Fanaticism

Before he met Jesus, Ravan worked as a paid assailant for the RSS, a Hindu nationalist organization in India. For seven years, Ravan relished his role as a hired thug. After the death of his father when Ravan was 15-years-old, he was ripe for the RSS’ recruitment to persecute Christians. The RSS trained him to find Christian farmers, beat them, and hand them over to police. Ravan says he felt powerful and happy for the sense of purpose, national pride, and camaraderie.

But the Lord was preparing his heart for a much deeper purpose. His mother, who had become a Christian years earlier, earnestly prayed for her son to meet Jesus. Ravan said, “Ever since I was small, I used to tell her to pray quietly. Sometimes I would wear headphones to drown out the sound of her praying.” But after a near-fatal motorcycle accident, his RSS friends abandoned him. His mother was the only person who stood by him. When his mother invited him to church, he balked, especially considering the suffering he had caused the Christian community. But the pastor surprised Ravan with gentleness and love.

Ravan soon trusted in Jesus, married a Christian woman, and together they planted a church. He said, “I saw how I had been in my old life and how I lived now. I felt a burden within me to do something in return for God.” Six months after his newfound faith in Christ, his former RSS friends started persecuting him.

Ravan expects more persecution in the future, but he also says,

There’s a lot of zeal within me that no matter what comes. We face a lot of persecution, but when I read the Bible and pray, I have experienced God speak to me. I have learned that persecution is a part of the Christian faith. But I am determined to never turn back from my ministry. God gave me new life, so it doesn’t matter even if I die.

Tom Tarrants was serving a 35-year sentence in prison for attempting to bomb a Jewish businessman’s residence. Previously, Tarrants had avoided any literature that didn’t support his white supremacist views. But with nothing to do in his tiny cell except think and read, he began devouring books about philosophy, history, and ethics. For the first time, Tarrants was forced to reexamine his extremist beliefs. He realized then how much he had been a slave to his ideology.

Tarrants grew up in a church in Alabama, attending every Sunday with his family. He had assumed he was saved. Even as he plotted terrorism, he had believed he was fighting for God and country. But reading Matthew 16:26 shook him awake: “For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul?” How utterly blind and foolish he had been to sell his soul in exchange for self-glory within the far-right movement! His hard heart cracked open, and he knelt on the concrete floor and asked Jesus Christ to forgive him.

Reading the Bible in prison convicted him that it wasn’t enough to simply not hate nonwhites: God had commanded him to love others, even his enemies.

There’s always a “someone” in a former extremist’s story. That “someone” awakens them from years of indoctrination and ignorance—and it’s always through unexpected kindness and empathy. For Tarrants, the “someones” were nonwhite inmates who befriended him. It was the Jewish attorney who vouched for him. It was the chaplains who brought him Christian books and tapes. It was the prayer group women who regularly interceded for him.

Tarrants became a free man in 1976. Over the years, he has co-pastored a multiracial church, served as interim pastor for an Asian American church, and participated in racial reconciliation events in the city.

"If somebody offered you $2 million, could you give up sports for two years?" This was the question a sports radio station asked its listeners. No games on TV, radio, or in person. No sports page. No ESPN highlight films. No Tuesday morning arguing about Monday Night Football.

One fan phoned in and said no, he would definitely not give up sports, not even for $25 million. "It's where I go when I'm on the Internet. It's what I watch on television. It's what I listen to on the radio in the car. Everywhere I go, it surrounds everything I do."

Hank Hanegraaff writes:

In 1980, Harvest House published a book by Larry Parker entitled We Let Our Son Die. The book tells the tragic story of how Larry and his wife—after being influenced by one of America's numerous "word of faith" (or "word-faith") teachers —withheld insulin from their diabetic son, Wesley. Predictably, Wesley went into a diabetic coma. The Parkers, warned about the impropriety of making a “negative confession,” continued to “positively confess” Wesley's healing until the time of his death.

Even after Wesley's death, the Parkers— undaunted in their "faith"— conducted a resurrection service instead of a funeral. For more than one year following their son's death, they refused to abandon the "revelation knowledge" they had received through the "word-faith" movement. Eventually, they were tried and convicted of manslaughter and child abuse.

When you look at our history, it is no wonder that spirituality is so often treated with suspicion, and not infrequently with outright hostility. For in actual practice spirituality very often develops into neurosis, degenerates into selfishness, becomes pretentious, turns violent.

How does this happen? The short answer is that it happens when we step outside the Gospel story and take ourselves as the basic and authoritative text for our spirituality; we begin exegeting ourselves as a sacred text ... True spirituality, Christian spirituality, takes attention off of ourselves and focuses it on another, on Jesus.

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

I once read the following definition of a fanatic: "A fanatic is a person who, having lost sight of his goal, redoubles his effort to get there." The fanatic runs around frantically getting nowhere. He is a basketball player without a basket, a tennis player without a net, a golfer without a green. For a Christian to make progress in ... learning to please God, he must have a clear idea of what his goal is. ... Jesus stated it this way: "Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you."