As I worked on my profile of the influential conservative radio-host Bryan Fischer, I was struck by the difference between the “pro-family” values he espouses and some of the choices he has made in his own life. For example, Fischer has not seen his only sibling in something like a decade—a sister with serious health problems who lives on social security and welfare disability payments. Perhaps more revealing, though, is the broken friendship between Fischer and another conservative Christian activist, Dennis Mansfield.

After the article came out, Fischer accused me of misrepresenting an anecdote concerning his relationship with Mansfield. Since then, Mansfield has weighed in on his own blog to defend the accuracy of the New Yorker story, and expanded on what he calls Fischer’s “divisive” politics as a dead end for this country. Partisans on both sides of the political divide could learn a lot from Mansfield’s musings.

To understand Mansfield requires knowledge of the central fact of his life. In 2000, his hard-edged political ideology collided with heart-breaking realities in his own family. He was running for the Republican Party’s congressional nomination in Idaho, as a conservative Christian candidate. Six days before the Republican primary, his son Nate, who was then a senior in high school, was arrested for drug possession. (Eventually, after a long struggle with addiction, his son died.) The public arrest torpedoed Mansfield’s congressional bid. More importantly, he says, the episode, and the subsequent humility he learned from his son’s struggle, caused him to reëxamine the way in which he was using his Christian faith as a cudgel in politics. As Mansfield told me, he concluded that “faith-based conservatives are either purposefully or inadvertently looking punitively at other people” rather than “lifting each other up.”

While Mansfield’s family crisis caused him to reassess his earlier self-righteousness, Fischer, he says, reacted to it heartlessly, and told Mansfield that he was no longer fit to be an elder at the church where Fischer was preaching, the Community Church of the Valley, in Boise, Idaho. At the time, Mansfield was not an elder in the church, but he had been, and he had hoped to return to it. He says that Fischer snuffed out that hope summarily, telling him that if he was not capable of managing his own house, he couldn’t manage God’s—meaning the church. Being turned away by his closest friend, with whom he had virtually built the church, Mansfield told me, was “such a painful experience.”

In his blog post about his former friend, Mansfield writes, “When someone wraps their own hate speech in a ‘god blanket’ it makes it easier for a subset of people to accept, and eventually it may even gather a following. The problem is that anyone outside of that subset is turned away from not only that particular subset, but from the entire religion.”

Fischer has been complaining on his show all week that since Mansfield wasn’t an elder at the time, the story is inaccurate, even though the story doesn’t say Mansfield was an elder at that time. As Mansfield has reiterated in his blog, the anecdote is accurate, as are the other facts in the story. They were all checked with Fischer, and where he had factual objections, his caveats were included.

The contrast between Mansfield’s message and Fischer’s in some ways captures a larger split within the evangelical Christian movement, concerning how much tolerance to show towards those who in the past may have been treated as outliers, including homosexuals. Polls of younger evangelicals, like those of younger voters of almost all stripes, show growing acceptance of gay rights, including same-sex marriage. Times, and attitudes, are changing.

Mansfield writes, “Debating the rightness or wrongness of homosexuality in our culture is something that Bryan Fischer is actively engaged in, and has been for over a decade. You know what? I used to be there too. The term ‘righteous anger’ would have been an appropriate term to describe the ferocity with which I would debate this issue, and others. The problem is that it doesn’t work. Somebody who yells and screams makes for great entertainment, but little else. I’ve found that it is exponentially more difficult to shut my mouth, and listen. It is also exponentially more rewarding.”

To Mansfield, Jesus’ message to those who castigate homosexuals and others is best summarized in I Corinthians 13:1-3

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Photograph of Bryan Fischer by Alec Soth/Magnum.