We Always Hurt the Ones We (Almost) Love

In a lecture on available through iTunesU (paste this link into iTunes and I think you'll get it), Carl Trueman makes a provocative observation about a common tendency to distinguish ourselves most stridently from those who are most like us, just a little bit different. Speaking about the Great Schism between the Eastern and Western branches of the medieval Church over a relatively obscure point of theology inserted into a historical creed, Trueman comments:

[M]ore often than not, certainly in religious and political circles, [you] fall out with the people you are closest to rather than the people you are furthest away from. And you do that by emphasizing the boundaries—by emphasizing the small things that distinguish you from the group that might be mistaken for you if you don't emphasize them.

Context begins around 27:00 into the lecture.