The Flip: The Evangelical Persecution Complex

Having had some distance from Evangelicalism, one of the things that boggles my mind more than anything else is the way Evangelicals position themselves to the world around them. Last week, in response to the passing of the “Respect for Marriage Act”, Franklin Graham tweeted the following:

If you understand the history of Christianity, Graham’s ridiculous tweet can begin to make sense.  Many years ago, during Christianity’s infancy, the church’s relationship with the Roman Empire was difficult. Rodney Stark’s seminal work, The Rise of Christianity[i], outlines in great historical detail this period of history. 

During the first century, the Roman Empire was unusual in its toleration of diverse religions and the small band of a couple thousand early Christians were allowed an amazing amount of religious freedom. They were considered just another weird subset of Judaism and were pretty much left alone. 

However, there was an historic date when all this began to change – a sort of ancient 9/11: July 19, AD64 in which the city of Rome burned for 72 hours. Just when everyone thought it was over, the fires began again and burned for another 72 hours. The fires left tens of thousands of people homeless and destitute.

A rumor spread that the soldiers of Nero stopped the firefighters from putting out the fires. Another rumor started that his soldiers started the fires. The political base of Nero was eroding in both the Senate and among the people. So, like many bad leaders, Emperor Nero decided to blame the fires on a minority group that the majority did not like: the Christians.  After all, there were rumors about them: they were cannibals who ate the body and drank the blood of their leader, they were against family values because they were more loyal to their leader, and they were sexually promiscuous because of the way they loved each other behind closed doors.

So, Nero gathered many of the Christians up and crucified them or had them sewn into the skins of animals and thrown to wild animals or had them dipped in pitched, held on poles, and lit on fire to light his gardens at night.

But, as Rodney Stark points out, things slowly changed for the early Christians and by AD350, 56% of the Empire identified as Christian and the new Emperor Constantine was forced to make Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. This ended the reign of Christian persecution and marked the beginning of the long era of Christian domination. 

Today, some 2,000 or so years later, many who identify as Christian in this county do not relate to Constantinian Christianity but rather still think of themselves as a marginalized and persecuted minority desperate to survive in a wicked and depraved world. Which is why, to the bewilderment of everyone outside of the movement, Evangelicals can control all the branches of the federal government in the most powerful empire the world has ever seen but still feel persecuted. 

This would all be an interesting sociological observation except that how this plays out in real public policy that effects people. Franklin Graham’s tweet is an attack on actual persecuted groups. The Respect for Marriage Act does not force anyone to do anything. The act does not take rights away from anyone except for the right to discriminate.

But in a maneuver that oppressors have done for centuries, Evangelicals like Franklin Graham flip the table and claim they are being persecuted when their ability to discriminate can have consequences. Recently, I read this quote from Timothy Snyder’s book on Hitler and Stalin and found it eerily relevant to Franklin Graham’s tweet and Evangelical persecution complex:  

No major war or act of mass killing in the twentieth century began without the aggressor or aggressors first claiming innocence and victimhood…[P]eople who believe they are victims can be motivated to perform acts of great violence.[ii]

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[i] Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).

[ii] Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, (New York: Basic Books, 2010), p. 399.