Persecution of Christians in America: It's Not Just 'Over There'
By now, the whole world is familiar with the snuff films documenting the forced marches and beheadings of orange-jumpsuited Christians by such groups as ISIS. Churches are blown up or converted into mosques, monuments and tombstones are pulverized or desecrated, and Christian schools are shut down while refugees from the horror of ISIS and other Islamist groups literally flee to the mountains.
But as it did at the turn of the 20 th century, when the harassed and tormented Armenians were exterminated by the hundreds of thousands, the world turns a nearly blind eye to the distress of Christians and groups like the Yazidis , 600 of whom were slaughtered only a heartbeat in time ago. By and large, the extermination of Christians and Christian culture from the Middle East and Northern Africa is greeted by the West with a sigh or ignored altogether.
That is because for most Americans, persecution of Christians is perceived as happening only somewhere over there in other countries. Distance serves as anesthetic. Certainly its not happening here. Not in the United States of America! Numbed Christians in America assume they are safe from persecution.
But they are not safe.
As Msgr. Charles Pope and Johnette Benkovic point out, persecution of a hated segment of society begins gradually and accelerates stage by stage. Christians in America should recognize they are well into the first stages of persecution.
The first stage begins with attempts to stereotype the targeted group. Our current president summed up the Christian-hating lefts views of people of faith when in 2008, he categorized working-class voters in the following way: "[I]t's not surprising, then, that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
For Obama, as well as for nearly all the left, people of faith are the inhibitors of progress, and they deserve being caricatured as Bible-thumpers, and therefore ignorant, uneducated, backward hicks and rednecks.
Msgr. Pope elaborates:
Catholics, in particular, were also accused of having neurotic guilt and a hatred ofor aversion to sexuality. We were denounced as a sexist institution filled with clergy who were sexually repressed, homosexuals, or pedophiles.We were labeledan authoritarian institution stuck in the past, one with too many restrictive rules. Basically, as the stereotype goes, Catholics and Bible-believing Christians are a sad, angry, boring, backward, repressed lot. To many who accept the stereotype, we are a laughableeven tragicgroup caught in a superstitious past, incapable of throwing off the shackles of faith.
The second stage of persecution involves justifying hatred of a particular group. As the progressive religion accelerates and consolidates its agenda, it justifies vilification of Christians who refuse to embrace its tenets of faith. Christians are portrayed as regressive troglodytes who are determined to resist the hope and change forced on them by the almighty State. Those who oppose the fundamental transformation the left desires are described as close-minded, harmful to human dignity and freedom, intolerant, hateful, bigoted, unfair, homophobic, reactionary, and just plain mean and basically bad people.
Of course, it follows that the history of the Christian church is seen as little more than unrelieved episodes of crusades, inquisitions, repression of scientific knowledge the repository of everything bad. Meanwhile, the current-day intellectual heirs of the Enlightenment are held up as the only light Western civilization has known or will ever know.
The end result, Pope writes, is that all of this has the effect of creating a self-righteous indignation toward believers and of making anti-Catholic and anti-Christian attitudes a permissible bigotry for many today.
Stage three involves marginalizing Christians role in society. Because Christianity is seen by the left as harmful to society at large, its immense contributions are downplayed or scorned. In fact, religion should be exterminated if a just and equal, fundamentally transformed United States is to arise like the proverbial phoenix from the cremation of the superstitious, irrational Christian past and present. If the Church is allowed to exist, its skeletal remains should exist only within select ossuaries, wherein its outdated and harmful rituals may just may be performed by and for the drugged and deluded.
In practice, Monsignor Pope writes, the lefts hatred of religion means that public prayer must be forbidden, Christian influence in public policy eliminated, and Christian holidays secularized.
It follows that Christians must be excluded from places of power and influence, be they in politics, academia, or the media. All positions of power belong by right to enlightened leftist progressives.
As Chris Matthews recently suggested, Christians, particularly conservative evangelical Christians, have no place in American politics.
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/05/persecution_of_christians_in_america_its_not_just_over_there.html#ixzz3Zq4ebD4S
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