Michael Luciano, writing in The Daily Banter, wants you to know that white Evangelicals in America have a “grossly overdeveloped sense of victimhood.” And he’s got the opinion polls to prove it.
You can read the full article here, but the argument is simple. According to a recent Pew Research report, about 50% of white Evangelical Americans agree with the statement that “there is a lot of discrimination against Evangelical Christians in America.” And this, to Luciano, is obviously unconscionable, considering the fact that everyone knows its white Evangelicals with their bigoted hatred and hateful bigotry who drive so much discrimination in America in the first place. Where do they get off?
Luciano, to his credit, attempts to marshal some evidence to support his thesis that white Evangelicals are not discriminated against at all but actually “pandered to politically.” An earlier Pew questionnaire discovered, for instance, that only 21% of Americans would consider Evangelicalism a disqualification for the office of president, whereas 53% would consider atheism a disqualification. And 53% of Americans (perhaps that same, woefully-unenlightened 53% who want the president of an overwhelmingly Christian nation to profess Christianity) think that belief in God is necessary to be a moral person. Admittedly the connection between the results of these Pew polls and Luciano’s overall point about discrimination is a little… we’ll say underarticulated. But let’s give him the benefit of a doubt.
He raises some other points as well:
Despite all the religiosity that’s so readily apparent in public life — “In God we trust” on the money, the National Prayer Breakfast, “God Bless America” signing off every major presidential speech, the continued use of “So help me God” at the end of the presidential oath of office despite nothing of the sort appearing in the oath in the Constitution, the existence of a congressional chaplain, the Ten Commandments still cropping up on public property across the country… the presence of nativity scenes on public property during Christmastime… it is the white evangelical Christians who think they suffer above all others.
See? The word “God” appears in all sorts of scandalous places, and nativity scenes, too. So there are still vestiges of America’s historical Christianity hanging on in the 21st century. (Although they clearly wouldn’t be if Mr. Luciano had his way. Does this represent a wrinkle in his argument? Does his conclusion that Evangelicals are not discriminated against rely in part on people with his social agenda not taking office? Inquiring minds want to know if this has ever crossed Luciano’s inquiring mind.) At any rate, not all of the public expressions of the faith of our forefathers have been systematically effaced yet. So what do these “ignorant creationists” have to complain about? Whence this so-called “discrimination”?
I don’t know whether or not Luciano is interested in entertaining counter-arguments, but there are a few questions that he might ask himself in a quiet moment of introspection sometime. And those questions might shed some light on why these contemptible Evangelical hicks imagine so “phantasmagorically” the state they live under despises them.
One question would start right at home. As a member of the New York media—a writer for a publication with a national audience in a great collective of publications with national audiences—does he happen to work with any white Evangelicals? More importantly, do his co-workers share his animosity for white Evangelicals? Is this a common attitude among his peers, a group of people who can broadcast their every opinion from coast to coast? Might that attitude color their coverage of Evangelicals, which those Evangelicals then pick up on as hostility? The questions answer themselves.
He might also ask himself what sort of response he would have gotten from the Daily Banter had he decided to take his article in a slightly different direction. Let’s say he got really edgy. Let’s say he decided to deflate the overblown sense of persecution that attends, say, homosexuals. Or blacks. Or Jews. There’s material to go on there, no doubt about it. At least one-in-four Americans are white Evangelicals. Approximately three-in-one-hundred are homosexuals, lesbians, or bisexuals. Is it a sign of “pandering,” then, that so much speechifying and legislation and kowtowing by politicians to the LGBT agenda gets lavished upon this tiny minority? Have they become spoiled political pets, whining even though their every demand is dutifully attended to? Or how about that recent unpleasantness in Missouri? Does an event like Ferguson suggest that blacks in America unquestioningly believe narratives about their oppression, even ones that don’t quite line up with the facts? Or do the Jews, although they’re famously tight-lipped about their anxieties, have a leg to stand on when they fret about rising tides of anti-Semitism at home and in Europe? Even though they are massively overrepresented in every seat and corridor of power in the Western world?
These are interesting questions, to me at least. Good potential articles. Does Mr. Luciano think his bosses would find them equally publishable? If not, why is that? I doubt it could be that white Evangelicals are denied protections offered to certain other demographics.
(We could look at more concrete examples, too, if we were so inclined: Cathy Truett, Tim Tebow, and Pat Robertson—all of whom were publicly smeared for expressing basic Evangelical beliefs. Can you recall the last time a business owner, an athlete, or a celebrity was taken to task for supporting, say, gay marriage? I hear the POTUS might just give you a ring if you’re a black professional athlete that comes out of the closet. Pandering?)
We could generate these questions all night, but frankly it’d be a great weariness of the flesh. All of this, after all, is just squabbling over victim status. Petty. That’s the whole reason Luciano’s article exists, in fact. Because victim status is sacred ground to the contemporary liberal, and he will fight tooth and nail to maintain it. You can’t let some upstart hetero whiteys start shoehorning in on your game. But personally, I say let them have it. I don’t want white Evangelicals (or white Southerners in general or white rural conservatives of any stripe) to think of themselves as victims of oppression, or as victims at all.
How they ought to envision themselves is entangled in a conflict. How they ought to envision themselves is a distinct people who live under a regime that has grown hostile to them. Luciano’s article, in fact, is a picture of that cultural distance and the bad blood it has engendered. However low-ranking he might be, he is a member of the media, and the media is an arm of the regime. As are his counterparts on the West Coast in Hollywood. As are the professors in the colleges that educated him. As are the courts and the politicians he shills for. As are the financial interests they shill for.
It shouldn’t come as a shock to us that these people, whose habits, convictions, and lives are so foreign to our own, have decided that they don’t like us very much. And we shouldn’t retreat to the “oppressive society” frame, either. There is no overarching oppressive society. There are multiple societies inhabiting the same geographical territory, with all of the dominance struggles that such overcrowdedness produces. A back-and-forth with people from that foreign society over there about how they’re mistreating us is so much wheel spinning. What we need to do is break what influence they have over our neck of the woods.
There are perfectly legitimate reasons to despise evangelicals. None of which are known to Anglophone Media Elite.
Christ never called us to despise the sheep who have gone astray.
Despise was too strong a word. Actually the ‘gelicals whom the Media Elite so hate are the ones I find to be quite well on my side in the Culture War: The ones who stick to their guns and believe Catholics are idolators and going to hell. That, however, is not mainstream Evangelicalism, which, nearly coterminous with the Republican Party, seems to stand athwart modernity yelling, “Wait for me.”
We’ve borne the hatred of your kind, Yankees, Papists, intellectuals, and all that like, for hundreds of years. Yet my folk are still here, in the hills, in the bayous, and across the Gulf plains, and we’ll be here until all three fade away. Since none of your kind have the courage to come down into the hollows to shout “redneck” “hillbilly” or “heretic”, you can pat yourself on the back safely in some big city or Yankee town.
yes our people are still here in the mountains and the forests and the sagebrush, the dispossessed from the south who came and made the west. made it safe for the metrosexual vibrant tools of SJW. they are clueless about our patience, waiting for them to fire the first shot. the gates of their hell will open, they will burn in molten lead.