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Why so many conservative Christians feel like a persecuted minority
http://theweek.com/articles/684365/why-many-conservative-christians-feel-like-persecuted-minorityIs America a post-Christian nation? For many true believers, it certainly feels that way.
This is largely the topic of Rod Dreher's The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation, which may be the most important statement of its kind since Richard John Neuhaus' The Naked Public Square, the 1984 book that Dreher's implicitly seeks to supplant. Like Neuhaus, Dreher provides devout Christians with a gripping metaphor that both describes the present moment and sets out a course of action in response to it.
Written in the wake of Ronald Reagan's first successful presidential campaign, in which evangelical Protestants played a decisive role for the first time, The Naked Public Square aimed to lend theological heft to an ascendant religious right. Jerry Falwell was correct: Devout Christians did constitute a "moral majority." But if they hoped to truly gain, hold, and wield political power, they needed to make their case in more sophisticated and civically appealing terms.
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During the Obama years, the religious right began to suspect that it had decisively lost the culture war. Secular liberal elites had finally succeeded in stripping the public square of religiously grounded moral arguments — and their victory was accomplished not by thwarting democracy but by riding it to power. The moral majority had become a moral minority, with devoutly religious voters hemmed in on all sides, immersed in an increasingly hostile secular culture and incapable of mustering the votes to fight back at the national level. If the U.S. wasn't a secular society in 1984, in 2017 it apparently is.
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Dreher's The Benedict Option is very much an expression of this bleak outlook — and it goes far beyond the United States. In his opening pages, Dreher informs his readers that "the light of Christianity is flickering out all over the West." "There are people alive today," he writes, "who may live to see the effective death of Christianity within our civilization. ... This may not be the end of the world, but it is the end of a world, and only the willfully blind would deny it."
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Dreher's concerns about persecution may be somewhat exaggerated, but they aren't delusional. Now that same-sex marriage has been declared a constitutional right, the full weight of anti-discrimination law is poised to bear down on those whose faith precludes them from accepting the licitness of such arrangements. That has inspired many religious conservatives (and a few liberals, like myself) to demand new laws to strengthen the First Amendment's religious liberty protections, specifically to clarify that the "free exercise" clause is not limited to what takes place within the walls of a church.
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I doubt Dreher would think so — because Christians would still find themselves living in a country in which a range of authorities within civil society constantly convey the message that same-sex marriage is good and opposing it is bigotry, in which pornography is ubiquitous, and in which gender is increasingly treated as a human construct entirely disconnected from nature, marriage, procreation, and a divinely authored order of things.
But why is that such a problem? Don't Orthodox Jews and observant Muslims, who hold analogous views about sex, manage to live and thrive in the United States, despite its sexual turmoil and lasciviousness? Indeed they do. But they are and have always been tiny minorities in America — which means that, in the decisive respect, they already practice something like the Benedict Option. They don't need to be taught how to preserve themselves in the face of constant counter-religious temptations.
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Christianity in all of its manifold forms and expressions isn't about to disappear, but comprehensive Christianity — a holistic vision of God and humanity, sexuality and sin, marriage and procreation — has been dethroned. Those of us who see a necessary moral advance in this revolution should be capable of acknowledging that it also entails a significant loss.
And for some of our fellow citizens, the loss is intensely personal.
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The poor babies! I feel so badly for them. I had no idea how easy it was to be persecuted when you're the majority
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