In his provocatively titled essay
Does Faith = Hate?, written in October, 2013, Rod Dreher offers his fellow conservatives the following advice:
Though same-sex marriage is almost certainly the wave of the future, the
country isn’t there yet. In states where marriage equality is still
under contention, traditionalists could take advantage of this divide to
negotiate a settlement that both sides can live with—one that protects
both religious institutions and religious individuals. Time is on the
gay-rights side, but its more pragmatic leaders may be persuaded that
achieving basic marriage equality now is worth granting substantial
protections to religious dissenters.
At first reading, I was persuaded by Dreher's concern for conservatives' religious liberties. What I had in mind, generally, was the need to protect people from being forced to perform or participate in religious ceremonies that they object to, and in particular to keep marriage traditionalists from being forced to officiate or participate in same-sex marriages. I thought the general principle was valid—I wouldn't want to be sued over my refusal to perform or participate in a rite that I thought was an invalid expression of my religion—and I also thought that the specific practice of forcing marriage traditionalists to participate in same-sex marriages seemed unnecessary and unkind, and at all events was unlikely to win my fellow progressives any new supporters.*
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| Arizona Governor Jan Brewer alongside a protest sign regarding Arizona's recent religious freedom bill |
It was a bit of a shock to me, then, when over the course of the last few weeks, a spate of religious freedom bills appeared in conservative legislatures with far, far greater scope than what I had envisioned when I read Dreher's proposal. Instead of staking out a middle ground "that both sides can live with," conservatives took advantage of their legislative majorities in Arizona, Idaho, Kansas, and Mississippi to push through laws that allow for open discrimination on religious grounds—not just to protect religious individuals from participation in religious ceremonies, but to "protect" anyone from having to serve someone if they thought their religion could be an excuse not to.
This overreach is part of a larger phenomenon: American Christians have a tendency see themselves as embattled and persecuted for their faith, and they sometimes seek to defend themselves in ways which seem harmful to outsiders (and which sometimes
backfire amusingly). It's not uncommon to hear people express confusion and dismay that American Christians, who represent a very solid majority of Americans, can perceive themselves as persecuted for their faith. What these people don't seem to know is that the idea of persecution is woven tightly into the Christian faith itself.
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One of the key passages in scripture for all Christians is the Sermon on the Mount, found in the Gospel of Matthew. In the sermon, Jesus enunciates his central moral teachings, exhorting his followers with such familiar phrases as "turn the other cheek," "blessed are the meek," and "judge not." Importantly for our purposes, he also says this:
Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you. (Matthew 5:11-12, NRSV)
The idea that being persecuted for your faith is inherently virtuous is, it seems, encoded into Christianity from the start. And it's widely known that, from the start, Christians
did indeed face widespread persecution—including imprisonment, torture, and death—for their faith.
Trouble is, that's not really true.
In her book,
The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom, Notre Dame professor Candida Moss explains how we got the notion that the early church was viciously opposed and suppressed.**
She starts by carefully explaining the actual conditions that early Christians faced in the Roman Empire: Christians were poorly understood by most members of Roman society, were generally unpopular, and
occasionally came into direct conflict with Roman jurisprudence and were killed for it. She notes that, far from being evidence for active persecution of the Christian faith, such state-sanctioned killings were part of a system of jurisprudence that also provided capital punishment for "accepting bribes as a judge or for defrauding a client...[for] burning crops planted by a farmer or making disturbances at night" (pg. 165).
From a Roman point of view, Christians seemed to subvert traditional family values and called down the wrath of the gods on society, and they were rumored to have practiced cannibalism and incest! What's more, when called into court, Christians had an irritating tendency to deny the authority of the court altogether, and to refuse to cooperate with the court in any way (Moss cites an example of a Christian who, when called into court on a charge, answered
all questions—even "What is your name?" and "Where do you live?"—by simply stating "I am a Christian"). Moss points out:
It is like modern defendants who say that they will not recognize the authority of the court or of the government, but recognize only the authority of God. For modern Americans, as for ancient Romans, this sounds either sinister or vaguely insane...When militia groups defend their illegal actions on the basis that they don't recognize some aspect of American law, they are still thrown in jail. This is essentially the state of affairs for the Romans. (pg. 179)
While anti-Christian violence occasionally did flare up in the Roman empire, it was typically sporadic, local violence. Even Roman governors who killed Christians in significant numbers did so less out of hatred than annoyance; of one such governor, Pliny, she says, "[I]t seems that Pliny just wants the Christians to go away. Once they are in his courtroom, Pliny has no option but to deal with the Christians, but he has no desire to seek them out" (pg. 143). In all, Moss estimates that Christians faced perhaps a dozen years of concentrated violence in the first three centuries of the faith. This is hardly the mass persecution of Christians that is current in the popular imagination.
After Christianity was legalized in the Empire, Christians began to look back with a certain, slightly perverse fondness on the time when their religion occasionally seemed enough to warrant death at the hands of the state, and they began to write stories about the people who were killed for being Christians. In the minds of Christians, these victims were martyrs, heroes, worthy of both veneration and imitation. They wrote stories about the martyrs, and as the demand for such stories grew, authors began to embellish, add to, and eventually simply fabricate stories of early Christian martyrs out of whole cloth. We have
hundreds of stories of early Christian martyrs' deaths; of these, scholars estimate that perhaps six accounts are genuine, and Moss points out that even these six have all been embellished and none are eyewitness accounts.
The most sinister element of the myth of the persecution of the early church is the ends for which it has been used. Moss shows that, from early on, church leaders drew explicit connections, linking themselves—and their orthodox faith—with the martyrs, and linking people they disagreed with theologically—heretics, schismatics—with Roman "persecutors" and, what's more, with
Satan. In doing so, these early church leaders set up a pattern that persists to this day, wherein church leaders call upon the language of persecution and martyrdom to set up an "us versus them" mentality that cannot be effectively bridged, as doing so would be tantamount to dealing with the devil:
Persecution is not about disagreement and is not about dialogue. The response to being "under attack" and "persecuted" is to fight and resist. You cannot collaborate with someone who is persecuting you. You have to defend yourself. (pg. 254)
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| (from a rally for religious freedom in Missouri) |
The notion that American Christians' religious liberty is at risk is quite widespread: some
recent poll results show that 70% of protestant ministers think that "religious liberty is on the decline in America," and that 54% of Americans agree with them. While it is true that the nature of the religious landscape in the country is changing, and that there have been conflicts of interest between some government policies and religious groups, characterizing these changes and conflicts as a decline in religious liberty is at best a mistake and at worst an active ploy to try to retain political power and a moral high ground. Moss writes:
The cultural power that drives these claims, the oil in the machine so to speak, is the idea that Christians have always been persecuted. In Christian terms, if you're being persecuted, you must be doing something right. It's a rather easy trick: if anyone can claim to stand in continuity with the martyrs and be victims of persecution, and if being persecuted authenticates one's religious message, then anyone can claim to be right. (pg. 250)
The perception that facing persecution is a foundational element of the
Christian faith fuels Christians' perception that they are being attacked.
As a result, they tend to overreact instead of creating dialog and working toward common
goals. Christians should re-examine the history of their faith and try to better distinguish between religious persecution—a real phenomenon in Christian history, if more sporadic and less foundational than Christians are led to believe—and conflicts of interest that can be resolved or ameliorated if we work to understand those we disagree with.
*My dad disagreed with me when I talked to him about the article in these terms, and I found his depiction of the issue from a civil rights/discrimination standpoint to be fairly persuasive. I still think it's probably not a great idea to sue someone for being unwilling to sell you a wedding cake, but I also think it's
way sillier to think that selling someone a cake is an endorsement of the event the cake is for.
**What's interesting about this book is that it is
not advancing a radical new thesis, but is in fact simply presenting the widely held scholarly consensus on this issue in laypeople's terms so that it can enter the public consciousness. It's long overdue: I mention later in the post that there's been extensive work done assessing the historical validity of martyrdom accounts, and said work has been in progress for
over three centuries.
Photo sources:
1.
Gage Skidmore
2.
Mike Licht, Notionscapital.com
3.
https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1366277434l/15818294.jpg
4.
KOMUnews
