If you are persecuted in America for living your Christian faith, it's all your fault. At least, that's what an expert at the Huffington Post Religion section claims in an odd piece that simultaneously acknowledges and denies the existence of concentrated anti-Christian sentiment in the United States.
The headline was “Christians to Blame for the 'War on Christianity.'” Dale Hansen, a political blogger for the Detroit News, claimed that this "war" is the "pinnacle of all self-ascribed pity parties," in part because Christians constitute 78 percent of the population while only 1.6 percent are what he calls "angry atheists."
The idea that the majority in general and a Christian majority in particular cannot be persecuted can be strongly questioned. In their book So Many Christians, So Few Lions: Is There Christianphobia in the United States?, George Yancey and David A. Williamson observed that, "Those with Christianophobia comprise a group with a great deal of social control due to their racial status, gender, and education....[T]hough they...envision themselves as victims, they are in a position to influence society and punish those they disagree with."
In other words, a nation could be 78 percent Jewish, but if an overwhelming majority of that nation's academic establishments, media outlets, film companies, and government movers and shakers are anti-Semites, who will persecute whom?
Hansen wrote “The problem is that Christians have spent so much time pretending to be victims that they have become oblivious to their own indiscretions.”
Using David and Jason Benham, whose show was canceled by HGTV for their advocacy of traditional marriage, as an object lesson, Hansen claimed “the problem wasn't that they were against marriage equality. The problem was that they funded and organized an anti-gay rally...There are millions of Christians who don't agree with same sex marriage but only a portion of them shamefully resort to using the Bible as justification for their hate speech....The fact that they are Christians is secondary to the fact that they have aggressively opposed the gay community in the past. Their actions, not their beliefs, cost them their potential television gig.”
So in Hansen's mind, the problem was not that the Benham brothers had a private Biblically informed belief that homosexuality was wrong. It was that they had the audacity to commit the cardinal sin of exercising their First Amendment Rights to voice said beliefs, "aggressively opposed the gay community," and used the Bible to justify said actions.
After running down Fox News correspondent Todd Starnes for specializing in stories where religious folks are forced to “keep Christ out of Christmas” and other controversies, Hansen accused the Christians of hypocrisy regarding religious symbols in the public square. “If non-Christians should be tolerant of Christian symbols and references in public spaces then why shouldn't Christians be tolerant of public spaces being void of all religious paraphernalia. After all, who does it hurt if the areas owned by everyone are free from all religious trappings?”
In fact, he goes so far as to suggest that Christians can virtually end the anti-Christian sentiment almost overnight. “The reality is that all non-Christians are asking for is equal treatment. These continued battles are simply a reaction to religious overreach that the courts have declared illegal. If Christians just stopped advocating for public religious observations the so called anti-Christian behavior would all but disappear.”
Unfortunately for him, he has little reason to be optimistic because "asking these Christian activists to apply the constitutional right of religious freedom equally to all Americans will undoubtedly result in more errant claims of anti-Christianity because Christian victimhood is great for business."
