One Utah

Last night channel surfing I happened across a show on one of the Christian networks that are cropping up in the 200 range on the TV - it as an hysterical (as in characterized by hysteria) show about the way in which Christians are being - reach for your smelling salts girls - persecuted by public schools!

If you’re all off your fainting couches, I’ll continue. It seems, according to this show, that a school district in TEXAS - TEXAS I TELLS YA! - has been taken over by a covert branch of the SECULAR HUMANIST UNITED NATIONS CONSPIRACY and is systematically persecuting poor innocent Christian children! Why, it’s so terrible they won’t the little bastards use school time to make converts.

Okay, that’s the snarky version. But not by much.

The host of the program is always grimacing Janet Parshall, a wingnut radio personality who can be counted on to tell less than half the truth on a regular basis. The show documented actual experiences of students at public schools who were told to not pass out church tracts (or other Christian paraphernalia) to their peers. The problem is not, as this particular show made out, some vast conspiracy to persecute Christians (and let’s be honest they don’t mean all Christians, they actually mean only fundagelicals - which I’ll deal with in a minute), the problem is in fact public school officials who are being overly zealous in keeping public schools safe spaces for religious diversity, which in any public school is necessary.

For a great many evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, “witnessing” on a constant basis is considered a religious duty. They train their kids to do it (see the film Jesus Camp for a scary scary documentary of the process). The goal of “witnessing” is to make converts. In any American public school, it’s foolish not to assume that there is religious diversity. In a religiously diverse community, in an official setting like a public school, witnessing has the potential to be disruptive to the overall harmony of the community. Public school principals and teachers are rightly concerned with not permitting a group of fundagelical students to create a hostile environment for Jewish, Muslim, atheist, mainline and Mormon students. To whit, those officials can easily overreact and create a very restrictive environment concerning religious expression within the schools by students.

The challenge is honestly knowing the boundary. U.S. law is relatively settled that so long as students are not being disruptive, they are allowed to talk about their personal faith in school. They can include it in assignments (if it is germane), they can share with their friends during recess and on the bus. The school officials involved in these cases highlighted in this not terribly educational program were in the wrong legally and overstepped their authority. They needed education instead what they got was a roomful of raving fundagelicals crying about the baby Jesus.

As I said before, this program used the term Christian in a highly specific and not terribly accurate way to refer to fundamentalists and evangelicals - the fundagelicals (the lines between them were one quite clear but they are increasingly blurring into a single mass of quivering religious zealotry). These fundagelicals are scornful of Mormons and mainline protestants and most Catholics for holding what they refer to as nominal faith - as in they are Christians in name only. Some Christian writers from the protestant traditions refer to fundagelicals as Great Commission Christians - believers who see making converts as the highest calling of any Christian. Watching this particular program pass itself off as a news program (while it was so slanted as to make a mockery of the concept of journalism) it was clear that the target audience was only the Great Commission Christians. Maybe I’m just too mainline or too influenced by my teachers at Judge, but watching the interviews of the students in question was disturbing to me. I simply do not believe elementary school students are acting on their own in “witnessing” to their peers. They are simply repeating what they’ve been told to say and simply doing what they’ve been told to do. “In Sunday School we learned you are supposed to bring people to Jesus because Jesus loves you so I’m going to give all my friends at school “Jesus loves you” pencils.” Or Bible Tracts. Or Cards. Or candy canes with bible stories attached to them or whatever.

The parents interviewed for the show were painfully earnest as many fundagelicals are. They just couldn’t see why their offspring trying to make converts in class was a bad idea. They were genuinely pained at the turn of events - and often genuinely surprised. Parshall, however, did her honest to god best to create a narrative of Christian persecution in the US using these cases as her starting point. The program featured a series of interludes in which a solemn voice read the first amendment while images of Colonial America scrolled in the background and then a deep voiced man read a voiceover about tyranny while the constitution and images of Hitler floated in the background (I shit you not). Parshall’s take is that a religiously neutral public sphere is inherently hostile to (her definition) of Christianity. Not being permitted to use school resources and time to make converts is interpreted as anti-Christian.

So here’s my take on the whole thing: besides being hysterical the program would be persuasive to its target audience - conservative Christians. It would teach them a language about their own persecution, a way of interpreting religious neutrality as religious hostility and create a sense of their own “otherness” that could convince them they need to take action to protect themselves. The “otherness” message relies on convincing Christians that they are an embattled minority who live in a world gone to hell, that rabid atheists are burning bibles and teaching evolution and gay sex to their five year olds and that Muslims are sneakily infiltrating the schools and all sorts of weird religions like Wicca are teaching their kids to practice witchcraft and lesbianism. It’s a message rooted in fear of the other that, by an odd psychological twist, is interpreted to mean that Christians are the real other.

In a religiously diverse nation, such programs represent a distinct challenge to advocates of freedom. Religious freedom does mean that people who are not faithful deserve in the public square freedom from religion and should not have to contend with a public square that forces religious activity, such as public prayer on them; at the same time, Mormon children shouldn’t be forced to participate in Catholic or Jewish or Baptist or Muslim or Buddhist prayers and vice versa; official activities such as classes and football games are not an appropriate forum in which one religious group should seek privilege to advocate for and engage in enforced practice of its faith. In a religiously diverse nation, the public square needs religious neutrality. For fundagelicals, there’s a combination of historical ignorance in claiming fundamentalism is the true expression of historic faith (fundamentalism is preeminently a modern phenomenon) and confusion about the appropriate limits of the freedom to practice one’s faith. I may practice may faith unmolested provided I do not molest others with my practice of faith.

As fundagelicals (who represent 25% of America’s population) grow increasingly less powerful and less influential, as more and more Americans embrace different faiths and no faith at all and demand a public square that is not overtly Christian, we will see more and more talk about Christian persecution. Because, simply, no one gives up privilege without a fight.

This entry was posted Sunday, August 17th, 2008 at 5:41 pm and is filed under 4th Estate (Media), Bigotry, Conservatives, Homophobia, Privacy, Religion, Religious Fundamentalism. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.