One of the hardest things we ever have to do is to see things as they really are. Instead, we are often tempted to seek control rather than truth or understanding. Paul’s words identify the problem and point to how we can live with it: our understanding is always incomplete, and only unconditional love allows us to face our prejudices without fear.
What follows is not a theological argument, still less a condemnation of faith. It is a psychological and cultural enquiry into a particular moral mentality — one shared, in different ways, by communities such as the Mormons, the Amish, and certain strands of evangelical Christianity — whose moral vision often feels like a denial of the natural world. These groups differ widely in history, doctrine, and social expression, but they share a recognisable family resemblance. That resemblance can be described without caricature or hostility.
At root, these movements tend to develop a defensive moral outlook shaped by a sense of threat. Their moral systems are aimed less at openness or understanding than at protecting identity, certainty, and purity from a world experienced as dangerous, corrupting, or spiritually hostile. What can appear as hostility toward the unfamiliar is better understood as fear of difference. The aim is not to cause harm, but to feel safe.
This mentality is marked by a strongly dualistic view of reality. The world is divided into inside and outside, sacred and fallen, pure and corrupt, chosen and worldly. Within such a framework, the natural world — bodies, sexuality, desire, pleasure, ambiguity — is treated not as morally neutral but as morally risky. When reality itself is framed as hostile, strict rules feel necessary, complexity feels dangerous, and freedom comes to resemble moral collapse.
A second feature is anxiety in the face of modernity and the loss of inherited meaning. These movements either arose or hardened during periods of rapid social change. Mormonism emerged amid frontier instability, persecution, and the weakening of traditional authority. Amish communities defined themselves in opposition to the disruptions of early modern state power and industrialisation. Evangelical fundamentalism took shape in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in response to biblical criticism and modern science, and later hardened as a defensive movement as secularisation, Darwinism, and sexual liberalisation gathered pace.
In each case, moral rigidity functions as a response to disorientation. Where the wider culture treats meaning as negotiated, evolving, and uncertain, these movements insist that meaning is fixed, revealed, and must be defended. Moral absolutism becomes a form of shelter. It is undeniably reassuring to have the Bible function as a kind of statute book, offering clear rules in an unstable world. Yet this is precisely what Jesus resisted when, in the Synoptic Gospels, he summarised the law and the prophets in terms of love of God and love of neighbour (Matthew 22:36–40; Mark 12:28–34), and elsewhere reduced moral life to a small number of relational demands rather than a comprehensive legal code.
Control of the body, especially sexuality, is a central expression of this mentality. Sexuality, gender roles, reproduction, and pleasure are tightly regulated because the body is unpredictable, desire resists authority, and sexuality exposes vulnerability. By restricting bodily freedom, such systems reduce uncertainty, reinforce hierarchy, and translate inner anxiety into external rules. This is why their moral codes often feel strained or unnatural. They are shaped less by human biology or psychology than by fear of disorder — Was nicht sein soll, nicht sein darf: what should not be is simply not allowed to be. The result is a moral culture that becomes repressive and is sustained by a quiet, unspoken hypocrisy. This is precisely what Jesus exposes and condemns in the episode of the woman caught in adultery (John 8:1–11).
For adherents, these systems provide genuine benefits. They offer clarity in a confusing world, a strong sense of belonging, relief from existential anxiety, and protection from moral ambiguity. This is why they persist, and why they deserve understanding rather than ridicule. But the cost is high. Individuality is suppressed, normal human impulses are surrounded by guilt and shame, and the harm done by the system is not always immediately visible.
It matters not to flatten these communities into one. Amish morality is communal and largely non-coercive toward outsiders; it is restrictive but not evangelical. Mormonism combines strict moral expectations with optimism about progress, family life, and human purpose. Evangelical fundamentalism is often the most combative, defining itself against secular society and, at one extreme, seeking to impose its norms politically. The mentality overlaps, but its social expression differs.
Why does all this feel like a denial of the natural world? Because such systems distrust spontaneity, treat instinct as something to be controlled, and place doctrine above lived experience. Psychologically, they value order more than vitality, certainty more than wisdom, and obedience more than personal freedom. From a humanistic or Jungian point of view, this does not lead to wholeness, but to inner division.
For those who do not fit easily — those who are temperamentally imaginative, sceptical, sexually non-conforming, neurodivergent, or simply inwardly restless — life within such systems can be deeply distressing. When identity, certainty, and purity are treated as supreme goods, difference is not experienced as variation but as threat. The resulting pressure is not incidental but structural. A moral order organised around purity cannot easily accommodate deviation without anxiety; tension is built into the system itself.
In fairness, some communities recognise this problem and attempt to mitigate it. In many (though not all) Amish groups, young people are allowed a period known as Rumspringa, usually beginning in their mid-teens, during which they are granted more freedom than at any other point in their lives. This may include wearing non-Amish clothing, socialising freely, using modern technology, or experiencing aspects of wider society. The purpose is not rebellion for its own sake, but choice. Amish adults are baptised only as adults, and baptism is understood as a lifelong commitment; Rumspringa exists to ensure that this commitment is voluntary rather than merely inherited.
At the end of this period, young people must decide whether to be baptised and remain within the community or to leave and live in the wider world. Most choose to stay, which speaks to the strength and coherence of Amish communal life. Yet the social and emotional cost of leaving can be high, and for those whose differences are deep rather than temporary, the earlier freedom does not always resolve the underlying tension. Even where choice is formally acknowledged, it is exercised within strong emotional, cultural, and relational constraints. Rumspringa recognises the importance of consent, but it cannot remove the structural pressures that arise from difference within a tightly ordered moral world.
At this point, the question widens beyond religion. What is being described here reflects humanity’s relationship with the natural world more generally. We build and impose order, but in doing so we also disrupt and damage. Faced with the wildness of reality — nature, desire, death, chance — we respond by trying to bring it under control. We create laws, cities, doctrines, and moral codes. Order itself is not the problem; without it, human life would not be possible. We cannot live in a world we experience as meaningless, and so we spend our lives trying to make sense of it. But when order becomes defensive rather than responsive — an attempt to shut out uncertainty rather than engage with it — it turns against the very world we are born to live in.
This is the deeper irony. In trying to make nature safe, we often make it unliveable. We dam rivers to control them, and ecosystems collapse. We monocrop fields for efficiency, and the soil dies. We engineer landscapes to remove risk and amplify catastrophe. Nature survives through variation and excess; our demand for uniformity undermines it. The same logic applies to human communities. When people are forced into narrow moral shapes, vitality drains away. Communities become orderly but brittle, pure but lifeless.
Nowhere is this more painful than in the realm of love. In tightly bounded moral communities, love is often conditional, even when it is sincerely felt. Acceptance depends on conformity, and affection is quietly withdrawn when difference appears. The same pattern can be seen on a smaller scale within narcissistic families, where children are valued primarily when they reflect their parents’ values, expectations, or ambitions. Love is not absent, but it is conditional: approval is granted in exchange for compliance. Over time, this teaches individuals to see themselves not as persons in their own right, but as instruments for sustaining the moral self-image of the family.
Communities can develop the same dynamic. Belonging becomes contingent on adherence to shared rules and beliefs, not simply for social order, but to preserve the community’s sense of its own rightness. Individuals are required to conform not only to belong, but to reassure the group of its moral legitimacy. In such settings, love and acceptance function less as gifts than as rewards for loyalty, and difference is experienced not as enrichment but as a threat to the collective self.
This brings us back to love itself. Love, if it is worthy of the name, does not require sameness. It does not depend on purity tests. It is not threatened by difference. A love that withdraws when difference appears is not love in its fullest sense, but attachment to order masquerading as care. To recognise this is not sentimental; it is ethical. Any system — religious or otherwise — that secures its own comfort by excluding the different does violence, however gently it speaks.
To write in this way is not to abandon religion, nor to reject moral seriousness. It is to move beyond a form of faith shaped primarily by fear — fear of disorder, fear of difference, fear of losing control — and too often presented as virtue. Much religious certainty is not born of wisdom but of anxiety, and it can feel kind precisely because it offers reassurance, clarity, and protection. Yet the comfort it provides is frequently purchased at a personal cost.
To resist the seduction of certainty is to accept that moral life cannot always be reduced to rules, slogans, or absolute positions. It means recognising that conscience must remain responsive to lived reality, even when that reality is complex, ambiguous, or unsettling. This kind of openness is uncomfortable. It offers less shelter, fewer guarantees, and no simple way of dividing the world neatly into the righteous and the suspect. It can be lonely, because it refuses the easy warmth that comes from shared certainty.
Yet this path is closer to truth. It allows human experience to speak, rather than forcing it into predetermined categories. It does not require difference or vulnerability to be hidden, denied, or punished in order to preserve communal comfort. Above all, it refuses to ask the most fragile members of a community to bear the psychological cost of maintaining order for everyone else. Whatever else religion may be, it cannot claim moral authority if it secures peace for the many by sacrificing the dignity of the few.
