Ten Things I Hate About You: #8 - The Persecution Complex

It's been Election Time lately - a fascinating mixture of Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, All Saints Day/Halloween and just about every other religious holiday of any significance you can think of. These past few months have been a mosaic of hope, anxiety, anticipation, thankfulness, pride, and a sense of a rebirth, a baptism of fire leading to a promised victory which will come for the faithful, "any day now". The antics we often see around the time of any major election reminds me of little kids fussing about in a sandbox, and the canvassers are like grown up versions of kids trick-or-treating - mind you of course, they're asking for a little more out of you than a couple of Tootsie Rolls and some change for the UNICEF box.

But above all, there's one emotion, state of mind, and mindset present, especially seen at these times, and among some of the more verbally visible elements of the Christian family - fear. The kind of fear I want to talk about here though is one fear you may have seen in others: the fear of persecution.

The story of the GOP in Arkansas from the 2004 US Presidential Election boldly proclaiming that you need to vote for the Republican Party lest dirty liberals ban the Bible is certainly one of the most extreme aspects of what I want to talk about in this post, and I'm certainly not asserting that such shouting is common to Christianity as a whole. However, it's a good example of something I like to call "The Persecution Complex". Let me try to break it down in manageable chunks so I can try to put it in basic terms:


1) Christianity is Under Attack:

This isn't so much a pervasive phenomenon in Canada, from what I see at least, but it seems to be something which is a lot more prevalent in the US. The basic point argued is that Christianity as a way of life is under attack from an overwhelmingly powerful and dominant force which seeks to suppress and/or destroy it.

To be fair to the people who make this a focal point of their view towards popular/secular culture, there is a considerable amount of truth to that basic idea. We live in a highly market-driven, extremely consumeristic and materialistic society feeding upon novelty; not innovation, but novelty - the next manufactured pop star, the next cookie-cutter sequel action movie, the next fashion trend or new shiny thing to buy. (People aren't rushing out to buy, say music from independent artists that are pushing the boundaries of traditional music styles and forms, regardless of the genre. Ironically, the Next Big Thing that consumer society chases after seems to be just another permutation of whatever came before.)

It's a hard world for any person of any spiritual level to live in while keeping a level head, and there's no denying that it's a potentially powerfully corrupting force.

Rebelling against this is all well and good, but the first problem is that you run the danger of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. As I mentioned in a past post, there are a considerable amount of things in popular, secular culture which are worth considering and bringing into our collective experience as Christians. To lose out on that would be to lose out on a wonderful way to add depth to the spiritual journey on which Christianity leads. A one-dimensional view of culture outside of Christianity threatens to reduce Christianity itself to being one-dimensional.

The second problem is who exactly are the villains in this story? The answer is very nuanced, and you could round up a whole list of reasonable perps as long as your arm, from the abstract (Free-Market Capitalism, Consumer Culture, Hyper-Materialism), to the concrete (CEOs, business and socio-ecnomically corrupt political leaders, multinational corporations, and other profit-driven institutions), to the unsettling (us, for being a willing -- be it consciously or subconsciously -- participant in the system). To probe the question of who's at fault is both hard and easy - it's easy in that if we go up the food chain, we can likely find something or someone to hold accountable. It's also hard though, because in the end, the person who you're going to blame likely had his or her strings pulled by someone else, who was beholden to someone else, and so-on, until you get lost in the tangle of who ordered who to do what that the only thing you have left to clearly blame is "The System".

Human beings though, are, I think it's safe to say, pretty lazy. So who do we blame? It's easy: Gays and Lesbians. Muslims. Jewish Hollywood. The Secular Liberal Media. All of these are excellent places to put our blame because they so easily symbolize everything we fail to understand, is outside our standardized view of what is accepted, and everything we find distasteful and hateful. (Or all of the above!)

The problem is that when it comes addressing the root cause of the problem, again, it's easy for us to take a one-dimensional view. When we have a one-dimensional view of a problem, we often always have a one-dimensional view of the solution, and how often do things like that work out?


2) Christianity is Being Oppressed

There are of course, various forms of this - Christians are being censored for the sake of political correctness; Christians are/have lost their freedom to express their religion on the grounds of other people not taking it so well (*gasp*! The Nerve!). The list goes on, and on. I'm sure that at church services, fellowship meetings, Bible studies and other such places, we've all heard at least *once*, a prayer request for the sake of poor innocent Christians who've, somewhere, been unfairly muzzled because of their beliefs.

Now, to start off, I know that there are actual places in which being a Christian, even on a very casual level (i.e. someone openly affirming their Christian faith to the man on the street vs. people who are obnoxious about it) is actually quite dangerous. The reasons for that are beyond the scope of this post, but suffice to say there are still places in the world where being a Christian does invite a serious and genuine level of peril.

The problem is when this notion is carried over to the realm of places where such a situation clearly doesn't exist. CNN founder Ted Turner's infamous "Jesus Freaks" comment is one example of an incident in the day to day lives of Christians where they came across very derogatory comments from someone outside Christianity - and its incidents like this, among other things like the teaching of evolutionary biology in schools vs. a Biblically Literal Christian view of science, or the equally infamous lawsuits to get "Under God" removed from the US Pledge of Allegiance, which drive people to believe that the sky is indeed falling on Christianity.

I don't want to turn this into a debate on the issue of the Separation of Church and State as codified in the US Constitution, but suffice to say, the fact of the matter is that we live in a pluralistic society, whether we like it or not, for better or for worse. We live in a society that we must share with people of other faith traditions and ethnicities and it's foolish of us to ignore the truth that they can see Christians and see their dirty laundry being aired for all of to look at. It may be the sexual immoralities of our grandstanding spiritual leaders or even the hypocrisies of Christians in their daily lives. The moment Christians start to get on their moral high horse and elevate themselves above others, others around us have every right to call us out on each and every one of our hypocrisies.

To get a true feel for oppression and persecution, we need only to look at our own history, and I don't need to fill in the blanks of the many examples where ethnic or religious groups were singled out for the deprivation of their rights as citizens in their own country and/or targeted for ethnic cleansing. We haven't gotten anywhere even close to that in North America, and it's insulting to the people who have suffered in places like that when Christians view ultimately petty annoyances like Turner's comment or even the question of whether the phrase "One Nation Under God" has any credibility within the US Pledge of Allegiance as examples of the persecution of Christianity. In short, it seemingly all boils down to the observation that apparently, while Christians can dish it out, they certainly can't seem to take it.

What's even more perverse about it is that when we look at how people have viewed the matter of religion in the public square, it's clearly front and centre. Both the GOP and Democractic Party campaigns in the US heavily leverage the religious element, whether they're conscious of it or not. The US has had a self-professed Born-Again Christian in the Oval Office for two presidential terms now. The backlash seen towards the American commercial media after Janet Jackson's notorious "wardrobe malfunction" is proof positive that Christians can have an incredible effect on the media landscape in North America. Sure, there's still plenty of sex and violence in the media today, and the outcry of enraged Christian parents has done little to change that, but in turning to the time-honored solution of just rolling your own alternative, Christianity itself has become a media force to be reckoned with.

"It's probably best to send them straight to bed with no dinner!"

It's the sort of rhetoric that I see talking about Christianity being the target of oppression which reminds me most of whiny children (of which I used to be and to a certain extent still am). Talk to a kid about how they're doing and likely they'll complain about how their parents didn't get them item X or take them to go to event Y or see person Z. There's of course all sorts of mitigating factors at play here on the parent's side of things, but the child seldom sees things from his or her parent's perspective. Hence, they're being treated in a way that's unfair and unjust.

Hopefully though, those children grow up, get older, start to live a little, and begin to understand reality as not being so one-sided as they once thought; that the world really doesn't revolve around them. We'll have to wait and see if Christians steeped in the Persecution Complex can have the ability to eventually mature as they can.