The case of Kim Davis, County Clerk of Rowan County, Kentucky, is giving me cause to reflect. On the one hand, I am strongly opposed to what she has done. Gay and Lesbian people have struggled long and hard to achieve, in practical terms, the full citizenship that, in theory, we always possessed. It is not easy to be gracious when one person who happens to be in a position of power feels free to nullify our most recent legal advance.

On the other hand, I am, like Kim Davis, a Christian who has occasionally felt it necessary to place myself sideways in some community process for reasons of conscience. To be sure, she may not regard my Episcopal tradition as Christian and I tend to look on her Christian tradition as a distortion of the historic Christian faith. Still, I fully understand the importance of conscience in matters of faith.

I am thus in the awkward spot of respecting her willingness to stand firm while at the same time believing that her understanding of Christian faith is mistaken on this topic and that she ought to reconsider. It’s unlikely that she and I will ever engage in direct conversation on the topic. Nor, I fear, is it likely that it would prove fruitful if we did.

My reservation is based on experience. For some years I functioned as one of the “point” people in the Episcopal Church’s long conversation on the topic of sexual orientation. I repeatedly found that Evangelical Episcopalians who attended (many simply stayed away) refused to engage in any real sort of conversation at all. They listened only in order to to decide how they were going to attack. As a result, they never really comprehended what was being said on the other side. They refused to treat faithful lesbian or gay Christians as anything more than interlopers. And they claimed the authority of Scripture for their position even while they were unwilling to go back to scripture with an open mind in order to discuss the interpretation of others. Their own presentations consisted in repeating what they had already said over and over, as if one more repetition might finally persuade where the previous hundred had failed.

In short, I have no expectation that people from the broadly Evangelical spectrum, including the Pentecostal tradition to which I am guessing Ms. Davis belongs, will or even can engage in straightforward conversation with those of us who belong to other Christian traditions. Happily, there seems to be some conversation on the issues of sexual orientation arising within the Evangelical world now. I pray that it may be more productive than what I experienced as an outsider.

My continuing question, however, as I think about and pray for Kim Davis is how Christian people arrive at points of such great intransigence on issues that are not really central to Christian faith. Christian perspectives on marriage have varied widely over two millennia. Many of the earliest Christians were profoundly suspicious of heterosexual marriage, which they saw as the enemy of true Christian faith and life. It was a distraction, exerting a constant pull toward worldliness and giving rise to the anxiety that undermines faith. Never was it conceived as a fundamental aspect of Christian belief. The Evangelical exaltation of marriage (and of the relatively modern nuclear family) owes little to the Bible and not much to ancient Christian tradition. It began as a twentieth-century reaction to the increasing visibility of same-sex oriented people—effectively a theologizing of homophobia—and not much different from the use of the curse of Ham/Canaan to justify first slavery and then the continuing degradation of people of African ancestry—a defensive move by slave holders and racial bigots.

And yet, I recognize that we all have to take our fundamental convictions seriously. Not just religious people, but all sorts of people. How then are we to live together without destroying our common civil society by trying to enforce our convictions in the public sphere? For that, of course, is the issue for the rest of us—not what Ms. Davis believes, but what she does or does not do in her office of County Clerk.

There is a parallel—in principle though not in gravity—to the much graver attack on civil society that now plagues the ancient center of the Muslim world (and laps over into other parts of the world). For some reason, we human beings find it possible to feel that the depth of our convictions exempts us from responsibility for their consequences in the lives of others. At that point, we forget that we are not in fact the God (or whatever other principle) in which we believe and we somehow turn ourselves into absolute authority. It is the deepest and most treacherous temptation of humankind, the true sin of pride. (It is also, of course, not limited to religious people. I need only name Fascism, Nazism, and Soviet Communism to make that point.)

When we find that we are no longer willing to enter into conversation with the people we judge, that we only want to dictate to them, that we have decided that we can no longer learn anything knew or find a new perspective, that our faith is so complete as to admit of no addition or alteration, we are in grave danger. And we place the world around us in grave danger.

There are things in this world that would be worth suffering martyrdom for. God defend us all from them. But the privilege of denying other people their human and legal rights is not one of them.