A recent piece by the Associated Press notes that the cultural influence of conservative Christians in the United States has waned in the last decade, making them feel “alienated” and “anxious.”
In her essay, AP writer Rachel Zoll says that Evangelicals believe that they have been “steadily pushed to the sidelines of American life” and feel “steamrolled” and “misunderstood.”
Many evangelicals fear that liberals want to “seal their cultural victory by silencing the church,” the piece declares, which liberals call “paranoid.”
The odd thing is, that it is often the liberals themselves who say they intend to capitalize on their advantage to silence Christians.
In a recent online post, a noted Harvard Law professor told his fellow liberals to press their advantage to strike conservative Christians while they are down. He even went so far as to suggest that liberals treat Christians like war criminals.
The 70-year-old professor Mark Tushnet wrote that the culture wars are over and the victorious Left should treat conservative Christians the way the allies treated Germany and Japan after World War II, offering no quarter or clemency.
Since “they lost, we won,” Tushnet declared, it is time to abandon defensive positions and unabashedly take up “aggressively liberal positions,” because they will no longer meet resistance, especially after the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
“For liberals,” Tushnet wrote, “the question now is how to deal with the losers in the culture wars. That’s mostly a question of tactics. My own judgment is that taking a hard line (‘You lost, live with it’) is better than trying to accommodate the losers.”
“Trying to be nice to the losers didn’t work well after the Civil War, nor after Brown,” he noted, whereas “taking a hard line seemed to work reasonably well in Germany and Japan after 1945.”
Yet if conservative Christians are “paranoid” to assert that they are under attack, perhaps they have reason to be. They have had abortion and then same-sex marriage foisted on them as a radicalized Supreme Court has bulldozed the democratic process and coerced the entire nation to follow the will of a 5-4 majority of unelected officials.
At a recent prayer breakfast in Washington DC, high-ranking Vatican Cardinal Robert Sarah decried an “insidious war” against Christians taking place in the United States under the guise of tolerance.
While other countries face “merciless beheadings,” “bombings of churches” and “torching of orphanages,” in the United States Christians face an “equally damaging, yet more hidden” form of religious persecution, warned the African prelate serving as the prefect of the Vatican Congregation for Divine Worship.
Sarah (whose name is pronounced Sar-AH and not like the English girl’s name) said that in America, “Political leaders, lobby groups and mass media seek to neutralize and depersonalize the conscience of Christians so as to dissolve them in a fluid society without religion and without God.”
By doing this, he said, they are carrying out “the will of the Evil One.”
“The legalization of same-sex marriage, the obligation to accept contraception within healthcare programs, and even ‘bathroom bills’ that allow men to use the women’s restrooms and locker rooms … Should not a biological man use the men’s restroom? How simpler can that concept be?” he asked.
The prelate lamented the loss of a sense of right and wrong in the country and increasing hostility toward those who believe in faith and family.
“All manner of immorality is not only accepted and tolerated today in advanced societies but even promoted as a social good,” Sarah said. “The result is hostility to Christians, and, increasingly, religious persecution.”
“I encourage you to truly make use of the freedom willed by your founding fathers, lest you lose it,” the cardinal said.
If evangelicals are “paranoid” to fear attacks on Christianity in America, at least they are in good company.
Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter Follow @tdwilliamsrome
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.