Albino Lizard

There are religious leaders today who teach their followers that Christ’s Golden Rule is a mistake. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” — that rule teaches compassion and empathy. And yet somehow, in certain corners of religious life, empathy itself has become the thing to root out.

How does that happen? I think it helps to look at how it’d happened before.

Hijacked in plain sight

Sometimes a Facebook user dies, or just stops logging in, and someone else quietly takes over the page. That happened to a friend of mine — “she” started chatting with me, trying to sell something. It wasn’t her at all. We reported it, and the hijacker was shut out.

Religion gets hijacked the same way. Movements claim the name “Christian” while teaching something that differs from — sometimes is the complete opposite of — what Christ actually taught. It’s been over 2,000 years since Jesus walked the earth. That’s a long time for a message to drift from its source.

This is part of why I find the Bahá’í Faith compelling: its three Founders walked the earth less than 200 years ago. There’s too much documented evidence of what They actually said and taught for anyone to convincingly twist Their words or invent a theology and slap Their names on it.

It’s harder to catch when the “hijacking” happened a thousand years ago instead of last week.

The pattern in history

Christianity, I’d argue, lost its purity over a thousand years ago. There have always been individuals who lived the gospel sincerely — that thread has never disappeared — but they’ve become a scattered minority next to the institutional version.

A few points along that timeline:

The Crusades. In 1095 AD, Pope Urban II called Christians to arms to reconquer Jerusalem from Muslims, promising spiritual reward for doing so. Organized Christianity could not acknowledge Muhammad as a Manifestation of God without a wrenching religious conversion — and those in power stood to lose their privileges if they did. So instead, the Faith that had emerged from Arabia in the 7th century, calling people back to the service of God, became the enemy.

Colonization. Centuries of crusading against Islam were followed by Columbus’s arrival in a land already occupied by other human beings. The following year, a papal decree — the Doctrine of Discovery — gave European soldiers religious sanction to seize land and resources across the Americas, and to kill and enslave people across Africa and the Americas. Even the Catholic Church now acknowledges this was wrong.

Manifest Destiny. By the 19th century, the belief that the United States was divinely ordained to expand across the continent justified clearing Native peoples from their land by any means convenient — often accompanied by the same racial contempt that fueled the holocausts against Jewish communities in Europe. Many of the people carrying this out called themselves Christian.

Not much has changed since 1095, really. Jerusalem is still contested. And in the meantime — this is my own conviction — the Sun of Truth has risen again in the Person of Bahá’u’lláh.

The same story, today

Given that history, it’s not surprising that there are still “wolves in sheep’s clothing” teaching that Christ’s Golden Rule was a mistake. The method is the same one it’s always been: discard empathy, define some other group as less-than, and atrocity becomes possible. I can’t imagine those teachers being welcomed to paradise after editing the Golden Rule out of their own Bible

What gets dismissed today as “woke” is, more often, just the ordinary content of a spiritual awakening: a heart opened to the pain of others — the pain of feeling unseen because of gender, skin color, who they are. Every religious tradition has language for the moment of awakening — the ah-hah, the ecstatic experience, coming out of self, being born again, seeing the big picture, and so on. Acknowledging the historical trauma and accumulated disadvantage carried by oppressed and dispossessed peoples isn’t a political slogan. It’s what that awakening looks like when you turn and look at the world.

Where it gets confusing

Some movements teach a version of “enlightenment” that leaves empathy out entirely — and they can be persuasive, because they often start from a true premise before landing somewhere hard-hearted. Here’s where I’d draw the line differently:

• “Using abortion as birth control is wrong.” True — but abortion needs to remain a legal medical option for genuinely difficult pregnancies and miscarriages.
• “Using hormones or surgery to treat gender dysphoria is sad and foolish.” It’s a serious medical decision — one that should be a legal choice, neither mandated nor forbidden.
• “Homosexuality is an aberration.” Even granting that view, it calls for compassion toward people living it, not condemnation.
• “Promiscuity is wrong.” Maybe — and morality starts with not judging someone else’s choices.
• “Keep the government out of my right to bear arms.” I disagree: the right to a weapon is like the right to drive a car.
  Regulation is how we keep each other safe.
• “Adultery is wrong.” Agreed — and the consequences should land the same regardless of which spouse is responsible.
• “Mankind is not one; the genders are not equal.” There are real differences between genders and between ethnicities — but none of them justify a hierarchy. This age is dawning toward oneness, not away from it. Anything that insists on division is pulling against that current, not with it.

Each of these starts from something true and then goes someplace I don’t go. That gap — between the true premise and the hard-hearted conclusion — is exactly where empathy either survives or gets cut out. That’s the choice this post is really about.