A Princeton Tiger Confronts the Lions
At some point between the Moral Majority and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, conservative Christians in the US began to feel that they are persecuted in ways that meaningfully recall Roman suppression of the early church and the passion of Jesus Christ himself.
This is a video of a white man who is a professor of philosophy at an Ivy League university where he also directs the Center for American Ideals, a name so Orwellian it sounds more like a DC pressure group than a place where academic work is done. His message is that in America today, being an outspoken conservative can cost you everything.
Of course, the word he uses is "Catholic", but the way he uses it, it is clear he does not mean the millions of Latino Catholics whose lives are imperiled by a hostile security state. He does, however, believe that encountering people who disagree with one's politics is part of the same legacy in which Irish and Italian immigrants were discriminated against for religious reasons.
How "Catholicism" in the United States came to refer not to a world religion whose leaders differ significantly from the American right but a set of positions on a handful of social issues is a question I do not have the historical research to answer myself.
Perhaps it was the same process by which "Islam" came to mean "terrorism", though Catholics have had more of a say in this discourse than Muslims. Perhaps it has something to do with the Manhattan Declaration; I don't know.
My point with this is that the kind of absurd ideas about persecution in Fox's "War on Christmas" or the movie God's Not Dead are the consequences of a modern political philosophy with no concept of power.
I don't mean that the right in America has a deficient understanding of power; I mean that power has no meaningful place in their discourse at all. This is despite their hate and suspicion of the "liberal state", the rigor of which is matched only by the academic left in my experience.
So, to confound absurdity with absurdity, I have tried to think how conservatives might be reading items in the news in ways that reinforce their beliefs.
"The jury opted not to indict the officer for the death of an unarmed homophobe."