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Fanaticism Versus True Christian Conviction

Fanaticism Versus True Christian Conviction

Last updated on: March 19, 2026 at 1:27 am by Henry Karlson

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Fanaticism Versus True Christian Conviction 2026-03-19T01:27:14-05:00 Henry Karlson

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Fanaticism breeds violence. Painting: Eugène Delacroix: The Fanatics / Wikimedia Commons

Fanaticism has people so focused on their own ideological perspectives that they lose sight of the common good. They become so hyper-focused on achieving their ideological end, they are willing to sacrifice anyone and everything to promote it. This is one of the many reasons why fundamentalism is dangerous, and why, in the Christian faith, fundamentalism, with its fanaticism, leads to ungodly beliefs and practices. Fundamentalism, when combined with the zeal of the fanatic, can even lead to its adherents to desire to see the world burn in order to prove a point. Fanatics turn people into objects to be manipulated and used. To the fanatic, their ideology, and not the people involved, is what is most important. Elisabeth Lesseur saw the danger of Christian fanaticism; she understood how leads Christians to hold to various inauthentic Christian convictions:

Fanaticism frightens me, and I cannot understand how it can exist with sincere conviction. Can anyone who loves Christianity passionately and wishes to see it flourish think for one moment that one can use any method to achieve this goal other than persuasion? Can one instill conviction through force or deception? Besides, is there not in the use of such means something completely repulsive to the upright, loyal spirit that should mark every sincere Christian? And yet how many small acts of fanaticism we commit unconsciously. Apart from personal pride, we have the pride of faith, the most evil of all. We completely scorn those who hold different beliefs and think ourselves scarcely obliged to extend our charity to them. We consider that Jews, Protestants, or atheists are hardly our brothers and sisters in the true sense, beloved brothers and sisters for whom we should sacrifice ourselves and embrace with a delicate love. In relation to them we think anything is allowed, even calumny sometimes, and we seem less concerned with convincing them than offending them.[1]

Elisabeth knew that Christian are called to love others, and that love, more than ideologies, should motivate the way they treat others. Just because someone is different, such as having a different faith, does not mean Christians could, let alone should, deny them that love. Fanatics, however, are more focused on their ideologies, and so they are more concerned with protecting their ideologies than people. They allows them to find all kinds of excuses to ignore the love they are to show to others. Elisabeth, a Catholic, said that Protestants, Jews, and atheists were all her brothers and sisters. Any fanatical Catholic who would try to deny them their share of the common good, and with it, the love all should have, are far from following Christ, because he taught us to love everyone as he loved everyone, even those who had him executed.

Cardinal Ratzinger (before he was Pope), wrote about this in the way the Genesis account of history shows us how we are one extended family. He doesn’t do so by tracing our common ancestry to Adam, but to Noah. He said that God worked with Noah, giving him a covenant which brings all humanity together as one:

This is particularly important in our attitude and conduct toward non-Christian communities. If the account of Noah’s covenant given us the insight that even the mystical religions embrace a real theophany with a historical – i.e., preparatory (vorläuferishch), and thus merely relative (vorläufig) – significance, so all the more the thoughts expressed in the “two-brothers” motif remind the Christian of his insertion in the mystery of history, of his own precarious situation, and of the inconspicuous task that is or can be incumbent upon his non-Christian counterpart. Such a consideration reminds us that there are also present in human history forces of evil that are obscuring the significance of history, and therefore must always be resisted with renewed strength. [2]

Sin, and the evil ideologies which promote it, tries to deconstruct humanity, and with it, insert itself various human communities in order to have them become divided, fighting against each other. It severs the ties people are to have with each other. Fanaticism takes up what is established through such division and reinforces that division by promoting those on one side of the division are in the right and have every reason to dominate, control, and mistreat the others. In this way, those who embrace fanaticism promote and preserve what sin has established. Christians who embrace fanaticism embrace the spirit of division and discord, not the Spirit of Christ. Their zeal leads them to deny the universal kinship of all humanity and the love that kinship should produce in us. While they claim to follow Christ, they reject what he told us to do, for Christ told us to be one as God is one. It was his inability to be anything but a nationalistic zealot, that led Bulgakov to believe led Judas to betray Christ:

Into personal love for Him he placed all his nationalistic fanaticism, his ideal, for which he lived. He saw Him in the light of the ideal, of those revolutionary-apocalyptic aspirations, and only in that sense did he took on His work. He did not understand his Teacher, and not only was he not aware of his inability to understand, but he sincerely wanted to change His path, to correct His ideas and actions. [3]

Christians must deny the fanatical zeal which would have us ignore our common heritage with the rest of humanity. Christianity is meant to help reawaken in us our familial connections with everyone else; we are to understand that we all share the same humanity with everyone else. Realizing our common humanity should have us overcome the temptation fanaticism brings us, the temptation to see others as so different from us, we no longer have any reason to care for them and their good. We are called to see everyone as our brother and sister, someone we should love, even if, in some ways, we would otherwise call them our enemies, not because of our views of them, but because of their views and actions towards us. We hope that by loving them, they will change their views and reconcile with us, so that what sin has caused to be divided can be made one once again (if not in time, than in eternity).

[1] Elisabeth Leseur, “Daily Thoughts” in Elizabeth Leseur: Selected Writings. Trans. Janet K Ruffing, RSM (New York: Paulist Press, 2005), 136.

[2] Joseph Ratzinger, “The Dogmatic and Ascetical Meaning of Christian Brotherhood” in Man Before God: Toward A Theology of Man. Ed. Dennis Burkhard OFM, Leo A. Connolly, William T. Merten, and Michael G. Steinhauser (New York: P.J. Kenedy & Sons, 1966), 116.

[3] Sergius Bulgakov, Judas Iscariot – Apostle – Betrayer. Trans. Mike Whitton (No City Listed: Independently Published, 2023), 22.

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