RELIGIOUS BOUNTY HUNTERS
by Mike Yaconelli

(EDITOR'S NOTE: This article is reprinted by permission of The Door May/June 1994.)

I have always believed that when a culture forgets about God, when a culture abandons its belief in God, what happens is an epidemic of immorality.

What I didn’t understand was that when the morality dam breaks, what comes rushing out is a wall of fear — endless rivers of fear that are covering our entire nation.

Fear is a mysterious visitor — an uninvited guest. Fear is elusive and threatening. It is difficult to identify and harder still to admit. Once it visits, fear tries to move in permanently, and hold us hostage — canceling out our reason, our faith, our dreams.

We have become a nation of fear. Afraid to send our children to school. Afraid to drive our cars in the city. Afraid to ride the subway. Afraid to leave our houses. Afraid to visit other countries. Afraid of terrorists. Afraid of carjackers. Afraid of anyone outside our own ethnic group. Afraid to send our children to day care. Afraid of AIDS. Afraid of homosexuals.

It is interesting what fear does to religion. It was the fear of Jesus that drove His religious enemies to orchestrate His death on the cross. These religious leaders were able to manipulate the crowds in to mindless mobs that forced the government to acquiesce to their demands.

What is so disturbing is what fear is doing to the right-wing, conservative church in America. They, like all of us, are afraid of the disintegration of our society. They, like all of us, are concerned about the increasing violence, the hatred and anger that rule our cities, the collapse of the family, and the moral vertigo that characterizes our leaders.

What worries me is not our common fear, it is what is happening to the conservative, fundamental wing of the Church in the face of that fear: they are sending, with their blessing, an army of religious bounty hunters to label and destroy anyone they consider to be the enemy.

I recently received a flyer in the mail telling of a fastselling book which names Madeleine L’Engle as one of the enemies. Madeleine L’Engle? (What has she been doing? Hiding crystals in A Wrinkle in Time? Are her books backmasked?) Richard Foster gets blacklisted for his emphasis on “mysticism.” How about the radio station in Wisconsin that is naming Karen Mains as the enemy because Karen dared to tell the truth about some rocky times in her life and marriage? (Apparently, real Christians don’t have rocky times in their marriages.) Hank Hanegraaff, the self proclaimed “Bible Answer Man,” has decided that Eugene Peterson’s new translation of the Bible called The Message is “New Age and soft on homosexuals.

”The list of “enemies” gets larger every day. These bounty hunters are really Bible terrorists who see nothing wrong with blowing up someone’s reputation or assassinating a person’s character. They have traded in their Christian faith for the weapons of Caesar. They have decided to fight power with power. They are the modern-day Crusaders, and the new Inquisition has begun. The new conservative right has abandoned Jesus’ strategy of allowing Himself to be nailed to the cross. They have decided instead to nail their enemies to a cross.

Madeleine L’engle, Richard Foster, Karen Mains, Eugene Peterson are great gifts to the Church and to culture at large — yet, in a moment of disgrace, rather than admitting it is afraid, the Church has attacked its own.

This kind of behavior must bring tears to the eyes of Jesus.

Home