Good News Everyone!

Everything is Going Great, Especially for Christians, apparently.

I was astonished yesterday, while spending a modicum of time online, to discover from a Leading Evangelical that everything is fine, brilliant even.

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Christians aren’t being persecuted in the United States. In fact, all the freedom of religion legal cases over the last twenty or fifty years have actually righted a heap of wrongs so that the Constitution is finally being able to heal by returning to its original state of religious pluralism. If you’d like to watch it, you can find it here.

Of course, I am not educated enough to make any comments about the details of how wonderfully Christians and religious people are doing in America today. I don’t know very much about the Warren Court, and I don’t know the implications of rulings handed down over the last many decades about where Christian students can meet and when. Perhaps everything this Leading Evangelical Thought Leader is saying is completely true.

But it does seem to me that this is one of those cases where a person can focus so much on one particular leaf that he misses the dense Mirkwood and all its prowling spiders. Like when a mild-mannered and well-meaning husband, gets caught in one of those terrible arguments where he is trying to calculate, aloud, exactly how much weight his dear wife has gained instead of being sensible enough to understand that that wasn’t the question she was asking. Like when you find yourself pharisee-splaining the Son of God that it’s totally fine for you not to take care of your aging parents because you dedicated all your money to the Temple.

It was as I was reading this excellent piece this morning about the hit pieces recently published about Highland Latin School in Louisville, Kentucky that I managed to grasp some of the missing pieces rattling around in the back of my consciousness. Namely, that when you set out to prove someone wrong—that they aren’t, say, being persecuted or ill-treated—and you carefully construct your argument so as to exclude most of the data that the person insists is relevant, you haven’t made your point very well. That person, in the parlance of the moment, won’t feel heard or seen. He or she might become incensed and accuse you of, what’s that called? Gaslighting.

Leading Evangelical Influencer does bring a lot of important points to the table. There have been important legal gains in favor of Christians in the last several years. But he leaves out a lot of other data. The fact that these suits are needing to be brought all the time, for example. And that other legal cases have arisen that have radically remade American culture, chief among them being Obergefell.

Even more, I don’t think a lot of Evangelicals are particularly fussing about being “persecuted.” That’s an interesting word choice. I think what’s happening is that a lot of Evangelicals are committing the grave sin of noticing what’s happening—because it is so very obvious—and are warning about real and terrible danger looming. They are pointing at bad things and saying, “Wow, this is bad.” Like how several states have made themselves into places where if a parent objects to a child’s stated intention to “transition” from one sex to another, as if that were even possible, the parent can lose custody of that minor child. Like how babies, in our very country, can be left to die if the initial attempt to slaughter them before they take their first breath of air fails. Like this wretched blasphemy aired on CBS news about how the Bible was not written for people in 2024 who know a lot more than those rubes from 2000 years ago. Like how people in New York were forbidden from going to church while the person in charge of Covid regulations was doing ecstasy and having sex in large groups. I could go on and on and on.

Of course Christians are not being rounded up and sent to the Gulag, not yet anyway. But when they do point out these obvious and terrible occurrences that are harming real people and destroying creatures whom God has made and who ought to be told about this God and invited to worship him in church, they are given lectures about how important religious pluralism is and that they should not fuss themselves because they are totally allowed to have their afterschool Bible study in the classroom next door to the Satan club. They are told to be meek and humble and to question themselves instead of opening wide their mouths to proclaim the mercies of God to a perishing world.

So anyway, now I must go muck out my office because I cannot think from the clutter. Have a nice day!