Something of a rant:

Where do "radical secularists" come from?  White conservative Christians seem quite worried about these people, and their persecuting ways.  It seems to be the case that in fact white conservative Christians explain many of their most politically controversial acts as preemptive acts to hold off the intolerance of these radical secularists, whose persecution of them is right around the corner.

This used to be just grousing by older white guys when they were around older white guys (which is one definition for the magazine First Things), but things have gotten worse recently.  The US Attorney General, William Barr, delivered a speech last fall at Notre Dame where he suggested that conservative Christians are facing a barbarian horde of nihilistic secularists who want to, well, do terrible things.  Where these people were, or what things they were going to do, was left significantly unclear.  But Barr made it clear that the Trump operation understands itself as a political counter to this rising godless monstrosity.  (The speech is here.)

Now, Barr is quite a remarkable person, and a remarkable Attorney General.  He seems to me modeling his time there on John Mitchell's admirable example.  Way to go, Mr. Barr.  I hope you'll be remembered in the same way that Mitchell is.

And now we see that the people most worried about the persecution of white conservative Christians in America are . . . white conservative Christians.  I mean, that's not super-surprising; one is always given special dispensation to take special concern with oneself.  But what's interesting is that the discriminated against here are always other conservative white Christians, somewhere else; no one seems to have it happen to them.  And what's more interesting is that the people who are most convinced that it is happening actually live in parts of the country where they don't know any radical secularists, or really hardly any secularists at all.  In other words, the white conservative Christians who would be best positioned to know about persecution--say, in places with high secularism--are the ones who see it as least likely; the white conservative Christians who are most in their own bubble, in rural red areas, are the ones who feel the danger most vividly.

What's the difference?  Is the difference due to some fact like that white conservative Christians in pluralistic areas have had their religiosity unknowingly "diluted"?  Or is the difference due to the fact that white conservative Christians living in conditions of plurality actually, you know, know some "secularists" and see them as messy people, just like the rest of us, whose experience of the world is not entirely dissimilar to their own, and who may actually be, from time to time, when the moon is full, disquietingly, you know, non-persecutorial?  Not monsters?

(Yes, of course, the same should be said for those believers in "New Atheism" who don't know many actual believers--you should get to know us!  We're not actually terrible people, or at least not significantly more terrible than any other group.  But they're not the ones in power now, they're not the ones locking up kids in cages, they're not the ones defrauding people of their right to vote, etc., so I'm much less worried about the Richard Dawkinses and Jerry Coynes of the world right now.)

Why do conservative white Christians have the idea that they're on the verge of being persecuted?  Two words: Fox News.  Well, that's not all. And it's enormously convenient for their own self-understanding.  But the capacity of Fox to distort people who live in its bubble is amazing.  (And let's be clear, the real "bubble" in the US is a right-wing one, not a left-wing one, and demographically and geographically, leftists who cluster in cities are exposed not only to far more racial and ethnic diversity, but also to political diversity; rightists who live in the country and can drive a hundred miles without seeing anyone else who doesn't look and think like them are not.)

Sometimes they say the "rising tide of unbelief" in the US is what they're fighting.  But the irony is, they are the ones who have caused that.  After all, who are the new "Nones"? They are not immigrants to America; they are overwhelmingly ex-Christians. As Nicholas Kristof (among others) has pointed out, this is causing a nasty backlash.  

But these white conservative Christians are like the honey badger--they just don't care.

So: Conservative white Christians have confected a demonized mythological other.  And they're acting on the rest of us out of a fear of their own confabulation. And those actions are producing a hostility to Christianity, not only the conservative white Christian kind.

One day, scholars will write the history of this age of American religion and politics, and it will be a sad story.

Happy Sunday.