My biggest daily struggle is that of balancing the fight with compassion. Christ treated His enemies with love because it’s an easy task to treat kindly those who find favor with you. It’s a lot harder to treat those who hate you the same way. It is my biggest struggle.
The story of the David and Jason Benham moved me perhaps because it is the most recent in a string of stories this year where people of faith or of different opinion are attacked; also maybe because they seem like sincere people of faith. The SunTrust story broke while I was on air, inspiring this rant. Tonight I appeared on the “Kelly File” with excellent guest host Martha MacCallum to debate the issue a bit with a democratic strategist named Jessica Ehrlich. My intention was to have a civil discourse, where perhaps we disagree, but civil nonetheless, but find common ground on this being America and there is room for all, faith-based or not. I quickly found that this was not to be the case. Ms. Ehrlich was set upon castigating these brothers for their faith. It wasn’t enough for Ms. Ehrlich that neither David nor Jason have ever expressed anything either in voice or otherwise that would classify, it was “hatred” so long as the brothers didn’t endorse in what they themselves simply disagree. It wasn’t enough for Ms. Ehrlich that the Benham brothers remained committed, on their own time and their own dime, to the six families whose homes they were flipping for their now-cancelled HGTV program—they had failed to endorse a lifestyle outside of their Biblical belief set. Ms. Ehrlich called them hateful “anti-homosexuals,” “extremists,” among other things, to which I asked her if her simple disagreement with David and Jason Benham’s lifestyle then would classify her as an “anti-Christian bigot.” It’s the same logic. She didn’t like the measure she uses to be used against herself.
I have friends and members of my own family who are gay, I have friends and family members who believe whole-heartedly that abortion is fantastic, and magically, we still all get along. I am not hurt if they do not share my beliefs no more than they are hurt that I do not share theirs. I care about these people, which is why I would never go out of my way to hurt them, especially over what we believe. It’s why it floors me that people like Ms. Ehrlich, who I’m sure prides herself on “equality” and compassion, would go out of her way to malign the characters of two men whose only crime seems to be that they are Christians. Perhaps she was not raised in a diverse environment and didn’t learn to coexist with people who think differently than she, but it’s about time she learned.
Genuinely, I didn’t plan on throwing down, so to speak, in our discussion, but when I realized that anything I said was going to be shouted down and met with a closed mind, I chose to play hardball. I am not going to be misled into believing that I should be meek about my faith to appease those who do not share it, I am not going to be meek in defending other people of faith, or defending my faith, period, when it is unfairly maligned such as it was this evening. It is not a pejorative to say that someone is an anti-Christian bigot if, in fact, they are an anti-Christian bigot. People will feign more offense over the title than the action and the action must change before the label will. Do not allow yourself to be driven away from expressing or sharing your faith. Hold yourself to a standard of love, but the bottom line is that the truth isn’t mean, it’s the truth.
Here is the video of the exchange, courtesy Jim Hoft at Progressives Today.
Romans 14:16, Isaiah 5:20.
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