I am not calling for evangelicals to weaken or become conciliatory, but I am calling them to own up to the fact that oppositional identity does not produce the Fruit of the Spirit. The obsession with sin – especially other people’s – is the bigger issue. Again, I’m not calling for weakness or permissiveness – I’m saying some of us need to tone it down and check ourselves. Our priorities are getting out of whack and this is the sin we should be worried about.

The other issue that is much bigger for the churches is how we handle Biblical interpretation. If we were to do a better job making sure Christ is our interpretive lens, we would stand with Christ looking at the New Testament through him, then looking at the Old Testament and the continuum between the two Biblical testaments through this Christ-centered lens. This secures our holding high the Centrality of Christ and the Supremacy of Christ.

When we put more focus on sin than we do on Christ, we build a doctrinal model with sin at the center and Christ in its obit. In this model, the King of Kings is peripheral and serves to solve a problem – a problem that is distracting us from the Savior himself. At least, it appears that way in the public narrative. The media have a hand in this, but they wouldn’t have cause to run stories that reflect division if Christians didn’t behave so divisively to begin with.

My mistake – clearly you were just being a jerk.