It’s the church shopping phenomenon that I am so astonished by. Going to a church every weekend to hear what the pastor preaches, and if he happens to preach things that you agree with, you join that church. If he says something that you don’t like, “God does not want you to divorce and re-marry!”, then you quietly seek a church that teaches, “God doesn’t care if you divorce and re-marry!”. Funny that god just happens to agree with your own sensibilities, eh?
I can see a point in what you are saying, insofar as it is also illustrated through interpersonal relationships. People sometimes push away from those who not tell them what they want to hear, and would prefer to keep company with people who
do tell them what they want to hear. What they often realize is that the people who were giving them constructive criticism were the ones who really cared, and the people who agreed with them in everything were the ones who did not particularly care.
So I understand the logic of suspecting that a homosexual, for example, will be told “your behavior was a sin”; or a young man will be told, “your engaging in pre-marital sex is a sin” and he (or she) will go to a church that makes life less difficult for them, that proves itself to be less of a “nuisance.”
Of course, just because something is not what you want to hear, does not make it true; and just because something
is what you want to hear, does not make it untrue. An example of the latter would be “God loves you”, while an example of the former would be, “all of us, without exception, will spend an eternity in hell.”
There’s also a distinction between something that is contrary to your desires (to your id, even) and contrary to your moral conscience.
For example, when a non-homosexual person leaves a Catholic or Evangelical Protestant church, because he does not agree with its teaching on homosexuality, it is usually because it goes against his conscience and his sense of empathy. He himself is not a homosexual, so his “id” gets no gratification from his saying, “I cannot accept that.” But it’s his conscience that tells him that this is unacceptable, and that he chooses not to believe it; or that, indeed, he
cannot believe it.
Another example would be if some church said that you have to kill those who do not subscribe to your religion,
because they do not subscribe to your religion. Surely, you do not want to hear it, and you may refuse to accept that God would ever command that; yet it is not your id that is involved in your sense of revolt, but your moral conscience.
A final example would be that of a woman in Islam. A woman may feel degraded, humiliated by certain teachings vis-a-vis women. So, she may decide to leave the Church. Yet it would be too easy to say “Hannah left because she didn’t want the Church of Allah, but rather she went to find the Church of Hannah.” There is a complex interaction between a. what she wants; b. what she believes is true (for example, she may find arguments of the intellectual or spiritual inferiority of women to be completely unconvincing); c. what her own conscience dictates, not merely for herself as a woman, but for
all women, or for her daughters.
