The Myth of Christian Persecution

One hears constant claims on the far right that Christians are being persecuted in America and Donald Trump has played up these claims and promised evangelicals and Christofascists power their perceived secular adversaries and the ability to openly discriminate against gays, racial minorities and non-Christians.  The reality, not surprisingly is that there is no real persecution of Christians, but rather their power to denigrate and persecute others has been eroded by growing secularism, much fueled by the hypocrisy, nastiness, and cruelty towards others that define much of the "Religious Right."  Younger generations in particular want nothing to do with this toxic religiosity and mistreatment of others. Yet in this upside down world of the political and religious right, objective facts and reality do not matter and limits on evangelicals' ability to persecute others has insanely become supposedly persecution of the self-congratulatory "godly folk."  A column in the New York Times by an evangelical who has been expelled by right wing evangelicals and Christofascists looks at the false narrative of Christian persecution and the cruelty these false Christians inflict on others.  Here are excerpts:

This June, I was invited on a friend’s podcast to answer a question I’ve been asked over and over again in the Trump era. Are Christians really persecuted in the United States of America? Millions of my fellow evangelicals believe we are, or they believe we’re one election away from a crackdown. This sense of dread and despair helps tie conservative Christians, people who center their lives on the church and the institutions of the church, to Donald Trump — the man they believe will fight to keep faith alive.

As I told my friend, the short answer is no, not by any meaningful historical definition of persecution. American Christians enjoy an immense amount of liberty and power.

When you’re inside evangelicalism, Christian media is full of stories of Christians under threat — of universities discriminating against Christian student groups, of a Catholic foster care agency denied city contracts because of its stance on marriage or of churches that faced discriminatory treatment during Covid, when secular gatherings were often privileged over religious worship.

Combine those stories with the personal tales of Christians who faced death threats, intimidation and online harassment for their views, and it’s easy to tell a story of American backsliding — a nation that once respected or even revered Christianity now persecutes Christians.

But when you’re pushed outside evangelicalism, the world starts to look very different. You see conservative Christians attacking the fundamental freedoms of their opponents. Red-state legislatures pass laws restricting the free speech of progressives and L.G.B.T.Q. Americans. Christian school board members attempt to restrict access to books in the name of their own moral norms. Other conservatives want to reverse the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, to bring legal recognition of same-sex marriages to an end.

Combine those stories with personal tales of progressives and other dissenters experiencing threats from and intimidation by conservative Christians, and you begin to see why the Christian persecution narrative rings hollow. And if conservative Christians are angry at progressive Americans for believing they are hateful hypocrites, then they have only themselves to blame.

[T]he Christian persecution narrative is fundamentally false. America isn’t persecuting Christians; it’s living with the fallout of two consequential constitutional mistakes that distort our politics and damage our culture.

[F]or most of American history, courts underenforced the establishment clause of the First Amendment. It wasn’t even held clearly applicable to the states until 1947. Americans lived under what my colleague Ross Douthat calls the “soft hegemony of American Protestantism.”

This soft hegemony wasn’t constitutionally or culturally sustainable. Mandating Protestant Scripture readings is ultimately incompatible with a First Amendment that doesn’t permit the state to privilege any particular sect or denomination. Culturally, the process of diversification and secularization makes any specific religious hegemony impossible. There simply aren’t a sufficient number of Americans of any single faith tradition to dominate American life.

In the 1960s the Warren court began dismantling the soft Protestant establishment by blocking school prayer and Scripture reading. A series of cases limited the power of the state to express a religious point of view.

The desire to disentangle church and state led to a search-and-destroy approach to religious expression in public institutions. Public schools and public colleges denied religious organizations equal access to public facilities. States and public colleges denied religious institutions equal access to public funds.

The Supreme Court has spent much of the past two decades correcting the overcorrection that began in the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, religious liberty proponents haven’t lost a significant Supreme Court case in 14 years.

Conservative and liberal justices have created a different, sustainable equilibrium, but the religious liberty culture war rages on anyway — in part because millions of Americans don’t want to strike a balance. They actually prefer domination to accommodation. Many conservative evangelicals miss the old Protestant establishment, and they want it back.

Combine these efforts at religious establishment with red-state legislation aimed at progressive and L.G.B.T.Q. Americans, and one could fairly assert that Christians are persecuting their opponents.

Then conservative evangelicalism ejected me from its ranks, and I experienced a level of anger and malice that eclipsed anything I experienced from the most vitriolic secular progressives. I started to hear from others who’d experienced the same thing, and my eyes opened. Christians are wrecking lives in the name of righteousness.

Christians who bemoan cultural hostility to their faith should be humbled by a sad reality. When it comes to inflicting pain on their political adversaries, conservative Christians often give worse than they get.