Shortly after I wrote this, I discovered that UCC pastor Chuck Currie is under attack from a right-wing Christian blog:

[Rev. Currie] seems wounded that I don’t consider him a Christian. When people teach the opposite of the essentials of Christianity yet parade around as pastors and label their opponents with demonizing and baseless accusations then what other conclusion can I draw? Words mean things, and to call him a Christian mocks the cross and the blood of the martyrs.

Obviously, there’s a lot to unpack there. But what I really want to know is this: why are conservative Christians so hell-bent on excluding people from their club?

NB: Here’s C. S. Lewis from “The Screwtape Letters” on the sin of spiritual pride:

I have been in correspondence with Slumtrimpet who is in charge of your patient’s young woman, and begin to see the chink in her armour. It is an unobtrusive little vice which she shares with nearly all women who have grown up in an intelligent circle united by a clearly defined belief; and it consists in a quite untroubled assumption that the outsiders who do not share this belief are really too stupid and ridiculous. The males, who habitually meet these outsiders, do not feel that way; their confidence, if they are confident, is of a different kind. Hers, which she supposes to be due to Faith, is in reality largely due to the mere colour she has taken from her surroundings. It is not, in fact, very different from the conviction she would have felt at the age of ten that the kind of fish-knives used in her father’s house were the proper or normal or “real” kind, while those of the neighbouring families were “not real fish-knives” at all.