The United States began as the colony of a country whose secular king was also the head of the country’s church.
Since its founding, every president of this country has been Christian, as has the majority of the house and senate, the justices Supreme Court, and the governors and legislatures of most states, if not the majority of them. We have slapped “In God We Trust” on a lot of things, added Him to the secular Pledge of Allegiance, have people swear on Bibles for any number of reasons, and have to deal with just wanting to watch a football game but have to either get coerced into praying or have our time taken up by watching a coach pray.
And, yet, Christians in the United States claim they are being persecuted.
By whom?
Their own?
In a word, “Yes”
The claim in this country is basically that persecution consists of not letting religion run the country according to its dictates and disagreeing with Christians on political and personal matters. Persecution could be merely a matter of having expressed an opinion and sticking to it in spite of the other person invoking Jesus in a Caesar situation.
The first modern attack on religion, specifically Christianity, is supposed to have been when schools stopped having students saying the “Lord’s prayer” complete with the Protestant doxology added at the end to improve on Jesus’s version of the prayer that He composed Himself, or any prayer that favored one particular religion. The proponents of prayer in school will claim that no child can pray under any circumstances which is patently false. They can pray so long as it does not get forced on others or disrupt instruction.
You can pray before a test, but you cannot suddenly begin praying out loud, forcing others to pray along, or swing a dead, bleeding chicken at the end of a string in ever-widening circles over your head to get a good grade on a test.
They hold that Christian politicians are attacked for their religious beliefs and for refusing to authorize same-sex wedding certificates. Businesses are persecuted if they refuse to bake cakes or arrange flowers for their customers’ same-sex weddings. One Pizza joint claimed it was persecuted because it advertised it would not cater any Gay weddings without pointing out the obvious fact that his pizza joint was failing and needed publicity, he had no Gay customers who would have asked, and that no sane same-sex couple would have a pizza joint cater the wedding reception and his customers, the ones he never had, continued not to come. Colleges silence Christian voices. Again yes, but only when the religious speech is intrusive and forced on an unwilling crowd.
Sometimes it is not the message but the presentation.
Don’t deny me a wedding cake and then say you are being persecuted because I complain about that.
The Southern Baptist Church came into being to support slavery. Was the Civil War religious persecution?
The Separatists came here to freely exercise the religion not accepted by their head of the church king or by his rivals, the Puritans, a rivalry that resulted in a civil war and the uncivil beheading of the head of the English church.
Of course, when the Mayflower arrived in Plymouth, anyone not of their faith was on their own with no help from the colony. They would have been of the wrong, unacceptable religion.
America began with one Christian sect rejecting all others in one colony and in the other slavery.
When the Puritans came here, they were able to pick on the Separatists again. The monarchy was restored as was the national religion.
Christian Nationalists and those who self-identify as persecuted Christians are correct in claiming Christians in this country have been and still are routinely persecuted when you consider how the Quakers were treated upon their arrival, having to isolate in what would become Rhode Island, or the Mormons who had to go to Utah, or the Catholics with the Know Nothings.
Yes, religion has been mistreated and Christians are still being persecuted.
However, the persecution of Christians was not perpetrated by the minority religions and anyone with a lack of religion, but by Christians themselves.
While finding fault with them in modern times, Christians were and remain to a degree the non-Muslim version of Sunis and Shi’ites.
It is the Incubus and Succubus thing redux. Commit the offense and not only blame someone else but claim by being held responsible for the act makes the perpetrator a victim.
Catholics and Protestants (both Christians) waged war on one another in various ways.
Depending on a person’s religion, political office was out of the question.
Lord Baltimore, wanting better conditions for his fellow Catholics, founded Maryland and his intentions were clear and acceptable as he received a Charter. Yet, when Protestants eventually outnumbered the Catholics, they voted to take rights away from Catholics in the colony.
During a discussion at the Continental Congress of the “Intolerable Acts” that had been introduced to the colonies after the Boston Tea Party, among the Acts that specifically targeted Boston and the 13 Colonies that would become the United States was one that applied only to Quebec, also part of the single British North America. That intolerable Parliamentary act legalized the practice of Catholicism in Quebec.
Christian, John Jay, wrote about this acceptance of a Christian denomination,
“Nor can we suppress our astonishment that a British Parliament should ever consent to establish in that country a religion that has deluged your island in blood, and dispersed impiety, bigotry, persecution, murder, and rebellion through every part of the world.”
Intolerance of the religious beliefs of Native Americans led to kidnapping Native children and forcing them to become Christian at “Indian Schools” where they were forbidden to speak their languages or worship their gods.
A person has to wonder why, if people started coming here for religious freedom, they had to move away from established colonies or areas within them to be able to practice their religion because the religion of the region would not tolerate theirs and took action to make that very well known.
Remember, there was no diversity allowed in religion. You were Catholic or Protestant, therefore Christian, or not.
Quick review:
A Huguenot colony was established for religious freedom at Fort Caroline, the modern Jacksonville, Florida, area. The Spanish, whose territory Florida still was, established a forward operating base at St. Augustine and wiped out the Fort Caroline colony because, as Spanish commander, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés told King Philip II he
“hanged all those we had found in [Fort Caroline] because…they were scattering the odious Lutheran doctrine in these Provinces.”
The same erasure was faced by survivors of a French shipwreck because of their religion.
Catholics were originally banned from the colonies and four Quakers were hanged in Boston over a two- year period for being Quakers.
Cotton Mather, Boston’s famous colonial minister, gave sermons against the Catholics and the French, and in various colonies statutes were enacted that discriminated against Catholics in matters of property and voting.
Before he became THE Benedict Arnold, when George Washington dispatched him to get support for the cause from the French Canadians, he was warned by George about possible religious conflict,
“Prudence, policy and a true Christian Spirit will lead us to look with compassion upon their errors, without insulting them.”
Unfortunately, this alliance was one of the reasons for Arnold’s defection. He did not approve of America’s alliance with Catholic France and said so publicly.
After the Revolution, in Massachusetts only Christians were allowed to hold public office, but Catholics could but they would first have to renounce papal authority. Catholics were banned from public office in the New York State constitution. In Maryland, Catholics had full civil rights, but Jews did not. Delaware required an oath affirming belief in the Holy Trinity, and not the peppers, onions, and celery one, and a number of the new states had official, state-supported churches.
Thomas Jefferson may have drafted a bill to guarantee legal equality for citizens of all religions, or none, in Virginia, but it was Patrick Henry’s bill calling for state support for “teachers of the Christian religion” that was favored.
In the course of debate, James Madison presented reasons why the state had no business supporting Christian instruction, among them,
“the Religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every…man to exercise it as these may dictate. This right is in its nature an inalienable right.”
He also asserted that the government sanction of a religion was, in essence, a threat to religion asking,
“Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects?”
He argued that Henry’s proposal was “a departure from that generous policy, which offering an Asylum to the persecuted and oppressed of every Nation and Religion, promised a lustre to our country.”
The Henry bill was defeated and the Virginia legislature went with Jefferson’s plan for the separation of church and state and this was brought to the Constitutional Convention and influenced Article VI which states that federal elective and appointed officials
“shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution, but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States,”
in a constitution that does not mention God or a deity and forbids Congress from making laws that would infringe of the free exercise of religion or establish one as the religion of the land.
In the 19th Century it was preached and accepted because of that, that, if permitted, Catholics would turn America over to the pope and this actually was resurrected when John Kennedy ran for president.
An anti-Catholic mob burned a convent to the ground in Boston because of reports that young women were being abused in the convent school.
Anti-Catholic sentiment in Philadelphia resulted in the Bible Riots of 1844, during which two Catholic churches and the homes of Catholics houses were torched and 20 people killed by other Christians in the name of Christianity.
During this time, Joseph Smith founded a new religion unacceptable to the mainstream Protestant majority so, he got tarred and feathered and he and his followers were expelled from their home state by Missouri Governor Lilburn Boggs. Three days later, 17 church members, including children, at the Mormon settlement of Haun’s Mill were massacred by a militia of Christians, and later a mob of never to be convicted of any crime members murdered Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum while they were jailed in Carthage, Illinois.
In the 2000s, a candidate in Oklahoma was accused of being the wrong type of Christian because he was Catholic not Baptist, so his opponent, hammering on that, claimed this should have people vote against him.
It worked.
I know my own Boston Irish History, so I know of the mainstream Christian on Christian persecution but am not so knowledgeable about those little churches that dot city blocks whose congregants’ weekly donations would add nicely to that of the bigger church nearby that somehow is able to get that church to have to close so the members migrate to the bigger church bringing their money with them.
All this to say that, yes, there is religious persecution of Christians. They have been persecuting each other since Paul took the teachings of Jesus and made them political.
It is also to remind people that, with all the Christians in charge of this country, the persecution will be directed out from them toward each other and the rest of us and will somehow be justified on the basis that their religion or idea of God is the only one.
The suffer from Beam Eye.
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