True Believers

“The Christian Church is called to disciple the nations over the course of centuries, not to be social engineers for the next three weeks, maybe four. Our message is the cross of Christ, not a systematic and doctrinal bundle of plastic explosives. Our approach must be patient, organic, biblical, and inductive, and never ideological, abstract, and deductive. When a revolutionary mind gets hold of an abstract ideological system (and it does not much matter whether he calls it Marxism or Calvinism) and conducts all ‘reforms’ in terms of deductions made from his abstraction in the sky, he has become what Hoffer pointedly called the ‘true believer.’ The ‘truth’ represented by the cause no longer matters, the cause does. And people just get in the way” (Mother Kirk, p. 82).