Tyranny, Not Love

I studied the German-American theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich while in college. Tillich didn't believe in Biblical inerrancy, so he could be critical of ideas and views expressed in the Bible. One of the things he felt fell short was the Gold Rule. He said it shouldn't be "love your neighbor as you would yourself." Rather it should be "love your neighbor as your neighbor would be loved." In other words, love should take into account the fact that the one being loved is a distinct individual separate from yourself whose needs and point of view may be different from your own.

Martin Buber, the Austrian Jewish philosopher, wrote about the distinction between the I-thou relationship and the I-it relationship. In the I-thou relationship the individuals recognize one another as subjects where each individual respects the integrity and the mystery of the other. In other words each person allows the other to unfold naturally, reveal themselves in their own time rather than one placing their own prejudices and expectations onto the other. When you do limit the other person to your understanding of them, the relationship becomes objectified. It becomes an I-it relationship.

You often see this stark difference in the relationships between parents and children, even parents and their adult children. Parents often have a hard time accepting that their children don’t necessarily reflect their expectations of them and that they have matured into distinct human beings that the parent doesn’t own or control. The result is a constant battle of wills.

It has been my experience that many fundamentalist Christians get caught up in dogma, and they define the world according to that dogma. And they have a hard time seeing people as the individuals that they are. To a lot of them, you are what you should be according to their dogma, and if you don’t measure up to their dogma, you should be fixed so that you fit their dogma. For instance, if you're LGBT, they might believe that you shouldn't be LGBT because they have made up their mind that there is no place in this world for such a thing, so they set about to fix you or erase you. And they often have the same attitude in regard to the rest of their dogma. You are to believe what they believe. If you haven't "accepted Christ as your personal savior" then they have a tendency to want you to do that. And they want to hear that you have come around to their position, and they want you to use their vocabulary when you finally accept their beliefs.

I do not believe this is love even though fundamentalist Christians rationalize what they do by calling it love. It is infantile to expect the world around you and the people in it to reflect what's going on inside of your head. And to use your power over others to try to force them to reflect back to you the assumptions you’ve made about them is abusive. This is tyranny. It is not love.