A symbol of hope or a symbol of ignorance and prejudice?
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Christians have a great deal to fear in this world. In the Middle East, they have been marked for genocide by the Islamic state, along with Yazdis and Shiite Muslims. In communist China, Christians face extreme suspicion and persecution, as are other faiths. However, even in the supposedly more tolerant West, they are experiencing growing prejudice in Europe and in the United States.     

Christian Persecution in the United States and Europe

There are a number of readily identifiable reasons for this persecution in the West. One is what seems to be a lack of scientific evidence for the existence of any God or gods, as science increasingly is becoming the faith of the modern West. In addition, Christianity is extremely inconvenient to the sexual revolution of those who enjoy a lot of casual sex. Then there is the Christian abhorrence of abortion, which alienates many in the feminist movement, and the condemnation of same-sex relationships by many Christian sects. Add all this to a desire to have your Sundays free from church services and you have some potent motives to denigrate Christianity.

In the United States hostility toward Christianity can be found particularly among progressives, although such enmity is certainly not limited to them. Valuing their freedom over just about anything, there are some libertarians who are antagonistic to Christianity. Nevertheless, anti-Christian malice is most evident among culturally progressive activists. Two sociology professors at the University of North Texas, David Williamson and George Yancy, decided to study the phenomenon of what they came to call “Christianophobia” among progressive groups. What motivated them was the realization that despite all the studies of hostility toward many groups in the United States, there was very little concern about anti-Christian sentiments. They used quantitative data from an extensive survey by the American National Election Studies (ANES) with 3,076 respondents “to look at hostility toward different religious groups, and we were surprised to find a relatively high level of animosity toward conservative Christians”, as they put it in the introduction to the their book So Many Christians, So Few Lions [P4] that documented their studies. Most of my quotes from their book can be found in the Introduction. They then collected qualitative data from open-ended questionnaires of 3,577 respondents “from groups particularly likely to demonstrate anti-Christian attitudes to get more detailed information about the nature of this hostility. Our findings provide us with insight into previously undocumented social forces. Ultimately we argue that the term “Christianophobia” best explains the perceptions of some with anti-Christian hostility.”

What they found in fact was a cesspool of hate. They also found that the merger of attitudes about Christianity with political attitudes made it difficult for some of their respondents to disentangle the two. They wrote:

The following two representative comments indicate the propensity of several respondents to conflate Christians with Republicans:

Well, first of all I don’t think there is such a thing as a Republican who is not a Christian. (Female, aged 46– 55 with bachelor’s degree)

Republicans and Christians are the same people. (Male, over 75 with some college)

For respondents like these, Christianity is a conservative political ideology. They fail to comprehend the diversity among Christians and develop a tenacious stereotype. A fear of conservative Christians colors the perceptions of individuals who have animosity toward Christians. … our research suggests that anti-Christian hostility in the United States is primarily animosity directed toward conservative Christians or the image of Christians as conservatives.

The degree of loathing and malice expressed by some of their respondents is blood-chilling.

Our data do, however, provide important clues to the nature of the animosity of some respondents. For example, seven respondents referred to lions as they wrote out answers to various questions.

My favorite bumpersticker, “So many Christians, so few lions.” (Female, aged 46– 55 with bachelor’s degree)

Bring back the Lions. (Female, aged 65– 75 with master’s degree)

Not enough lions. They have abandoned their Christian views for a political position. (Male, aged 36– 45 with doctorate)

I wish we could start feeding them to lions again, or burn them at the stake. (Male, aged 36– 45 with doctorate)

FEED THE LIONS. (Male, aged 56– 65 with some college)

Feed them to the lions. (Male, aged 46– 55 with some college)

So many Christians, so few lions. (Male, aged 46– 55 with some college)

Of course, use of the word “lions” refers to the practice during the Roman Empire of feeding Christians to lions.

It would seem that there are a great many progressives with their own problems with intolerance. Also the conflation of hated Christians with conservative Republicans points to progressives as the greatest source of this hatred. This is a subject the authors explore in chapter 3. In that chapter, they wrote:

Based on the evidence … if we wanted to predict who would reject conservative Christians relative to other religious and racial groups, we would envision a white, well-educated, non-Protestant, wealthy, politically progressive male who does not live in the South.

They also speculate

Anti-Christian attitudes may arise when an individual with culturally progressive ideas has had limited personal contact with conservative Christians, even if he or she lives in an area where many conservative Christians live. The combination of being near enough to those Christians to feel threatened but not having the personal contact that humanizes them may enable such individuals to develop a perspective that views conservative Christians and Christianity as the source of societal problems. Solutions emerging from this type of perspective would revolve around limiting Christian influence in society.

Who are the bigots now?

If anything, Western Europe seems to have gone further down this road of animus toward Christians than the United States. The website Catholic Exchange,  affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church, has made the following points concerning Christianity in Europe:

• In Scotland during 2010-2011, 95% of all religious hate crimes were directed toward Christians. Only 2.1% of hate crimes were against Muslims, and 2.3% against Jews.
• Most religious hate crimes in France were against Christians, who suffered 84% of the cases of religious vandalism.
• In the United Kingdom, a British Conservative Party minister, who is also Muslim, Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, made a controversial speech in which she stated “I see it in United Kingdom and I see it in Europe: spirituality suppressed; divinity downgraded… at its core and in its instincts [militant secularism] is deeply intolerant. It demonstrates similar traits to totalitarian regimes – denying people the right to a religious identity and failing to understand the relationship between religious loyalty and loyalty to the state.” 
• An Austrian NGO, The Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination against Christians, released an annual report in 2011 documenting the growing problem of Christian persecution in Europe. Its director Dr. Gudrun Kugler, stated that all Christian denominations are confronted with  “a broad phenomena of intolerance and discrimination caused by those who reject and disrespect Christianity as a whole: radical lobbies which have gone overboard, seeking to limit the practice of the Christian religion and with it fundamental rights and freedoms.” When it is asked whether she is over-dramatizing the issue, she responds that many religious leaders and politicians have been raising the alarm. She also notes the persecutions of European Christians are slight compared to the daily possibility of murder, beatings, imprisonment and torture in countries like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia,  or Syria, or at the hands of the Islamic State. Nevertheless, she asserts, “History teaches to address injustices before they become a slippery slope towards even greater injustices.”

Is Religious Belief Unjustified by Observed Reality? Is God Truly Dead?

Much of the animus and derision toward Christians that is de rigueur for the Left nowadays has come from their increasing certainty Christianity’s God (and all other gods for that matter) is dead, that he never existed in the first place. We are all just the mechanistic evolutions allowed by the Laws of Physics, particularly as those laws were expressed biochemically.  If God does not exist, then why should they endure any opposition to their projects from narrow minded, primitive, bigoted, Bible-spouting conservatives?

A couple of centuries ago, the existence of life and its obvious intricate, small scale designs in living beings was often presented as a proof for the existence of God. Such a grand design as Life demanded the existence of a Designer. Famously (or infamously, as the case may be), that proof for the existence of God foundered on the rocks of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. After Darwin there seemed to be little or nothing of scientific support for the idea of God.

The theory of evolution does seem to have a problem in that the probabilities of random chemical reactions creating the first living cell – or virus for that matter- are impossibly small. Some who would save Darwin do have a counter-argument based on the idea that chemical changes could occur incrementally that would eventually add up to a living cell, i.e. there would be chemical evolution before biological evolution could take off. Those ideas in turn have been challenged by others, and those have been answered by others. See here and here and here and here and here.  The whole field looks to be in a very interesting mess, but the bottom line seems to be that currently the idea of non-random mutations is becoming very respectable.

I am a physicist, and as such I have studied some incredibly weird things. The magic trilogy of special relativity, general relativity, and quantum mechanics have conditioned the minds of most physicists to be willing to consider propositions just as non-intuitive as we find in the magic trilogy. (Did you know there was no “Before” before the Big Bang? Or that a quantum particle is simultaneously a wave, and that until it is absorbed by something, it exists partly in many different places? Or that the vacuum is a seething sea of particle-antiparticle pairs going in and out of existence?) Even the theory of electromagnetic fields, finished by James Clerk Maxwell in 1860 and the most thoroughly tested and confirmed basic theory in physics, has its own weirdnesses with changing perpendicular electric and magnetic vector fields generating each other and propagating in a direction perpendicular to both of them. That is what we colloquially call “light”. Then when we try to combine two of the trilogy, quantum mechanics and general relativity, the weirdness gets totally out of hand and you go quietly (or not-so-quietly as the case may be) insane. After noticing that basic reality is so totally strange, how difficult can it be to fit in the idea of God as part of this reality? Is there any evidence for His/Her existence? Is God truly dead?

I will continue this discussion in my next post.

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