I think the Christian right perceive a kind of persecution or a general disdain for them because of something very real.
First off, when we speak of Christian and Muslim fundamentalism together, the conservatives tend to hear something they think is incredibly unfair. On the one hand, you have people trying to pass laws teaching creationism in schools, standing on street corners handing out bibles, maybe even making claims that non-Christians will not find salvation. On the other hand, you have people blowing themselves up, crashing planes into buildings, and trying to bring down the states of Israel (primarily) and the United States (secondarily). Now, most will acknowledge that terrible things have been done in the name of Christianity in the past, but it seems to be considerably less common today. It's important to look at this from the perspective of the Christian right. They are being associated with murderers.
Secondly, it is impossible for any government anywhere to be completely neutral to religion. The law has to be based on ideas taken to be true, and if those ideas conflict with that of some religion, then the government has essentially taken a religious position. There are some people who believe that God does not want them to seek medical care when they are ill. They are allowed to do this, but there is no religious exemption for them when they wish to deny basic medical care to their children. The reason for this is that their belief is essentialy untrue. The public schools are teaching our children every year that human beings evolved from species of primates. The government has taken a position on the truth of both these religious ideas; the ideas will be tolerated but contradictory ideas will be promoted.
This bias is unavoidable. Our best efforts to be fair involve appealing to secularism: remove the nativity scenes, the ten commandments monument, the words "in God we trust," and so on. The problem with the appeal to secularism is that the one set of ideas it never contradicts is the atheistic set. We do not intend for the government to take the position of atheism any more than we want it to take the position of theism, but, in some sense, it has to do one or the other. The religious left seems comfortable with this, but the religious right does not, and I understand.
Thirdly, many people do ridicule the religious right as ignorant buffoons who want simply want to control the way other people think. Aside from the hostility in this accusation, there is also a hypocrisy in it. To call the most important belief in a person's life buffonery is an effort to control the way xe thinks. They are told that to oppose abortion is to oppose women, which seems odd to them because half of the aborted fetuses are, in fact, female. They are told that they must help promote homosexual marriage or else they will be regarded as bigots.
Now, of course there are arguments for homosexual marriage that do not involve an appeal to namecalling. There are arguments for abortion that do not appeal to namecalling. There are arguments against most of the positions of the Christian right. And people on both sides have their share of this kind of thing. And I don't mean to support the religious right. I'm probably a moderate about most things.
I don't disagree with most of the things said in this thread so far either. The conspiracy to boil the frog slowly might be just the way politics works, but it is probably true and it is probably bad. |
