Projection

Kathy Baldock has generously contributed a considerable amount of her time to read and review the latest book by a Christian purporting to offer a "compassionate" response to the issue of homosexuality. Among other things Kathy observes that, while the author (Michael Brown) appears to sincerely believe he's being compassionate, she found nothing in the content of the book that any outside observer would be likely to interpret as compassion.

Based on my own experiences growing up in fundamentalistic churches, I don't find that surprising. While believers in such churches are routinely exhorted to harbor warm thoughts toward others in the name of love, compassion is inevitably divorced from empathy (and thereby reduced to an abstraction) since the idea that anyone could genuinely view and interpret the world differently than they do borders on heresy. Such differences of perspective must be denounced as either willful rebellion against "the Truth" or satanic deception. Any factual or experiential evidence that contradicts what they have defined as Truth is likewise beneath consideration.

In the twisted version of the Golden Rule that emerges from such conditioning, fundamentalists are taught to "do unto others" by first projecting their own feelings and opinions onto everyone around them and then demanding absolute conformity to that narrow vision. That they are conflating God's will with their own never occurs to them, since they have been armed with a list of Bible verses that appear to support their arguments.

While individuals trapped in this mode of thinking are not irredeemable by any means, it's not always feasible to remain in relationship with somebody who considers you to be a hell-bound apostate. But at the very least we can temper our reactions with an understanding of where they are coming from, extending the same grace we would hope to receive were our positions reversed.