No doubt this stems from a trend of Evangelical leaders coming out in favor of Gay Marriage and even being friends of the gay community. I think the best example that is described in this comic is Brandon and Jen Hatmaker.
They are a married couple and regarded as an outstanding leaders and authors of the American Evangelical community with a following well into the thousands. Seeing them, they had this air of love, compassion, empathy all thing taught by Christ. Basically they followed the two great commandments of the Bible, while holding onto certain fundamentalist doctrines like innerancy and had a fundamentalist following well into the thousands.
Initially the Hatmaker's had a tenative relationship with the gay community. Back in 2014, when the Christian Charity organization World Vision hired openly gay employees, 10,000 of their sponsors pulled their sponsorship abandoning the children the proceeds go to until World Vision retracted their hiring policy. When Jen Hatmaker spoke out about this, saying that Jesus encouraged his followers to be all about feeding the hungry and helping the poor as opposed to being the sin police. Her followers response was essentially "Hey! You are DANGEROUSLY close to walking in thin ice!"
Two years later after the Orlando Massacre, the Hatmaker's took to befriending the LGBT community and encouraged compassion to her followers saying that Christianity hasn't treated the LGBT community all that right; "We can not honor in death those who we failed to honor in life." Her followers where on edge about this with some already accusing her of going off the deep end. Then in October it finally happened, the Hatmaker's came out in full support of the LGBT community and marriage equality.
Now here's the thing about Evangelcials who take a progresisve stance; they don't ruthlessly vilify those who stand to traditions or fundamentalist doctrines. In fact it's quite the opposite. As with the Hatmaker's coming out and another statment of compassion explaining their stance, the fundie backlash was almost immediate and rather vicious. Almost over night they lost 10,000 of their followers, from some of them decrying them as heretics, to the arrogant faux lament evangelicals tend to do when they REALLY hate someone. Basically they got Rob Bell'd (Rob Bell being a former Evangelical leader with a decades long ministry who wrote about about Hell and Universalism, leaning more to the latter, and as a result had all his followers turn on him; now he's one of the more famous progressive christian leaders).
The fact remains its not the tradtionalists turned progressive who vilify the traditionalists, but the total opposite. For all their claims of being a flock, they have a rather ravenous wolf pack like mentality ready and willing to rip apart anyone who's not them. Brings a whole new meaning to Wolves in Sheeps Clothing if you ask me.
