I grew up in the Churches of Christ, where we believed in something called Patternism. What this meant was that God wanted our churches to be patterned off of the Christian churches that existed in the first century. The assumption was that the first century Christians were given specific instructions on how to worship God and organize their churches, that these instructions could be found in the New Testament and that deviating from them would lead a congregation and its members away from being members of God's true church, the Churches of Christ. And it was believed that any group that didn't both worship correctly and organize its church polity correctly was most likely destined to hell.
What did that mean for us? Well, for starters it meant singing our worship songs without instruments and sharing communion (The Eucharist) every Sunday. We we taught that churches that didn't do this loved entertainment and convenience more than they loved Jesus and that would be condemned. We were taught that believers needed to be fully immersed during baptism and that the baptism wasn't just a sign of faith, but that it was for the remission of sins. If it didn't happen this way, it didn't count. This led to people getting rebaptized because they'd been baptized for the wrong reasons or because, perhaps, an elbow hadn't gone under water - How embarrassing would it be find yourself in heaven when you're right elbow is in hell??? Weird, right?
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But the Patternist obsession got weirder from there. The more conservatively minded among us believed that anything not specifically dictated in scripture should be avoided. So, if the New Testament didn't mention having a fellowship hall, there there shouldn't be a fellowship hall. If it didn't mention using a projector then we weren't supposed to use a projector. Since the first century Christians used one cup during communion, people who used a variety of tiny cups for sanitations sake might be destined to hell, etc. Our churches divided endlessly over this nonsense because...
One of the problems with purity is that it's completely impossible to be 100% consistent. In our churches, we almost never asked if it was okay to use a church building, even though both the New Testament and church history indicate that the earliest Christians worshipped in homes. Most of our churches had pulpit ministers, even youth ministers, even though these things did not exist in 1st Century. We had hymnals, microphones.... Need I go on? The truth is that each particular local church decided what was central to the 1st Century pattern and what wasn't.
And that's how it always is with purity. Those groups that are tend to focus on ideological purity necessarily bend towards infighting and self-cannibalization especially during moments when they aren't focused on an outsider, even less pure, adversary. The reason for this isn't because some members of the group are less pure than others, but because ideological standards of purity are necessarily subjective. Take the contemporary fight between some advocates of transgendered rights and some advocates of women in sports. Should a transgendered woman be allowed to participate in women's sports? I'm not here to offer an opinion, just to say that when ideological purity is valued more than conversation and overall progress, you're going to have people who used to be on the same side condemning each other as if the two groups had little to nothing in common.
I used a rift within the feminist movement, because I expect most of my readers will be sympathetic to the movement as whole and I wanted to demonstrate that groups whose mission we generally agree with can start having problems once purity of ideology becomes a a dominant focus within a group or movement.
We can see more radical versions of this with groups that probably more obviously come to mind. You'd think that the Taliban and ISIS would get along. They don't. ISIS thinks the Taliban is too liberal.... The Leninists banned a number of socialist groups from operating in Russia during the revolution, because they viewed those groups as not being revolutionary enough - weirdly, the revolution probably would have been a lot more successful in the long-term if they'd brought those people in and made it work (Also, how it often goes). Imagine a world where ISIS, Al Qaeda and the Taliban get along. That wouldn't be great for the world, but it would help them forward their vision. Puritans cut off their nose to spite their face.
To go back to my point on Feminism. I think it's clear to see that the Feminist movement is suffering a somewhat successful onslaught from the right at the moment. How successful, time will tell - I'm hoping that it won't be too successful. To whatever degree the neo-traditionalists (my own term) win out, the current state of ideological puritanism among many Feminists will certainly be a huge contributor. Afterall, it's not as though the US is less Feminist than it was 20 years ago. Quite to the contrary - the neo-traditionalists have an abundance of female leadership. But, the Feminists movement is more fractured than it was 20 years ago and that leaves it vulnerable. It little less ideological purity and a little more cooperation would go a long way in handing the Feminist movement important victories.
If we want to move any relationship, group, cause, or municipality forward towards a shared goal, we should not be so focused on purity that we are unable to work alongside people who mostly agree with us. Obsessing over ideological purity makes such cooperate difficult. And that's our first problem with purity.
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