“My faith is still strong,” she said. “But I am more careful in dealing with Christians than I used to be. They are just people with no more ability to be good

“My faith is still strong,” she said. “But I am more careful in dealing with Christians than I used to be. They are just people with no more ability to be good than anyone else.” If you don't grow up in an area that has a very heavy Christian presence it can be hard to understand how very conservative/evangelical Christians think. Many of them believe, honestly and truly, that they are incapable of being wrong because they have been sanctified and saved and therefore even if they perform a transgression no one on Earth has the authority to call them out on it. But see, since they're saved, Jesus forgives them, so no one can call them out on their sin because no one is without sin, so best to just let it go. It's an extremely insidious mindset because there's no arguing with it. There's no way to get someone who believes that they are morally right to budge even an inch because they 100% do not believe in capitulating to anyone other than Jesus Christ- and since the only source of what He thinks is the Bible and it can be interpreted in about a thousand different ways... you see where this is going. Their personal definitions of what's "good" and "bad" are very, very different from people who did not grow up in the religious culture and there's no way to bring them around to another way of thinking. It happens within the culture too- my father in law and his lifelong best friend had a falling out about 10 years ago over a very small, nitpicky religious matter (they were both elders in their church and disagreed over the way some church finances were distributed) and my father in law straight up stopped talking to his best friend because his friend would not capitulate and come around to my father in law's way of thinking. My Father in Law believed, and still believes, that he was 100% in the right and that his best friend was deceived by the devil and that's why their friendship had to end. And this is over something like "Should we put the church's nest egg all in a savings account or should we take half of it and put it in a Money Market account instead?" I point this out to add some context to this type of arbitration since, if you didn't grow up in an area where this was just a normal fact of society, you're probably scratching your head wondering how in the world this is even a thing. Even growing up Southern Baptist below the Bible Belt I had no idea that Religious Arbitration was a thing until I read this article. I had heard of Orthodox Jews having their own set of laws and rules and that being a thing in some very small neighborhoods of NYC, but I didn't realize there was a Christian equivalent being played out across the US.