A Possible Reason for the "Either Lunatic or God" Argument

Why do some fundamentalist Christians embrace this strange "intellectual" argument that if Jesus is not God, he could only otherwise have been a "lunatic" or worse? Though such an argument is automatically specious to a progressive Christian, why should it all hold any water even with fundamentalist Christians, who supposedly revere Jesus? Then it occurred to me: what if the articulators of this argument have always been uncomfortable with some of the things Jesus said? I frankly admit that Jesus calls for a level of moral dedication and rigor that is difficult for me, living in a world with a multiplicity of demands and incredible complexity to psychologically navigate. But still, even in the most challenging moral arguments of Jesus, I see their merit, I understand his reasoning, and I respect their virtue. But if you are telling your congregations that Jesus said things tantamount to a lunatic if he were a mere human being, you are slyly (or perhaps unconsciously) invalidating and neutralizing the spiritual cause he preached. The implicit message of such an argument would be this: don't go trying to imitate Jesus or enact his causes, because you are a mere mortal, and you will be deemed a lunatic (or even demon!) by society if you do! So what is left for Christians hearing this? They are left to focus on what is deemed "divine" about Jesus, his magical powers, his ability to circumvent death. This puts one in an abjectly subservient relationship to Jesus as an inscrutable manifestation of God, and puts his social activism deep in the background. Jesus repeatedly preached the cause of the poor, the outcasts, the demeaned, the disenfranchised, and God's will that they not only be included in the Kingdom of God on Earth, but also that their sufferings be lifted. In Modern Society, a secular manifestation of this message is the new word for "witchcraft" among conservatives, whether they be religious or not: socialism. And not surprisingly, there is a Christian Socialist Party in the parliamentary democracy of Germany. I strongly suspect that socioeconomically conservative people in the 20th and 21st Centuries feel uncomfortable with Jesus words in a profound way, and this causes them to sublimate that discomfort by focusing chiefly on the grisly minutiae of Christ's trial, torture, bearing of the cross and crucifixion, instead of his life and words as a whole. I have heard people loudly pronounce that Jesus would have been a "Republican" if he had been born in our time. But the concepts of liberal and conservative would have been meaningless to him, whether in the actual province of Judaea where he lived, or in today's global culture. For Jesus, there was only the rectification needed between those who mistreat or neglect their fellow human beings for self-aggrandizement, and those of God's children who suffer at the hands of the powerful.