One of those atrocities was the Salem Witch Trials, during which the Church created mass hysteria and then executed people because they were hysteric.
We Christians are particularly skilled at fear mongering and significantly prone to Group Think.
We can grieve the innocent lives slaughtered because of the mania the Church itself created (and we should), but we must also realize that we still hunt witches today.
We’re still prone to creating our own narratives, becoming obsessed with them, and then using the very things we trained our eyes to “see” to condemn people, all the while feeling self-righteous about the pseudo form of “justice” that we mete out.
It’s hard to imagine ourselves as the Puritans, but we are all too happy to take up the arms of our self-righteousness to keep the Church free of what we ourselves deem as a threat.
We convince ourselves and each other that certain ideas can be narrowly defined and then we create what is called a “thought terminating cliche” out of those self-created narrow definitions.
We arm ourselves with pitchforks raiding the villages for anything reeking of “progressivism” or “wokeism”.
We drag anyone “deconstructing” out into the streets to be stoned.
Conservatism is our Puritanism, and any “evidence” of “liberalism” is guilt of a crime punishable by the death of our compassion and companionship.
We imagine our God as small, fragile, and in need of our vigilante “protection” and we fancy His Church as agents of “justice” against the very chaos that it often itself creates.
All the while we look nothing like the Christ who welcomed questions and honored humans and touched the lepers.
We have no time for the good works that were created for us before the foundation of the world because there are witches to hunt.
We are obsessed with brandishing the whips of His righteous anger, forgetting that it is our own tables of greed and self-absorption that He would overturn.
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