Fake Christians?

A recent post at Atheist Revolution notes an annoying but common phenomenon:  Whenever a Christian says or does something hateful or obviously evil, other Christians -- and even some atheists -- rush to denounce him as a "fake Christian" (or some similar term) on the grounds that no true Christian would say or do such a thing.  This is, of course, a textbook case of the "no true Scotsman" fallacy, defending the purity of a favored identity or ideology by arbitrarily re-defining any bad manifestation of it as not being part of it.  As Atheist Revolution points out, however, it's absurd for non-Christians to play along.  Not only do we have no reason to help whitewash a religion we don't believe in, but the "fake Christian" denunciation is simply not valid in most real-world cases.

One can imagine a few cases where it probably would be valid -- no true Christian would explicitly worship Satan, for example -- but most situations where it's actually used are murky at best.  For one thing, in two thousand years Christians themselves have never been able to agree on what true Christianity is.  From the earliest reliable historical records about Christianity, we hear of disputes about various details of doctrine, with the adherents of the winning dogma defining rival views as "heresies".  There were even conflicts over which documents should or should not be included in the Bible.  Sectarian divisions soon arose, and Christians have fought innumerable bloody wars with each other over the correct way to worship a deity who supposedly told them to love their enemies.  A few centuries ago, one of the few things that Protestants and Catholics agreed on was the virtue of burning each other at the stake.  The number of sects has steadily metastasized, and even those that maintain administrative unity over a large population (notably the Catholic Church) are riven with disagreements, in many cases pitting European and northern-US liberals against African, Asian, and southern-US reactionaries.  Given the cacophony of squabbling among Christians about what real Christianity is, there can be no meaningful consensus about whom to denounce as fakes.

The most hateful elements do, at least, generally have the sacred texts on their side.  Torquemada, the Crusaders, the pope who condemned Galileo, etc certainly had a deeper knowledge of the Bible, and lived in a more Christian-centered culture, than the modern liberal Christians who repudiate them.  The Bible really does condemn homosexuality -- and most of the anti-gay stuff is in the New Testament, proclaimed by persons far closer in time, culture, and belief to Jesus than any modern Christian is.  The present-day moderates reject the most disgusting Biblical taboos on the basis of modern morality, insisting that a deity thousands of years ago must, deep down, have been in agreement with the moral values of college-educated early-21st-century American liberals, even if those values would have been literally unimaginable to any of the people who wrote the texts of the Bible.  It is bizarre indeed that they denounce the modern fundamentalists, who do still uphold most of the taboos, as "fake Christians".

The Bible itself does contain some humane material, of course, mostly in the cited words of Jesus -- but one has to take this in context.  The modern liberal claim that Jesus's mission superseded or abrogated the Old Testament's intricate labyrinth of barbaric taboos is specifically refuted by Jesus himself in Matthew 5:17-19, and can only be salvaged by dishonest verbal sophistry.  Jesus is never quoted as explicitly rejecting or questioning the Old Testament's taboo on homosexuality, nor its endorsement of slavery, despite living in a time and place where slavery was common.  Moreover, as noted above, devout Christians have been studying the Bible from late Roman times down to the present, and until very recently, virtually none of them ever imagined that the teachings of Jesus somehow abrogated the condemnations of homosexuality, declarations of the subordinate status of women, etc which litter the pages of the Bible.  Only with the advent of modern changes in the secular moral view of such matters did a few Christians start to claim that God or Jesus anticipated and agreed with those modern views but oddly forgot to mention it, or mentioned it in such an obscure and indirect fashion that none of those generations of scholars noticed it until now.

So, sorry guys, but you're gonna have to own Fred Phelps and Jack Chick and Pat Robertson and all the rest of them.  You can say they're fake Christians, and they can say you are, and they're the ones who have most of the Bible and tradition backing them up.