"revusion toward anything that chooses to call itself 'Christian'"

Here is a piece of an article by David James Duncan - a bit spikey as usual, but as usual quite entertaining and just simply good.
It is featured in the July/August 2005 issue of Orion Magazine.
The rest of the article can be found by clicking on the link at the bottom.
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Most of the famed leaders of the new “Bible-based” American political alliances share a conviction that their causes and agendas are approved of, and directly inspired, by no less a being than God. This enviable conviction is less enviably arrived at by accepting on faith, hence as fact, that the Christian Bible pared down into American TV English is God’s “word” to humankind, that this same Bible is His only word to humankind, and that the politicized apocalyptic fundamentalists’ unprecedentedly selective slant on this Bible is the one true slant.

The position is remarkably self-insulating. Possessing little knowledge of or regard for the world’s wealth of religious, literary, spiritual and cultural traditions, fundamentalist leaders allow themselves no concept of love or compassion but their own. They can therefore honestly say that it is out of “Christian compassion” and a sort of “tough love” for others that they seek to impose on all others their tendentiously literalized God, Bible and slant.

But how tough can love be before it ceases to be love at all? Well-known variations on the theme include the various Inquisitions’ murderously tough love for “heretics,” who were defined as those defiant of the Inquisition itself; the European Catholic and American Puritan tough love for “witches,” who were defined as virtually any sexually active or humanitarian or unusually skilled single woman whose healing herbs or independence from men defied a male church hierarchy’s claim to be the source of all healing; the Conquistador’s genocidally tough love for the Incas, Aztecs, and Mayans whose gold they stole for the “glory” of a church meant to honor the perfect poverty of a life begun in a manger and ended on a cross; the missionaries’ and U.S. Cavalry’s genocidally tough love for land-rich indigenous peoples whose crime was merely to exist; and, today, the Bush team’s murderously tough love for an oil-rich Muslim world as likely to convert to Texas neocon values as Bush himself is likely to convert to Islam.

Each of these crusader groups has seen itself as fighting to make its own or some other culture “more Christian” even as it tramples the teachings of Christ into a blood-soaked earth. The result, among millions of non-fundamentalists, has been revulsion toward anything that chooses to call itself “Christian.”

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/156/