do put on a disguise is their willful ignorance as to the subject. Creationism is not, as some atheists would have it, a fringe movement that is isolated to the Deep South. It is an active anti-science movement that is still very much alive, even among so-called moderate churches. Up until very recently, the church I was raised in taught creationism classes to children, an act that was heavily responsible for my own deconversion. However, these facts are rarely known, because recently Christians have begun wearing their creationism under their hat, instead of actively engaging in the movement. Here we see yet another danger of the moderate label: it has allowed a dangerous anti-science movement to survive and thrive under the radar.

In allowing the term “moderate” to be thrown around so flippantly by Christians, we have allowed dangerous and hateful ideologies to spread, and infect people that ordinarily would be resistant to those ideologies. So what can we do to stop this? We need to start speaking out. If a so-called “moderate” Christian starts spouting anti-gay rhetoric, call them on it. Do not allow hateful bigots to disguise themselves as kind people, instead drag their ideas out into the light, and expose them for what they really are.