“Why do Christians hate each other so?”

Ohio native historian T.S. Matthews asks this searing question in his book “Great Tom,” a literary biography of poet and playwright T.S. Eliot. As one who has dedicatedhis life to serving Jesus Christ in very ecumenical and interfaith settings, I ask this question almost daily.

Indeed, I witness as much hatred between Christians as I do between Christians and people of other faiths.

What’s up with that? I suspect some of this comes from our primordial desire for human purity. Mac Davis nailed it in his country-western song: “O Lord, it’s hard to be humble, when you’re perfect in every way!”

Yogi Berra put it even more succinctly: “It ain’t the heat that’ll get cha, it’s the humility.”

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The profoundly prophetic Christian evangelist Jim Wallis distilled all this wit and wisdom into a practical metric for our time: “When one believes that you’ve been appointed by God for a particular mission in history, you have to be very careful about that, how you speak about that. Where is the self-reflection in that? Where is the humility in that?”