Rumors of the Persecution of U.S. Christians Are Greatly Exaggerated | Opinion

The ultra-Christian nationalist minority is weeping their way to victory.

Recently, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) has complained bitterly of an FBI memo suggesting that suspected Catholic extremist groups bear watching. Siccing the FBI on such groups is certainly as valid as investigating any others, but the memo was disavowed by the Justice Department in a panic.

Jordan claims this is just another tip of just another spear. The Deep State and the Elites and the Media are all coming for the few who know how to fear God in just the right way.

The war on Christmas! The war on straightness! The war on whiteness! The war on men! The war on women who are barefoot and trapped in kitchens!

And worst of all, the war on God!

But not just any god. A very particular, very unkind god.

Why must a pregnant young girl be forced to carry the abomination of incest to term? Because the Bible says so, according to these Christian ultra-fanatics. To give that child (or even her parents) a say in the matter would be to carry out another "holocaust," this one not against Jews but against non-viable tissue.

Even as they celebrate their victories in the courts and legislatures across the U.S., they cry out, "Will nobody think of the children!?"

It's an old trick of the oppressor to play the victim, and these Super Zealots see no shame in doing so.

The enemy—as these fanatics have painted them—lives on one of the Coasts and likes to read books they choose for themselves. They wear glasses, and have gay friends. These people may not know anyone who is currently transitioning, but they know someone who knows someone. Maybe this person drives a Subaru. If they're urban, probably a Tesla or a Prius.

That's a lot of people, but I must tell you, having sipped wine with the enemy, they aren't a particularly dangerous bunch. They might go to a protest, they might raise a little bit of money, they may write a sternly worded letter to the editor, but that's about it.

I will admit to you that there are many, many of these people in the media. And religious extremist groups can find themselves under attack by the New York Times. And movies tend to be very accepting of LGBTQ+ people. And if you turn on ESPN's Around the Horn, you'll hear cheering of people getting help for depression and other mental health issues. You know, kindness.

But, despite the calculated whining of this Christian nationalist minority in the ever-growing right-wing mediasphere, they're hardly facing violence. Even if the FBI takes a peek while following up a legitimate line of inquiry, the sticks and stones are all on the zealots' side. This "oppressed minority," not the "elites" is calling the shots.

They are winning, if they haven't won.

From Billy Graham to Jerry Falwell to Lee Atwater to Karl Rove to the movement's unlikely apotheosis, former President Donald Trump, the plan has been hatching before our eyes. It was never a secret. It was a failure of liberal imagination.

"Wait," the liberals gasped, "you want to go back to the Dark Ages?"

Yep.

The plan to work from hyper-local politics to capture the nation succeeded. These fanatics own the statehouses, and by such margins that it doesn't even matter whether they have the governor's offices or not. Poor powerless North Carolina Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper is now a prisoner in his own mansion.

State legislatures are boring and corrupt. They are places of patronage and personal favors, but they set the rules we all must live by, at least as much as the federal government does. They set the table for elections through gerrymandering, which allows a minority to keep the statehouses, and which allows them to control the U.S. House of Representatives. The legislatures set the terms of voting and elections, allowing them to perpetuate the dominant party ad infinitum.

The courts could fix this and lessen control of the ultra-religious, but Christian nationalists have worked tirelessly to populate the bench with people whose sole qualification is their unflagging Christian faith. It's the perfect trap that has now been sprung.

Abortion is gone or going. A national ban is easy to imagine.

Teaching history as it happened is going, going—gone?—in Florida and under threat elsewhere.

And to be transgender is terrifying in many—if not most—parts of the country.

Free and fair elections—already in danger—are clearly next.

The Supreme Court will certainly rubber stamp it all. The court's conservative supermajority—five men of strong Christian faith and one person of Praise—was carefully built over decades of presidencies and with a certain amount of skulduggery. Everything is in place to make the United States one nation under a particularly unsympathetic god.

It's not hard to imagine what America will come to look like as the situation evolves (if we may still use that word). We've seen it elsewhere, in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Spain during the Inquisition.

Not one of them is—or was—a paradise on Earth. How could they be? Human beings have always been better at playing the devil.

Jason Fields is a deputy opinion editor at Newsweek.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.