CHRISTIANITY AND PERSECUTION
Thoughtful essay by Richard Mouw over at Belief.net.The last couple of paragraphs capture a thought I think more Christians need to hear and understand:
The truth of the matter is that the New Testament does not give much hope to Christians who expect to be well-treated by the dominant culture. Readers of David Limbaugh’s book [Persecution] would do well to remember that Jesus seemed to take the fact of continuing persecution of his followers for granted. "Blessed are you," he told his disciples, "when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you becaue of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you" (Matthew 5: 11).This does not justify our cultivating a persecution complex. But it is a good reminder that the time for Christians really to start worrying is when we find ourselves winning too many popularity contests.
If the early Christians behaved the way many modern Christians seem to think is essential--turning over moral decisions to the prevailing cultural attitudes, altering basic Christian doctrine so that it lines up with the shifting standards of modernity or politics--it's fair to say there would be no Christianity at all. It would have been absorbed long ago, and forgotten. We have survived because there has always been a remnant that remained loyal to God's hard truths no matter the cost, and because it has been God's will that we survive.
Coincidentally, I'm currently reading Silence by Shusaku Endo. Set in 17th century Japan, Silence is a sobering read for anyone who believes American Christians are being persecuted. Japan in that period probably experienced the most thorough and successful anti-Christian campaign in history. In some ways it was Christianity's version of the Holocaust. Whole families and towns were destroyed in the shoguns' quest to stamp out the "European" faith and close Japan to all outside influences. Hundreds of thousands of Christians were executed in cruel and painful ways, and Japanese Christianity only survived as a deeply underground resistance movement. Japan's crypto-Christians were some of the least heralded, most courageous Christians in history.
American Christians do face some hostility from elements in our culture, and that hostility is gaining ground through abusing the courts and so forth, but persecution here is nowhere near on the scale that our brothers and sisters in Japan experienced.