I grew up in the Bible Belt, right on the buckle, and am a practicing Christian. I come into contact from time to time with folks who consider themselves part of the religious right and who think I really want to hear what they have to say about politics. Almost invariably, religious wingnuts that I talk to complain that they feel persecuted when expressing religious ideas and that "modern society" is engaged in a war on Christianity.
I talk about religion all the time, and I find that most folks are interested in religious views and respectful of the religions of others. Politicians spout off all the time about religion, and the vast majority of public officials profess to be Christians. In fact, you just about have to claim to be Christian to get ahead in politics in America.
I just don't see a lot of persecution of or discrimination against Christians in America. What I do see is criticism of folks who claim to be Christian when they say or do asinine or evil things and try to justify it with religion. My wingnut conspecifics feel persecuted, not because of Christianity, but because they are ashamed of some of their other embarrassing viewpoints that they have tried to cloak in spirituality.
Pat Robertson declares a fatwa on Hugo Chavez and the Supreme Court and is rightly denounced. Homophobic nutbars protest soldiers' funerals and claim the soldiers were killed by God in retaliation for American tolerance of homosexuals, and these idiots are properly denounced. Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell say the same thing about the attacks on the World Trade Center, and bulls**t is rightly called. Self proclaimed religious leaders advocate hatred and oppression of homosexuals, uppity women, racial minorities, nonChristians, and a host of other folks, and they get called on it. So-called Christians advocate war, murder and tyranny in the name of the Lord, and they get called on it. This is not part of any war on Christianity; it is a war on ignorance and hypocrisy.
If you claim to be speaking and acting as a Christian, you can expect your utterances and actions to be judged in the light of the teachings of Jesus Christ. One ought to be ashamed of trying to tie Jesus to any kind of hatred, to war, to other murder, to theft, or to tyranny. One should certainly be expected to be called on it. It is not a question of being "politically correct"; it is a question of being religiously correct.
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Did you experience tolerance of your Christianity at Columbia University?
Even as a non-believer in college, I agreed with the Christians who said that theirs was the one voice excluded from left-liberal claims of tolerance and diversity at the school.
To this day, I hear friends and acquaintances express prejudice against Christians and Christianity that they'd never consider uttering against Buddhism or Judaism, certainly not Islam.
The people at Columbia I knew were tolerant of my Christianity and supportive of my right to express my religious views. This is not to say that they did not have some pretty harsh criticism of some Christians or the religious right or religion in general. And they did not accept my faith. A lot of the criticism was warranted, and a lot was based on ignorance. Most of my colleagues were aspiring anthropologists, however, and bought into the whole diversity and tolerance thing.
I never felt constrained from expressing a religious point of view when one was called for. Then again, I am not a Biblical literalist or a Dominionist. And I am an agnostic in the sense that I don't claim to be able to prove my faith. If I had chosen to call my comparative religion class "Devil Worshipers From Around the World", I would have been called on it.
One of my fellow grad students was a fundamentalist Christian who unhappily was obsessed with the Bell Curve. He could never adopt the relativist approach required for anthropological analysis and insisted on making disturbing normative judgements about other cultures and religions at inappropriate times. He was very unpopular and flunked out, not because he was "Christian", but because he was not capable of conforming to the canons of the discipline and was a jerk.
It is true that Christians are sometimes denigrated in a manner inconsistent with the rules of political correctness. This is, in part, because they are the dominant religion and there is no meaningful movement to oppress Christians.
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