A quisling is a traitor who collaborates with the enemy.  The name comes from Vidkun Quisling, a Norwegian politician who aided Nazi Germany to conquer his own people and then ruled the collaborationist government they set up.  The term indicates one who, for personal gain, is willing to sell out his own people without regard for the worth or moral standing of the one  with whom they are collaborating.  They don’t care what suffering they inflict or whom they benefit as long as they are co-beneficiaries.

When one approaches the Christian faith, and the Bible especially, it is unavoidable that some of the things found there will disturb.  Deeply.  But this disturbance is far from being the end of the story.  I would like to argue that much of the time what is disturbing arises from an incomplete understanding of what is going on in the story, misunderstandings of the text and in some cases problematic translations.  What interests me, perhaps most, about these problems of scripture is the varied ways people react to them.  Some put them out of mind altogether, some search earnestly for exonerating circumstances and others are willing to write them off as the writer’s human error.   Others, more fanatical in my estimation, see this as unfaithful to the text and the faith.  They take the hard line that God’s actions are always recorded exactly in the text, always right and always beyond the need for justification.  Theologically, they often shelter under what is called the divine command theory, which is the theory that God can never do wrong because right are wrong are defined by his will alone.

To me this amounts to nothing more than divine might makes divine right, and is an abortion of the very idea of right and wrong, good or evil.  Beyond this, I have to say I am very personally disturbed by the mentality of someone who claims to be perfectly comfortable with the grotesque punishments commonly attributed to Hell, such that they can say (no matter what sort of life a person lived, what suffering they endured, what horrors they lived through) that any person truly deserves eternal torture if they did not acknowledge Christ in life.

Beyond this, I have heard many (whom I count as friends, by the way) go so far as to say these grotesque punishments exist for the glory of God.  For my part, if I believed their assessment of the Christian faith were correct and I believed the words of the scriptures actually disclosed that the god it purports to reveal was the sort of god who revels in that kind of unmerciful torture, I’d have no part in it.  And most Christians, I believe, when faced with the problem thus stated would have to qualify and mitigate God’s love of inflicting suffering before they would exclude themselves from agreeing with me.  But not everyone.

I can understand the drive to be consistent in theology, to make one’s beliefs black and white, and to refuse to use theology to excise the unpleasant parts of the scriptures, but I still find it disturbing when someone can actually revel in the cruelty of God and claim it brings him glory.  To me this is the epitome of the religious quisling.  A religious quisling is one who is so bent upon a fanatical following of God (at times for eternal personal gain) that they lose the ability to see other human beings, outside the elect, as worthy of sympathy or pity.  They are so bent upon “pure” theology and the benefits they think they receive from it that they are hardened toward what the theology makes of the rest of humanity, how it says God will treat them, and how they treat their neighbor as a result.

Perhaps this is an unfair caricature, and I personally can only name a few that I feel it applies to, but I think the caricature is important as a balance against the caricature within Evangelical theology that there can be no identification between Christians and those outside the faith, regardless of whether or not both are human.  It is a dangerous message that a person is Christian first and human second and that, when it comes to God, there is no such thing as betraying your fellow human being.