[I posted this on Facebook yesterday, and I thought it might be of interest to many in the Daily Kos community.]
In recent days there has been talk of the Christian faith in the United States being "persecuted". Some have even gone so far as to say an era of "persecution" lies ahead that will force devout Christians to go "underground". Being a (minor) historian and an old history teacher, and because language is very important to me, I thought I should share some of what I've learned about the topic of religious persecution, and perhaps let you draw your own conclusions about the validity of the assertions we have been hearing in recent days. I am saying these things not out of animosity to any of my friends, whom I love and cherish. But as I say, language is very important to me, and when I think it's being used carelessly, I have to speak up. So please understand that I am not criticizing or vilifying any of you. OK?
I am first compelled to note that humans have not usually had much tolerance for those who disagreed with them, although this general observation has many exceptions. This attitude has its deep origins in the principle of group solidarity. Human society itself came into being because humans had to stick together in the face of terrible threats from other animals and the vagaries of the natural world in general. The threat posed by other human groups was often even worse. Group solidarity was therefore a matter of survival. The principle of group solidarity has been passed down across time and space among human communities everywhere. Its message was plain: dissenters cannot be tolerated, because they weaken the group. Further, there is the widespread fear many humans have had (or still do) of antagonizing the spirit or spirits that rule the unseen world, that hypothesized supernatural plane of existence that most humans believe in. The rise of modern political and economic ideologies--belief systems held in human brains about how life should be organized and regulated--has complicated matters further. Add to this the tendency of many humans (not all) to feel threatened by those who see the world differently than they. Finally, consider the fact that certain humans have a nasty, sociopathic desire to harm other people and force them to submit to the sociopaths' will. Take all of these factors together, and we have a formula for regular upheaval and disaster. It is from these roots that the malignant growths of intolerance and persecution arise.
No group in history has suffered more for its beliefs and its culture than the Jews. Jews, whose territory was repeatedly conquered by foreign empires, were savagely persecuted by the Hellenistic ruler Antiochus IV Epiphanes in the second century BCE. Antiochus inflicted monstrous tortures on those Jews who refused to renounce their beliefs. Later, when Palestine (as it was known) was under Roman rule, more than a million Jews were massacred by the Romans in the terrible uprising and war that erupted in the first century CE. Many Jews went into Diaspora following these terrible events, many of them forcibly driven out. As the Roman Empire fell under the control of Christian authorities, Jews were singled out for persecution and discrimination. Christian leaders ranging from Augustine to St. John Chrysostom condemned them in the harshest terms. Augustine asserted that the Jews had been driven from their homeland as God's punishment for the murder of Jesus (whom I refer to by his Aramaic name, Yeshua). The Roman Catholic Church's hierarchy labeled the Jews as "Christ killers", a label which was not officially repudiated until 1965.
In the centuries that followed the slow disintegration of the western Roman Empire, Jews were systematically barred from many regions of Europe, and even in those regions they occupied, they were prevented from engaging in certain occupations. Jews were forcibly expelled from England, France, Lithuania, Portugal, Spain and numerous other territories. Jews were massacred by the participants in the First Crusade. They were butchered by many communities during the horrible era of the Black Death (bubonic plague) for having "caused" the plague. Terrible violence against Jews erupted with distressing frequency across Europe. Jewish holy books were often publicly burned. Jews were stripped of all legal statuses and protections until certain individuals in the eighteenth century, influenced by Enlightenment principles, began to speak out against such discrimination. Martin Luther published a viciously ugly attack on Jews in 1543 ("On the Jews and Their Lies") that gives recommendations for the brutal treatment of Jews that are shocking to read even today. Preposterous falsehoods were spread about Jews: that they kidnapped and murdered Christian children at Passover in order to use the blood of the children to make their bread (The Blood Libel) or the grotesque charge that Jews stole consecrated hosts from Catholic churches in order to torture the body of Christ.
When German nationalism and romanticism reared their heads in the early nineteenth century, traditional hatred of Jews was often added to them. "Scientific" racism emerged from the poisonous writings of charlatans such as Arthur de Gobineau, and a new rationale for anti-Semitism emerged with it: Jews were a "race", not a religious cohort. All of these ideas passed through millions of brains in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. When scapegoats were needed for Germany's humiliating defeat in the First World War, Jews were a convenient--and traditional--target. By 1945, one-third of the world's Jews (and two-thirds of those who had once lived in Europe) had been exterminated.
Christians in Europe also routinely waged war on each other. The leaders of the Catholic and Orthodox faiths excommunicated each other. Religious wars (which were also political in character) in the German states led to the deaths of millions of people in the 16th and 17th centuries. The wars of religion in 16th century France were marked by savage massacres of Protestants by French Catholics. John Calvin's theocracy in Geneva, Switzerland tolerated no dissent at all. Traditional Russian Orthodox Christians (called Old Believers) were brutally persecuted and routinely harassed from the mid-1600s to the early 1900s. The English Civil War was partly religious in nature. It was only with the greatest difficulty that this sectarian violence was brought under control.
Religious persecution now often takes a political character. Of particular note was the barbarism of the Communist authorities in Russia. Joseph Stalin waged the most terrible campaign of anti-religious persecution since the time of the Roman Emperor Diocletian. More than 95% of all Russian Orthodox churches were destroyed, many of them by roving bands of Young Communist Leaguers or Young Pioneers who specialized in burning churches. More than 90% of all mosques were eliminated as well. Some 500,000 Moscow Jews had only three synagogues available to them. Tens of thousands of priests, rabbis, and mullahs were executed, often after suffering the imaginative torments of the Soviet secret police. The Communists took particular delight in sending Muslim clerics from central Asia to the coldest parts of the Gulag to exterminate them faster. The Bible, the Koran, the Talmud, and all other works of religious literature were banned and removed from libraries. The Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow was dynamited to the ground. The Ukrainian Catholic Church was brutally attacked. Church attendance by young people was strongly discouraged. Atheism was forcibly imposed in schools. During World War II the persecution of Russian Orthodoxy was lifted in a cynical attempt to use religion as a means of stirring up patriotism in the desperate war against Nazi Germany. But whole Muslim communities were uprooted and destroyed. Stalin had those who resisted shot or even burned alive.
As it happens, I once interviewed a survivor of that terrible time for a research project I was working on in my graduate studies. He was an old Lithuanian man. He had been a Roman Catholic priest at one time. The secret police had bugged his church and heard another priest denouncing Stalin's suppression of the Church. All of the church's officials were arrested. This man was interrogated for more than two weeks, as I recall. He was asked whether he had a weapon on him. He replied, "Yes", and pulled out his Rosary. ("They beat me VERY hard for that", he recalled.) He was kept awake for days to compel him to sign a bogus "confession". When I asked how they kept him awake, he replied that they kicked him in the head whenever he nodded off. After signing a document the contents of which he didn't recall, he was shipped to the Vorkuta forced labor camps in northern European Russia, near the Arctic Circle. He was assigned back-breaking work in a coal mine. On the day Stalin died in 1953, he saw 300 people gunned down in a riot that erupted in his camp. Only in 1956, after he had been shipped to another camp near the border with China, was he freed. He finally was able to make his way to America in the 1970s, I think.
There is so much else I could add: the terrible war against Falun Gong in China; the near-destruction of Japan's Christian community in the 1600s, the survivors of which were driven into hiding; the depraved atrocities of ISIS; Serbian crimes against Muslims in the former Yugoslavia; the savage wars between Hindus and Muslims in south Asia. All of the terrible things I have briefly touched on need to be borne in mind. They are all examples of persecution based on religious belief (with a healthy dose of ethnic animosity often thrown in as well).
So in light of these unhappy facts, I think we need to choose our words carefully when discussing religious matters in America. Yes, there are legitimate issues which need to be worked out, and genuine concerns which must be addressed.
But persecution? Is this what we're talking about? Really?
Maybe we need to think about what the word persecution has really meant in human history.
And stop claiming for ourselves a martyrdom we are not threatened with.